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Grants:APG/Proposals/2020-2021 round 2/Wikimedia Norge/Progress report form

< Grants:APG | Proposals | 2020-2021 round 2 | Wikimedia Norge

Purpose of the report

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This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their progress after completing the first 6 months of their grants. The time period covered in this form will be the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). This form includes four sections, addressing grant metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.

Metrics and results overview - Program Knowledge Equity: Supporting equity on Wikimedia projects

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Wikimedia Norge's welcome message for Maryana Iskander, Chief Executive Officer, Wikimedia Foundation, summarizing our work


In the 2021–2022 funding period, we have made some of the metrics a bit lower than previous years. This is to calculate for the ongoing COVID situation and the effects it has on volunteers, partners, and staff members. By January 2022 there are two main consequences of the pandemic we would like to comment on: it's more challenging for us to reach the metric for Newly registered when no physical events are possible. With less resources spent on physical events, we have more resources to spend on uploads, which is reflected in the metric Content pages. Further details on our Program Knowledge Equity: Supporting equity on Wikimedia projects and the Global metrics can be read under the program section below.

We do expect that there will be long-term effects for our work from COVID also after the restrictions are lifted. Per January 2022 there are still restrictions inn Norway because of the pandemic.

New grantee-defined metric: We have changed our program structure from three programs to one. The previous metric on Diversity is no longer a valuable metric for our work since our overall focus is on increasing diversity on and off the Wikimedia projects. Our upcoming annual plan's focus on the continued Sámi project and underrepresented and indigenous languages and the Wikimedia projects, so we have chosen a new grantee-defined metric that can reflect the results of our work on this. This metric also highlights the importance of communication activities and making time to share the stories about our work with the world. For building partnerships this is an important step. In our next application for funding to the Wikimedia Foundation, we will most likely change this metric to reflect our work and partnerships with different small language communities from around the world. This way, this grantee-defined metric will change and develop as our work is proceeding.

Explanation of grantee defined metrics:

  • Community hours: Hours community members spend on organizing activities or helping staff organize activities (not included are hours spend adding content)
  • Blog posts about underrepresented and indigenous languages and the Wikimedia projects: Number of Wikimedia Norge blog posts written and shared in social media about our collaborations with partners on underrepresented and indigenous languages and the Wikimedia projects


Table 1 Grant metrics
Participants Newly registered Content pages Blog posts about underrepresented and indigenous languages and the Wikimedia projects Volunteer hours
Knowledge Equity: Supporting equity on Wikimedia projects Target this year:1,200

Progress end Q2: 1,352

Target this year: 200

Progress end Q2: 110

Target this year: 35,000

Progress end Q2: 24,300

Target this year: 8

Progress end Q2: 4

Target this year: 700

Progress end Q2: 330

Telling your program stories - all programs

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Overview: Progress of Wikimedia Norge's work

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In this progress report the reader will learn about the progress of the Wikimedia Norge program Knowledge Equity: Supporting equity on Wikimedia. The program was awarded funding from Wikimedia Foundation based on this APG funding proposal. We will share details on the global metrics, program activities and our revenues and spendings.

But first, a short introduction to the context of our work:
Norway is a country where gender issues and the rights of indigenous people are supported on a government level and by different structures in society such as national GLAM and educational institutions, organizations, the arts and by a large part of the public press. This context provides Wikimedia Norge great opportunities to align our work with the international strategic direction and focus on knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. Many doors will open easier for us, compared to how it may be for other Wikimedia colleagues around the world. Our ambition is to take projects, partnerships and experience from Norway and upscale or transform to include international partnerships in the coming years. Wikimedia Norge's strategy is to try to connect our program activities to already existing structures in institutions, organizations, and in society at large instead of building these structures our selves.

Wikimedia Norge's strategy will be revised in 2022. Wikimedia Norge’s revised strategy will be for a five year period, 2022–2027. An important question to answer in the new strategy is where do we see Wikimedia Norge can grow and play a role as an important NGO in the future. From the 2030 strategy Wikimedia Norge has focused our resources so far on Recommendation 5: Ensuring Equity in Decision-Making. We are exploring ways to see if underrepresented and indigenous language communities can work more closely together globally.

Wikimedia Norge is especially invested in the progress of the work connected to hubs and right now we are awaiting a response to a Movement Strategy Implementation Grants application on Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub Research. We are motivated by the fact that the topic of language diversity is also on the list of Maryana Iskander’s 5 “puzzles” that will shape the priorities for her first six months as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Puzzle 4: Multilingual in name only?
Remarkably, Wikimedia supports more languages than any other online platform in the world. I met volunteers from all regions of the world who are innovating across so many dimensions of language – from the digital preservation of endangered languages to developing tools that can scale knowledge across languages.

— Maryana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, summary on meta

Jon Harald Søby, project manager at Wikimedia Norge, took part in a meeting on language diversity that was part of Iskander’s listening tour in November 2021. In the meeting he highlighted the fact that the Incubator process should be rethought, because it likely pushes away would-be mother-tongue Wikipedia editions. He also shared a hope for the future: that smaller Wikipedia language projects will receive support from the Wikimedia Foundation rather than an exclusively focus on ‘big impact’ for ‘big projects’. We are excited to investigate what role a possible Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub can play in this important work.

We are on track with reaching our Global Metrics. The metrics have been stable or increasing over the last years.

We very much welcome the possibility to apply for multi-year funding from the Wikimedia Community Fund. In 2023 when we have a strategy for 5 years, and a multi-year annual plan, we will apply for multi-year funding from the Wikimedia Community Fund. This will give our organization more stability and the possibility to plan our work and engage in partnerships that last several years.

We are on track with our revenues and spendings. We have secured 48 % of this budget’s revenues. 34 % of our revenues comes from other funding sources than the Wikimedia Foundation APG fund for the period 1 July-31 December 2021. In comparison, for the period 1 July–31 December 2020, 27 % of our revenues were from national funding. Wikimedia Norge has in recent years worked systematically on diversifying our funds, and this work will continue in the coming years.

The reorganization of our work due to the pandemic has given us the chance to use more resources on organizational development like information work and solutions for membership sign ups and electronic payments for memberships and donations. Our communication plan will be revised in conjunction with the revision of our strategy, but we have already made some big changes in our communications efforts. For example using the blog on wikimedia.no as a channel for documentation of our work on underrepresented and indigenous languages. Making sure Wikimedia Norge stays a stable organization in terms of partnerships, community involvement, funding and good governance is an everlasting task. The stability we have now makes us capable of growing our projects from a national to an international level.

We hope you will enjoy reading this progress report and please reach out to us if you have any questions about our work!

Program: Knowledge Equity: Supporting equity on Wikimedia projects

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In the following section we will share highlights from our program Knowledge Equity: Supporting equity on Wikimedia projects.


Knowledge Equity: Supporting equity on Wikimedia projects

Our program goals for the Wikimedia Norge program Knowledge Equity: Supporting equity on Wikimedia projects are:

  • WMNO will be an organization that works together with a diverse set of national and international volunteer communities and is considered an influential organization in free culture and open knowledge
  • WMNO will explore existing and new national and international partnerships to diversify the content available on the Wikimedia projects.
  • WMNO will identify next steps for support and awareness for underrepresented and indigenous languages and the Wikimedia projects
  • WMNO will raise awareness on how the Wikimedia projects work and are part of an international ecosystem of knowledge

The activities in our program are done in collaboration with three target groups:


Volunteers
We have a set of community support activities we have organized over several years, and we will continue doing them as long as they are appreciated and used by the community of volunteers. Over the last 6 months we have worked more closely with different volunteers on an international level in connection to the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub initiative. Communicating about our work on the village pumps, asking for input and advice, is also a big part of our work. The input from volunteers helps us shape our annual plans and gives us valuable volunteer viewpoints that we always try to hand over to the board of directors in board meetings. During our General assembly the volunteer community can give their comments on our annual plan, annual budget and the annual report of activities.

Examples of different activities Wikimedia Norge offers to support volunteers are awarding wiki grants two times a year, access to resources behind a paywall through the The Wikipedia Library, organizing online editing contests, organizing wiki meetups and different workshops, applying for press accreditations, sending out newsletters, and sharing stories from volunteers in different communication channels, set up and facilitate discussion on Telegram for volunteers.

The Global Metrics Participants and Volunteer hours reflect the activities with the volunteer communities.


Partnerships
We have a set of prominent partners in the Norwegian GLAM and education sector (at the national level) and in the broader civil society (at government and international level). An overview of our main partnerships can be read in our Funding application, under the headline What we will continue doing this year and why. With our partners we work on Wikidata uploads, Wikimedia Commons uploads, writing of Wikipedia articles as part of our education program, organizing events and speaking at conferences, and outreach activities such as online editing competitions, to give some examples.

The Global Metrics Newly registered and Content Pages reflect the activities with our partners.


The public /lager networks
We have a set of activities that include different types of communication work to raise awareness of the importance of free knowledge and whose voices are underrepresented our left out on the Wikimedia projects, for example taking part in and building networks, taking part in podcasts, interviews in media and writing blog posts etc. In the next funding period, we will rethink our communication efforts and most likely focus more on how we document and share stories from our Sámi project. We will also spend more resources on activities connected to network and advocacy for underrepresented and indigenous languages, building on the outcomes from the Arctic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference.

The Global Metrics Participants and Blog posts about underrepresented and indigenous languages and the Wikimedia projects reflect the work with the public /lager networks.


We are on track with our program and we anticipate we will reach the Global metrics we set up in the funding application. We have done some adjustments in our program, mainly due to the pandemic. Optimistically we didn't expect the pandemic to be ongoing for all of 2021. All physical events had to be canceled for the whole period. The pandemic has also affected the planning of our participation in UNESCO International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022–2032, which is depending on an all-staff travel to the north of Norway, where our main Sámi partner institutions are located. Alongside the development of the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub initiative we will develop our work with the UNESCO International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022–2032 in 2022. These two projects are of course closely connected.

In the next paragraph we will go into more details about our program’s activities. The activities can be grouped under three different thematic headlines:

  • Women in Red and Queer Cultural Heritage Year 2022
  • Sámi knowledge online
  • Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub


Progress Women in Red and Queer Cultural Heritage Year 2022

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For the fourth time, we have engaged a group of students from Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet) to write biographies on women as a part of the Women in Red initiative. Three library and archive students took part in this education program this semester. The program was, as previous years, organized together with the National Library. The project page for the program can be read here. During the course, the students learned how to search efficiently in the digital archives of the National Library, trained on evaluating the sources and writing Wikipedia articles. The students contributed to three different language versions of Wikipedia: Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish. Like in previous years, we had several curated lists from various partners that the students could choose from; this year the students chose the list prepared by the National Museum. The other lists came from the National Library and the Queer Culture Heritage Year 2022 Facebook group for institutions and organizations.

This years’ students worked across three language versions of Wikipedia, which meant they could also translate each other’s work into the different languages. Their experience as new editors gave us very valuable insight about contributing to different language versions of Wikipedia and how templates works across language versions of Wikipedia.

We would have liked more harmonization of templates across language versions of Wikipedia. This could be done by implementing a function for converting between different language versions of commonly used templates.

— Recommendation from the OsloMet-students taking part in our Women in Red education program

The students taking part in the education program report that they have enjoyed learning to contribute to Wikipedia, and they will keep contributing in the future.

During the course period we also organized a 4 week writing contest for the communities on the Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Northern Sámi Wikipedias. This contest is motivating for the whole community, and it has become a yearly routine for Wikipedians to have a Women in Red monthly editing contest. This year we saw record breaking numbers as there were 20 participants adding 1,588 new articles on women across all three language versions.

With knowledge equity being at the center of our work, it was motivating to observe the number of articles about female activists from around the world written, such as this article about Aoua Kéita, a midwife, politician and writer from Mali. We created a series of social media posts for Instagram sharing the great work being done during this month, and summed it all up in this blog. We are emphasizing in particular the work in Norwegian Nynorsk, which is the smaller of the two Norwegian-language Wikipedia versions.

As stated in the APG funding application, for the spring semester 2022 this university subject has become mandatory, and we do expect more students this semester. 2022 is named the Queer Culture Heritage Year, marking the 50 year anniversary of decriminalization of homosexuality in Norway.

The queer community has made a decisive contribution to our common culture, and has fought for an openness that benefits the whole of society. But the history of queer Norway has not yet been written, and we still know too little about our queer culture and history.

— Join the celebration of Queer Culture Year for the whole country!, The National Museum of Norway

In preparations for the Queer Culture Heritage Year 2022, we have engaged in a new partnership with the The Norwegian Archive for Queer History, which is part of the University Library at the University in Bergen. With national funding, we have uploaded 139 video interviews from the The Norwegian Archive for Queer History to Wikimedia Commons, and ten new Wikipedia articles have been written based on these video interviews. Together with The Norwegian Archive for Queer History we will organize a panel debate about queer cultural history in the archives and on Wikipedia in March 2022. This event will happen due to national funding.

Our experience is that this education program has been successful in raising the focus on Women in Red among the wider Wikipedia community. A slow, but lasting effect is that gender balance is something more contributors are conscious of now. We hope to see this effect for the queer culture and history too.

Through student evaluation at the end of each project period, we are able to develop this course further, and also strengthen the relations with OsloMet and the national GLAM institutions. In addition to learning to search in the digital archives of the National Library, this year the students will also get training in searching in the National Archive of Norway. We are happy to say this project is rewarding for all participants, and it creates waves in the Wikipedia community too.

Progress Sámi Knowledge online

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Sámi knowledge and content, and content in Sámi languages, has remained a focus for Wikimedia Norge's work in this period, with several projects big and small. One of the highlights of the year for Sámi people in Norway was the October return of the Lapp Codicil of 1751 to Sámi areas; the Lapp Codicil was an early addendum to a border treaty between Norway and Sweden, and formalized rights for Sámi reindeer herders to cross the newly-established border to follow the migration of the reindeer. It is still a legally binding document today, some 270 years later. In conjunction with the return of the document from the National Archives of Norway in Oslo to the Sámi Archive in Guovdageaidnu, Wikimedia Norge was provided with high-resolution scans of the Lapp Codicil itself, and a detailed 1765 border map of the area of the border near Guovdageaidnu. The border map image uploaded to Wikimedia Commons later became a featured picture.

Now that the Lapp Codicil has been handed over to Sámi Arkiiva in Guovdageaidnu and Sápmi, it is a new recognition that the Sámi are one people. It is a new reminder that the states know that the Sámi community is not divided by national borders. It is therefore a great day for me today, on my final assignment as President of the Sámi Parliament, to be able to receive the Lapp Codicil.

— Aili Keskitalo, President of the Sámi Parliament in her speech when receiving the Lapp Codicil

The "radio cinema" segment from the Arctic Knot Language Conference that we hosted in June 2021, will be used in some university courses going forward.

Other Sámi-related projects undertaken during this period have been uploads of freely-licensed pictures by the Sámi Parliament of Norway to Wikimedia Commons – including high-resolution pictures of newly-elected representatives, and from the Lapp Codicil handover ceremony attended by the King and Crown Prince of Norway. Another project that has just concluded is the upload of around 12,000 Sámi place names as lexemes in Wikidata; Sámi languages have a lot of grammatical cases, so in order to use the right form of a place name in an automatically generated text (for instance from Abstract Wikipedia), it is important to have those available. This is work is a continuation of a project from 2020 where we uploaded items about places in Norway with Sámi-language place names to Wikidata, and was conducted in collaboration with Giellatekno, the research group for Sámi language technology at the Arctic University of Norway, and the National Library of Norway. Funding for the project was provided by The National Library and the Arctic University of Norway.

We were planning a trip to Kárášjohka and Guovdageaidnu in early 2022, but because of the COVID situation, it has been postponed until further notice.

In the immediate future, we are working on a continuation of the Sámi place name lexeme work in cooperation with Wikimedia Finland (as outlined in the application); we are also planning another round of uploads of photos from the 1913 Reindeer Pastures commission (see last year's progress report form) in cooperation with the National Archives of Norway and the Sámi Archive of Norway. We are also in touch with Wikimedia Finland and the National Library of Finland regarding a Sámi-language project.

Progress Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub

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Wikimedia Norge has taken the initiative and an active organizing role in proposing and setting up the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub (WLDH). This is part of the larger 2030 strategy recommendation of setting up regional and thematic hubs in the Wikimedia movement. In our work with the Sámi project, and as an extension of that our participation in the Celtic Knot conferences and organizing the Arctic Knot conference, we have crossed paths with many affiliates and volunteer community members who are working on similar issues regarding small and minority languages.

The idea for the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub is that it would be a gathering place for affiliates and volunteers within its topic area to share experiences, expertise and resources in order to help each other grow and succeed, and to act as a united front in advocating issues that affect smaller language projects. It would also serve as a facilitator for partnerships with external partners looking to collaborate with Wikimedians on language issues all over the world. Wikimedia Norge is an observatory member of the Global task force for the UN International Decade of Indigenous Languages. We have also established a partnership with Global Voices: Language Digital Activism Toolkit.These are two collaborations it is natural to include into the further work of the WLDH.

The WLDH builds on the existing Wikimedia Language Diversity network, which was started in 2012. Wikimedia Norge first proposed the idea of a language diversity hub in November 2020, and started actively working on it just after the conclusion of the Arctic Knot Conference (which we organized) in the summer of 2021, holding a workshop and gathering input during Wikimania 2021.

As a contributor and project lead for the Dagbani Wikimedia Community, I get a lot of support from the Language Diversity Hub and the steering committee; like translation support, tools and how to localize other Wikimedia tools for the Dagbani Wikipedia. The Hub understands the needs of smaller language Wikipedia Communities like mine (the Dagbani Wikimedia Community) and provides the necessary support anytime I reached out. Through the work of Hub, I was able to bring my community to the 2021 virtual Artic Knot conference. As indigenous language ambassador for Art+Feminism, I am very happy to be working with the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub.

— Shahadusadik, steering committee member

We set up a steering committee to help guide and focus the direction of the work – it consists of a mix of community members and affiliate (and Foundation) staff who are all working on minority/indigenous language issues in some capacity, and we tried to keep a good geographical balance in order to make it as representative as possible. While Wikimedia Norge is taking an active leadership role in the hub at the moment, we are also mindful not to label it as "a Wikimedia Norge project", because we want it to have a shared ownership between all of its stakeholders, keeping in mind that WMNO is only one of many stakeholders.

In December 2021, the hub applied for a Movement Strategy Implementation Grant; the goal of the proposed project is to research what challenges and barriers there are for emerging Wikimedia communities in getting Wikimedia projects in their language up and running, by conducting standardized interviews with an array of communities from across the globe to identify shared barriers. A secondary goal of the grant is to explore the hub itself as a working method; this would be useful both for further WLDH work, and for other regional and thematic Wikimedia hubs.

A second grant proposal – a cooperation between the WLDH and Wikitongues – is also in the pipelines.

The WLDH steering committee has regular meetings, discussing how to get funding for activities, and exchanging current challenges for small language groups at the moment. Together we are developing a set of guidelines to ensure that the WLDH is an inclusive hub where people can contribute and learn no matter what language they speak. The engagement and commitment from the members is a clear indicator that this will be an important activity for Wikimedia Norge for the future.


Revenues received during this six-month period

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Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal = Provided exchange rate=0,11705 USD

  • Important note
    • the anticipated column may list revenues anticipated for the whole year instead of only the 6 months. Please make sure that this the time period clear in the table.
    • In the explanation column, always mention relevant information about the numbers: what period they refer to etc.

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

  • Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan
Annual Plan Grant, Wikimedia Foundation NOK 2,029,100 507,300 507,300 1,014,600 237,506 118,759 period 6 months, grant funds only
External funding NOK 900,000 209,414 232,708 442,122 105,345 51,750 period 6 months, our total budget
Inkind donations NOK 300,000 35,000 45,000 80,000 35,250 9,364 period 6 months, our total budget
Total revenues NOK 3,229,100 751,714 785,008 1,536,722 377,966 179,873 period 6 months, our total budget

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Spending during this six-month period

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Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

  • Important note
    • Budget can be the budget for the whole year (and thus the percentage will reflect the half year and should be around 50%, or the half year, in which case the % should be around 100%. Please make that clear in the table.
    • In the explanation column, always mention relevant information about the numbers: what period they refer to.

Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense Currency Budgeted Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Budgeted ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Percentage spent to date Explanation of variances from plan
Program expenses NOK 460,000 113,813 76,771 190,584 53,843 22,394 42 % 6 months, our total budget
Operations NOK 799,000 176,985 110,476 287,461 112,368 33,777 30 % 6 months, our total budget
Staff expenses NOK 1,950,000 498,724 516,816 1,015,540 228,248 118,869 52 % 6 months, our total budget
TOTAL NOK 3,209,000 789,522 704,063 1,493,585 375,614 175,496 47 % 6 months, our total budget

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Compliance

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Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?

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As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

  • Yes

Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

  • Yes

Signature

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Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.

Resources

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Resources to plan for measurement

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Resources for storytelling

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