Wiki Society of the Philippines/Projects/Digitalization Project

Legal name of chapter: Wikimedia Philippines Inc.
Grant contact name: Butch Bustria
Grant contact user-name or e-mail: Exec8 / butch@wikimedia.org.ph
Grant contact title (position): Member, Board of Trustees
Project lead name: Butch Bustria
Project lead user-name or e-mail: Exec8
Project lead title (position), if any: Head Organizer
Full project name: Philippine Heritage Digitalization Project
Amount requested (in USD): USD 18,215 (PHP 765,030) (USD $1 = PHP 42.00)
Provisional target start date: 2011-09-01
Provisional completion date: 2012-05-15 (the date of the evaluation of the success of the project).

Budget breakdown

(N.B.: For ease of computing and to account for currency fluctuations, rates here are quoted at P42=$1 if Philippine peso figures are given. All values given here are estimates.)

Category	Allocation in PHP	Amount in USD ($1.00=₱42.00)
High Speed ADF-Flatbed Scanner	400,000	9,524
Semi-Professional Video Camera and accessories	300,000	7,143
Portable Computer for Image and Video Editing	65,000	1,548
Total	765,030	18,215

Project scope

Wikimedia Philippines has been seeking to digitize its paper documents to allow scrutiny of its members online. Moreover, the organization helps wikipedians digitize publicly accessible books and documents for the Wikibooks and the Wikipedia resource building initatives. This initiative faces challenges where repetitious process of scanning page by page in a rental shop proved to be time consuming and costly.

This project will dramatically cut costs by acquiring a scanner that allows both scanning images to its highest possible quality and perform high speed scanning of documents to PDF with OCR, and TIFF formats.

Moreover, we have an advocacy of sending information through the power of media. The future of Wikimedia is to deliver rich multimedia content like video to our Wikimedia Projects. We would like to bring that to reality by shooting quality video of cultural heritage like tribal and Colonial dance, feasts and festivals, art works like the Philippine lantern (Parol) and many others. The camera would also be helpful in covering our events and projects and uploading it to Wikimedia commons and to social media sites.

The organization faced a challenge on how to encourage new contributors to Wikimedia projects through the use of social media. The Philippines ranks one of the top ten highest penetration of Social Media like Facebook and Twitter. Wikipedia is one of the ten most actively visited websites in the Philippines yet the article count and depth of Philippine Language Wikiprojects are low.

The organization would like explore ways in connecting these vital information by the use of promotional and educational videos.

Project goal

The goal of the project is to allow the contributors to take advantage of the equipment that is not common in the households or schools, to produce high quality media for its commons repository and to automate and produce more online documents beneficial to the organization's clientelle.

Non-financial requirements

Should there be a better product model available overseas rather than in the Philippines, it will be an option of the foundation to acquire the equipment at the store of their choice and ship it to the Philippines. WMPH will use open source editing software like Blender.

Fit to strategy

This project would fit the organization's strategy by bringing hard to find or hard to produce information to those who need it most. Automating this repetitious task would produce a significant volume of information and media to existing Wikimedia online projects.

Other benefits

Running the chapter's scanner should provoke more activity in digitalization of old materials. The discussion about what available documents can be digitalized and can be valuable for the Wikimedia projects has already started during the preparation of this project, we expect it should grow even more intensive when the scanner is purchased and used.

Measures of success

During the period of the running project, the equipment will produce at least 2000 high technical and/or content quality files from the pages of books, documents, photographs. At least 100 video clips ranging from use and creation of wiki content, resources building, documentaries, event coverage that can be stored in wikimedia commons and other mediums like DVD copy, youtube, vimeo, hulu, skype, ustream.