Grants:IEG/Fundación Joaquín Díaz/Midpoint

This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

• A little delay during the first two weeks. Other than that, everything goes as expected.
• Over 10,000 songs processed during the first three months.
• Increase in processing speed

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

Firstly I made a trip to Urueña to meet Joaquín Díaz and other members of FJD to discuss how we should develop the project. A second trip was necessary to get all the songs. As a consequence of the unavailability of the computer expert of FJD, this second trip had to be carried out later and I started the task two weeks later.

After analyzing the available material, I started to process 1,000 songs per week, a goal that seemed manageable. During the first weeks, the rate was lower than expected, but the learning curve is being successful and during the last weeks I am being able to process even more than 1000 songs per week. The amount of songs processed before concluding the first three months is over 10,000.

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

• I am almost doing what I expected per month. During the first weeks the rate of processed songs was below the target, but the learning curve is successful and during the last weeks I am processing more songs than the target.

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

Two of the four planned trips to Urueña have already been made. Every week I work part time from Monday to Friday for this project, except the first two weeks because of the reasons I mentioned above. These two weeks will be recovered later. Therefore, the budget remains within expected ranges.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points. These have been the main problems up until now:

• More of one song in a file.
• The same song in different files.
• Songs whose content does not match the title described by the technicians of FJD.

I am proceeding to split or join files to correct these errors. However, at least one additional meeting with technicians of FJD will be necessary to evaluate one by one the problematic cases.

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

• Your learning pattern link goes here

The main difference with the database provided by FJD is that I have added many more fields. Thus, it is much easier to work and access to information in the new database.

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points. If you're considering applying for a 6-month renewal of this IEG at the end of your project, please also mention this here. I hope I can start very soon the process of creating a robot and then start the uploading time.

I am considering to adapt the upload.py bot of the pywikipedia robots, but I will have to check further before.

After I finish this IEG period I would like to help the FJD in the transcription of the files, thus making the collection fully available on the Wikimedia projects. But... of course, this will take another bunch of time :-)

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an IEGrantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

Personally I find it a very rewarding experience. Having the opportunity to hear some of the songs that my ancestors used to sing, a part of our cultural heritage, is very exciting indeed in most cases. Also knowing that in a few months I will be able to share this privilege and these feelings with the whole community.