Grants talk:Project/Wikipedia Asian Month/2021 coordination

Eligibility confirmed, Round 1 2021 - Community Organizing proposal

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for review in Round 1 2021 for Community Organizing projects. This decision is contingent upon compliance with our COVID-19 guidelines. If your proposal includes travel and/or offline events, you must ensure that all of the following are true:

• You have reviewed and can comply with the guidelines linked above.
• If necessary because of COVID-19 safety risks, you can complete the core components of your proposed work plan _without_ offline events or travel.
• You are able to postpone any planned offline events or travel until the Wikimedia Foundation’s guidelines allow for them, without significant harm to the goals of your project.
• You include a COVID-19 planning section in your activities plan. In this section, you should provide a brief summary of how your project plan will meet COVID-19 guidelines, and how it would impact your project if travel and offline events prove unfeasible throughout the entire life of your project. If you have not already included this in your proposal, you have until February 28 to add it.

The Community review period is now underway, from February 20-March 4. We encourage you to make sure that stakeholders, volunteers, and/or communities impacted by your proposed project are aware of your proposal and invite them to give feedback on your talkpage. This is a great way to make sure that you are meeting the needs of the people you plan to work with and it can help you improve your project.

• If you are applying for funds in a region where there is a Wikimedia Affiliate working, we encourage you to let them know about your project, too.
• If you _are_ a Wikimedia Affiliate applying for a Project Grant: A special reminder that our guidelines and criteria require you to announce your Project Grant requests on your official user group page on Meta and a local language forum that is recognized by your group, to allow adequate space for objections and support to be voiced).

Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community review period. By March 4, make sure that your proposal has incorporated any revisions you want to make and complies with all of our guidelines. If you have not already done so, you can make use of our project planning resources to improve your proposal further, too.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for round 1 2020 will occur March 5 through March 20, 2021. We ask that you refrain from making any further changes to your proposal during the committee review period, so we can be sure that all committee members are scoring the same version of the proposal.

Grantees will be announced Friday, April 22, 2021. Sometimes we have to make some changes to the round schedule. If that happens, it will be reflected on the round schedule on the Project Grants start page.

We look forward to engaging with you in this Round!

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 07:16, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Feedback from Campaigns Strategy perspective at WMF

The Campaigns team at the Foundation is excited to see the application from Wikipedia Asian Month. The organizing team has consistently delivered a well organized campaign that engages communities throughout the world -- I highly recommend supporting the campaign -- it is important for the ongoing calendar of campaigns in the movement.

I do want to notice that the budget reflects only the bare minimums of implementing the event, and does not include a significant investment program management or other costs (such as professionally developed communications assets, etc). It would be appropriate for the central team to grow these kinds of support if they identify them as priorities --- the relative cost is currently very low compared to its impact and other campaigns like Wiki Loves Earth, #1lib1ref, Art+Feminism, and others have benefited from increase programmatic support for a mix of different capacities and activities. If the organizing team wants to consider different ways to grow capacity or experiment in other ways, the Campaigns team is here to help, Astinson (WMF) (talk) 14:47, 25 February 2021 (UTC)

Hi@Astinson (WMF): I am Jamie, the leader of WAM UG. In the past years, WAM team members need to spend lots of time on project management to make sure the events go smoothly and keep communicating with different communities. As our team members have their own careers, it's hard for them to spend as much time as before. Besides, we try to reconnect our past partners and reorganize history event pages, these works do take lots of time and all our team members become busier than before (some of them are preparing degree defence this year). It's impossible for our team to spend as much time on volunteer work as before; also, in Asia, the long working hour does take almost our free time.

It will be a big help if Campaign Team could give us some advice. If you want to know more about WAM's situation, feel free to contact me. Best, Li-Yun Lin (talk) 19:45, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Wikipedia Asian Month/2021 coordination

Scoring rubric	Score
(A) Impact potential Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both? Does it have the potential for online impact? Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?	7.3
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	8.0
(C) Ability to execute Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe? Is the budget realistic/efficient ? Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?	7.2
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	6.8
Additional comments from the Committee: This is a high-impact project that fits neatly with Wikimedia's strategic priorities. WAM has progressively become a relevant campaign in the movement and creates cross-project and trans-language momentum for improving knowledge and fostering interculturality. WAM has a track of reporting outcomes. The proposal clearly targets the improvement of Fountain (a tool that was developed with the support of a project grant, if I am not mistaken), thus providing lasting benefits for our activity control infrastructure. The team have the relevant skills and experience to execute the project WAM has been successful for several years now. I think a better strategy to track editors involved and articles created or improved in the context of WAM is needed. The expected outcome of communities involved is shy in comparison to what was previously achieved. As WAM is expecting to grow with the support of this grant application, I would have myself wished to see a significant increase in quality. I'd suggest the WMF campaign team contributes here to set up a new vision of outcomes. WAM has done amazing work. An issue that should be more clearly targeted is that it has not been able to sustain the community engagement it sparks every year. Editor tracking and sustained communication would lead to stronger bonds with the project and lead to shifting from a mostly content-driven program to a community-catalyzing sustained process. The results are connected to an invasive banner present worldwide. The banner is seen by a lot of people but at the opposite is not well accepted by other members mainly if it's in English and appears in Wikipedia versions than English ones. I suggest reducing the invasivity of the banner and to work more on specific communities. Modest budget for the campaign that brings in a lot of momentum among communities in the region. However, it would be good for the organizing team to explore what can be done to increase interest from communities - the reason for this saying is, in the last few the participation is seeing a decline, and would be good to explore new strategies. Please experiment! The budget is low and I look forward to learning from the report. Recommending for full funding. As already mentioned on the talk page-- I would have expected a more ambitious plan and set of metrics as WAM is moving from a mostly exclusive volunteer-based to a funded program. I recommend the project is revised with a clearer sense of how it may be thought of as fostering and sustaining communities that intend to continue improving pertaining content on their local Wikimedia projects.

This proposal has been recommended for due diligence review.

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal and recommended it for due diligence review. This means that a majority of the committee reviewers favorably assessed this proposal and have requested further investigation by Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Next steps:

1. Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal. We recommend that you review all the feedback and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page.
2. Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on Friday, April 22, 2021.

Questions? Contact us.

Mercedes Caso (platícame) 22:49, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Round 1 2021 decision

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for a Project Grant.

The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, $7,777

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to support this increasingly expanding campaign and the strong group of young regional leaders that make it happen. They are glad that the grantee is focusing on building internal organizational capacity and on improving campaign best practices. The committee recognizes the experience of the WAM team and recommends a consultation with Alex Stinson, Senior Program Strategist, Campaign team to connect the grantee with other similar campaigns and encourage peer-to-peer learning. Also, they recommend a consultation with the Community Resources team about capacity-building opportunities.

NOTE: Funding of any offline activities (e.g. travel and in-person events) is contingent upon compliance with the Wikimedia Foundation's COVID-19 guidelines. We require that you complete the Risk Assessment Tool:

• 14 days before any travel and/or gathering event
• 24 hours before any travel and/or gathering event

Offline events may only proceed if the tool results continue to be green or yellow.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
2. Review the information for grantees.
3. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
4. Start work on your project!

Upcoming changes to Wikimedia Foundation Grants

Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We are also currently seeking candidates to serve on regional grants committees and we'd appreciate it if you could help us spread the word to strong candidates--you can find out more here. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.

--Mercedes Caso (platícame) 03:20, 23 April 2021 (UTC)