Grants:IEG/Wikimaps Atlas/Final


Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's 6-month project.

Part 1: The Project

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Summary

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In a few short sentences, give the main highlights of what happened with your project. Please include a few key outcomes or learnings from your project in bullet points, for readers who may not make it all the way through your report.

The project produced a software piece which

  • download relevant GIS data,
  • processed heavy files into lightweight bitmap / json / svg outputs
  • the files produced are highly structured and ease databiding
  • all world country can be mapped via a loop,

The project provide D3.js code and js stylesheet following wikipedia map guidelines, so :

  • administrative,
  • administrative locator (regions),
  • relief, and
  • relief locator (regions) styles

Methods and activities

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What did you do in project?

Please list and describe the activities you've undertaken during this grant. Since you already told us about the setup and first 3 months of activities in your midpoint report, feel free to link back to those sections to give your readers the background, rather than repeating yourself here, and mostly focus on what's happened since your midpoint report in this section.

Outcomes and impact

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Outcomes

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What are the results of your project?

Please discuss the outcomes of your experiments or pilot, telling us what you created or changed (organized, built, grew, etc) as a result of your project.

Progress towards stated goals

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Please use the below table to:

  1. List each of your original measures of success (your targets) from your project plan.
  2. List the actual outcome that was achieved.
  3. Explain how your outcome compares with the original target. Did you reach your targets? Why or why not?
Planned measure of success
(include numeric target, if applicable)
Actual result Explanation


Think back to your overall project goals. Do you feel you achieved your goals? Why or why not?

Global Metrics

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We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across all grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the "Global Metrics." We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" as often as necessary.

  1. Next to each metric, list the actual numerical outcome achieved through this project.
  2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for a research project which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. Number of active editors involved
2. Number of new editors
3. Number of individuals involved
4. Number of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages
5. Number of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects


Learning question
Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

Indicators of impact

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Do you see any indication that your project has had impact towards Wikimedia's strategic priorities? We've provided 3 options below for the strategic priorities that IEG projects are mostly likely to impact. Select one or more that you think are relevant and share any measures of success you have that point to this impact. You might also consider any other kinds of impact you had not anticipated when you planned this project.

Option A: How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects?

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects?

Option C: How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

Project resources

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Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

Learning

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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 took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

What worked well

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What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? 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.

  • Same location: work in same location had positive effect.
    • By encouraging and challenging each other.
    • By small discussion allowing quick problem solving.
    • By having a python-oriented developer (Arun) and a D3js oriented user.
  • Automatizing practices: copy-engineering wikigraphists styles and Photoshop-like design processes was tedious be largely successful.
  • Communication: External communication was good !
  • Debug: using Question-Answer website Stackoverflow.com proven very helpful. We wrote and categorized rich blogpost-like answers relevant to our field of web cartography (ex: How to create transparent hillshade?). The know-how acquired by the team is kept online and available to all after us, from anywhere, at anytime. Yug on GIS, Topojson, D3js, etc.
  • Online course: Codeschool have also been a good resources to perfect competences (JS best practices, git, bootstrap)
  • External freelancers: we eventually handled ourself this (d3js review), as our compentences clearly increase over the project time span.

What didn’t work

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What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points. By chronological rank, bold for bigger impact on project :

  • Being in 2 different countries (France & India) was troublesome, we waited for same-location time
  • Location in India was as expected cheaper, but infrastructure was poor
    • office was cold and windy (no roof), western teammate got flu => first week as a zombie.
    • internet and electric shortages
    • India's plane delayed for 48 hours (5000km => 5 days trip)
  • One important data source author (gadm, berkley), who had confirmed right of use for Wikipedia some years before, disappeared (no answer to 6 emails), we couldn't get a renewed confirmation for large scale reuse at lower quality level. The official license page is not as open.
  • Lack of git / github mastery at project's early stage, parallel coding was difficult, resulting in serious bottlenecks. Solution: for every development project, insist on a pre-project Git / Github training.
  • Time/Money budget:
    • Project's human budget appeared insufficient (10.000US$). We kept the budget as low as possible in respect to local culture and non-paid volunteer wikicartographers.
    • Project's work load was under evaluated : 4~5 work-months => +8 work-months needed.
    • Project time span formerly planed from March 2014-August 2014 (5months) => March 2014 to May 2015 (13 months). Of which about 7months were not active due to other professional missions.
    • The project being a side project for the team members, it was negatively affected by our other main activity's priorities. Several unexpected postponing.
    • One teammate found a full time start up job, delaying the delivery of one core portion of the project.
    • Online on-demand map creation could not be delivered despite web UI and server side scripts working.
    • Project work split shifted due to : timeline changes, and team members time availability changes. Initially designed for 60% Arun 40% Yug moved to ~35% Arun 65% Yug.
    • Internal (Wikipedia community) communication was not done properly due to lack of time / budget. (External done well)
  • Communication and collaboration:
    • We had difficulties to set a space for effective synchronization. Google talk, skype, irc were too transient. Google doc and Trello were not our habit. ⇒ Asychroneous communication on the Grants:IEG/Wikimaps_Atlas/Timeline proven the most resilient system
    • Some bottle necks delayed the whole project delivery. One delayed the project by 6 months.

Other recommendations

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If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

Next steps and opportunities

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Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.


Think your project needs renewed funding for another 6 months?




Part 2: The Grant

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Finances

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Actual spending

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Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

Remaining funds

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Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

Please answer yes or no. If yes, list the amount you did not use and explain why.

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

Documentation

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Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadmin wikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

Confirmation of project status

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Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Please answer yes or no.

Is your project completed?

Please answer yes or no.

Grantee reflection

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We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being an IEGrantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the IEG experience? Please share it here!