Grants:PEG/WM IN/PEG Bridge Funding

statusFunded

WM IN/PEG Bridge funding

Funding request for the following ongoing programs of Wikimedia India Chapter until January 2016: Microgrants for various community programs and events, Equipment lending and other support for individual community members, Wikipedia in Tech Education and GLAM focus in West Bengal.

targetWikipedia (Bengali, Tamil, English), Commons and MediaWiki.

strategic priorityIncrease Participation, Increase Reach, Improve Quality, Encourage Innovation and Stabilize Infrastructure.

start dateAugust 1

start year2015

end dateJanuary 31

end year2016

budget (local currency)4,50,000 INR

budget (USD)6,743 USD (on 1st December, 2015)

grant typeOrganization

non-profit statusYes

creator• Ravidreams (WMIN)

contact(s)• ravidreams

wikimedia.in• yohannvt

wikimedia.in

organization• Wikimedia India

website• http://wiki.wikimedia.in

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Goal

Wikimedia Chapter, India (WMIN) has a mandate to support Wikimedia projects in 22 Indian languages. WMIN has successfully utilized its first annual grant and looks forward to stabilize as an organization. Following is the list of WMIN's ongoing programs till January 2016: Microgrants for various community programs and events, Equipment lending and other support for individual community members, Wikipedia in Tech Education and GLAM focus in West Bengal.

Plan

Activities

Microgrants

WMIN provides microgrants for projects and events conducted by Wikimedia community members in India. This is one of our core programs since our inception and vital for establishing ourself as a community driven organization. All microgrants awarded so far are listed here. Wikipedia workshops, edit-a-thons, anniversary celebrations and contests are some of the typical activities we support. Besides financial assistance and logistics support, we provide inputs for program design to maximize impact in a measurable way. At times, we also encourage the communities to get creative and realize their true potential with ZERO BUDGET.

WMIN intends to continue this ongoing program until January 2016. We expect to support one major activity through this program:

Tamil Wikimedia Outreach - WMIN will support the Global Tamil Wikimedia Community for its collaboration with Tamil Virtual Academy, a State Government of Tamil Nadu run autonomous institution, regarding a serious of outreach, content acquisition and free content friendly policy initiatives. More details of this initiative can be seen in the proposed MoU between these stakeholders. This grant will help the Global Tamil Wikimedia Community to have access to a contingency funding before a separate PEG request is granted by WMF.

Equipment lending and community support

Wikimedia India runs an Equipment Lending and Community Support program for established Wikimedians to retain and enable them to be more active. This is mainly intended at removing limitations in contributing for user groups like students, unemployed and others facing financial constraints. This program enables contributors in a way that there is a significant increase or improvement in their regular contributions.

For example, please check the steady increase in User:Pranayraj's edits after having access to a personal laptop since June 2015.

While concerns about editor retention, active editor decline and increasing mobile usage resulting in less number of users turning in to contributor are widely registered, very little has been done in identifying and solving financial challenges that stops individuals from contributing. For example, an active contributor like User:Jim Carter's edits declined since March 2015 simply because he didn't have access to a laptop anymore. Our program intends to solve real world issues like this.

Monthly internet charges, purchase of reference books, lending of other equipments like scanners and cameras are some of the ways in which this program can support the community. While we intend to expand this program in a bigger scale in the future, we will continue to run the program only in a pilot scale until January 2016 to document the impact of support we have already provided.

Wikipedia in Tech Education

SKP Engineering College located at Thiruvannamalai, Tamilnadu and Wikimedia India run a Wikipedia in Tech Education Program. This takes a unique approach to the universal Wikipedia Education Program by having a tech focus. A select set of 35 students from final year engineering courses are working on language computing and MediaWiki related topics under the guidance of an expert faculty. This will be an ongoing and self-running project with new set of students joining the program every year. Based on this pilot, the program can be scaled and extended to other institutions across the country.

We will work together to design, develop and execute collaborative projects under following three broad categories:

Mediawiki and Wikimedia projects specific
Pan-Indian Language tools and resources
Long term Indian language computing research projects.

Activities are defined for every six months and the progress is reviewed in the same interval. All outputs (text, corpus, media, software code) developed under this partnership will be released under CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license and GPLv2+. An MoU regarding this collaboration was signed in June 2015 and the program was launched with a virtual guest lecture from WMF staff Niharika Kohli in August 2015. The focus for this semester will be to orient the students in these research areas with various guest lectures and hands-on training. The students will work on individual final year projects during the next semester.

GLAM Focus in West Bengal

GLAM Focus in West Bengal is a 100% community driven program that started with Kolikata Little Magazine Library GLAM project which WMIN supported through a microgrant. Community members were highly resourceful in lining up a series of such GLAM opportunities. While WMIN continued to support them by officially endorsing the projects, we saw that the communities can be supported better if this GLAM Focus in West Bengal becomes a core programmatic area for WMIN. This reduces the additional burden for communities from writing multiple microgrants or PEG requests and lets them focus on the real work. Until January 2016, following will be the key activities:

Kolikata Little Magazine Library GLAM - Kolikata Little Magazine Library o Gabeshana Kendra (KLMLGK) is a privately owned library of alternative and experimental literary magazines in Kolkata, India. From June 2015, the Kolikata Little Magazine Library o Gabeshana Kendra (KLMLGK) launched the first ever Wikimedian-in-Residence program in West Bengal, supported by Wikimedia India. The library comprises approximately 70,000 experimental, radical, alternative and avant-garde periodicals and little magazines. There are numerous little magazines in the library from the pre-independence era. Needless to say, these journals are having a close association with the Independence movement of Bengal, rather India. Majority of these books are in Bengali, but several books and periodicals are in other languages as well, including English and Hindi. Subjects range from literature to broader disciplines of social science and humanities. Periodic updates for this GLAM initiative are reported here.
Bejoy Narayan Mahavidyalaya GLAM - Bejoy Narayan Mahavidyalaya is a college located in Hooghly district since 1950. The college library comprises approximately 2000 books and periodicals including Probashi, Bharatbarsha, Basumati, Udbodhan, The Calcutta Review, Sri Krishnakirtan Kavya and Early Indian Prose from their first publication. In addition to these books and periodicals, the library is also having a rare collection of zoology specimen and zoology microscope slides collected and preserved by college faculties and students. Most of these books are in Bengali, but there are several books and periodicals in other languages as well, including English, Hindi and Sanskrit. There are some rare manuscripts (almost 300 years old) in a personal collection of the librarian who has gladly committed to release them for public access.

Apart from the digitization project with the Bejoy Narayan Mahavidyalaya, the team will also interact and involve the museum staffs and members in the following ways to establish a stable relationship between the college and the team in order to value and internationalize the history of Indian literature as well as the history of Bengal.

Organize training and workshops on Commons, Bengali Wikipedia and Bengali Wikisource.
Organize training and workshops on digitization process.
Organize on-site regular edit-a-thons on Bengal’s literature activities.
Involve college staffs and students to participate in short term Wikipedia quality article writing contests.
One-to-one outreach with interested college staff and member targeting to provide at least 3-5 very active Bengali Wikipedian.
Involve female members and students to turn them into active Wikipedian, consequently diminishing gender-gap.

List of activities

Phase I: Photography of zoological specimens and slides

Phase II: Digitization of Books

Step 1: Workshop for the management staff and students of Bejoy Narayan Mahavidyalaya

Step 2: Phase I upload

Step 3: Phase II upload

Step 4: Edit-a-thon with students and staffs of the college.

St. John's Church, Kolkata GLAM - St. John’s Church, originally a cathedral, was among the first public buildings erected in 1787 by the East India Company after Kolkata became the effective capital of British India. This heritage building is a tourist attraction and contains lot of records and materials of historical importance. The minute books date back to 1783 and contains valuable correspondence between the Governor Generals, Viceroys and the church authorities. The Church contains valuable inventory including old Bibles, crucifix, antique furnitures, etc., The walls of the church has a large number of plaques giving valuable informations about British officials.

All these GLAM projects will extend beyond January 2016. Funding is requested only to meet the expenses until January 2016.

Impact

Target readership

Wikipedia (Bengali, Tamil, English), Commons and MediaWiki.

Fit with strategy

What crucial thing will the project try to change or benefit in the Wikimedia movement? Please select the Wikimedia strategic priority(ies) that your project most directly aims to impact and explain how your project fits. Most projects fit all strategic priorities. However, we would like project managers to focus their efforts on impacting 1–2 strategic priorities. Examples of strategic priorities can be found here.

Our Microgrants program will Increase Participation and Reach as it primarily supports projects and events from various language communities trying to enroll new contributors by increasing awareness about the Wikimedia movement.
Equipment lending and Community Support program will help to Improve Quality by enabling active users to contribute more and consistently. The equipment will be a shared resource for the community to conduct outreach thereby Stabilizing Infrastructure too.
Wikipedia in Education Tech program is one of its kind in the Wikimedia movement. It is the only education program which has a tech focus to leverage the tech talent that India is known for. Thus, this program will Encourage Innovation and Increase Participation towards the technical side of Wikimedia projects. This program will also Encourage Diversity by working on technical solutions for Indian languages and Reduce Gender Gap as 75% of the current set of students are women.
GLAM Focus in West Bengal will Improve Quality and Increase participation by adding to an ecosystem of reference sources in Bengali online.

Measures of success

Please provide a list of both quantitative and qualitative criteria that will be used to determine how successful the project is. You will need to report on the success of the project according to these measures after the project is completed. See the PEG program resources for suggested measures of success.

We will consider our programs successful if we have the following outcomes:

Microgrants
- At least 2 Wikimedia communities in India are supported to conduct projects and events.
- Tamil Wikimedia Community starts executing the proposed outreach, content acquisition and policy initiatives.

Tamil Wikimedia Outreach is a standalone and high impact program which may need a separate PEG request with exact measures of success.

Equipment lending and community support
- 1 long time contributor increases his/her edit activity by at least 100%.
Wikipedia in Education
- At least 35 students start working in projects related to MediaWiki, Language Computing research and tools.
- At least 3 guest lectures are conducted.
- At least 2 hands-on workshops are conducted.
- Students start working in at least 7 final year semester projects.
GLAM Focus in West Bengal
- Kolikata Little Magazine Library GLAM
  - At least 40 images of artifacts are contributed to Commons.
  - At least 19,200 pages are digitized and uploaded to Commons.
- Bejoy Narayan Mahavidyalaya GLAM
  - 200 images of zoological specimens and slides are contributed to Commons.
  - 1,00,000 pages are digitized and uploaded to Commons.
- St. John's Church, Kolkata GLAM
  - At least 15 registers are digitized and uploaded to Commons.
- Number of new editors from all the above GLAM activities:
  - Short term: New editors during the courses and workshops: 5
  - Long term: Number of those editors who continue editing one month after the project duration: 1 to 3
  - Female editors: 1

All the above success measures are calculated considering a 2 month period of work until January 2016.

Note: In addition to your project-specific measures of success, you will also be asked to report on some global metrics at the end of your final report. Please keep this in mind as you plan, and we'll support you as you begin your project.

Resources and risks

Resources

Most of our programs are completely community driven. These communities and contributors have demonstrated considerable success and maturity in handling similar projects in the past. WMIN has 1.0 FTE serving as Program Director who can allot dedicated time for planning, tracking and reporting these programs.

Please check Tamil Wikipedia community discussion demonstrating community participation for Tamil Wikimedia Outreach initiatives. Global Tamil Wikimedia Community is partnering with Free Software Foundation, Tamil Nadu and Tamil Virtual Academy (TVA), an autonomous institution established by the Government of Tamil Nadu. TVA will be deputing government staff who have an interest in Tamil promotion or Wikipedia to work full-time on these initiatives. At least 2.0 FTE staff will be engaged besides more available on call across various districts of Tamil Nadu. TVA, being a high-profile apex institution, will help us get logistics support from colleges and universities across the state. TVA is also open to host Wikipedians in Residence whom we hope to engage through a separate PEG. Tamil Wikipedia 10 Years Celebrations and Tamil Wiki Media Contest are two successful projects funded by PEG earlier.
Wikipedia in Tech Education program has access to all resources available at SKP Engineering College including an expert faculty exclusively available for this. Lectures and hands-on training will be conducted by WMF Staff, GSoC interns and other experts. We have already reached out to quite a few and got their consent.
Santanu Chandra, Sujay Chandra and Rangan Datta are the coordinators for GLAM projects. The Bengali community has experience working in huge scale projects like Bengali Wikipedia 10th Anniversary Celebrations and Wiki Treks Mountains.

Risks

For microgrants towards community projects and events, planning, execution and reporting based on latest learnings in the movement might have a steep learning curve. This can be limited by having more engagement with the organizers making them aware of easy to use tools and learning patterns. WMF Learning & Evaluation Team can help here.
GLAM projects have the risk of burning out currently active volunteers if the next generation of volunteers don't join the team soon. The encyclopedic value of content digitized or their actual usage or impact in the Wikimedia projects may also be debated in the wider movement. This might be a deterrent in signing up similar institutions in the future. Upload to Commons in time can also be an issue due to slow internet connections. In this case, volunteer burn out can be avoided by engaging non-Wikipedians in a professional basis where mechanical and routine work is involved. The community shall strive to add or improve content in Wikipedia from the beginning besides scanning and uploading. This will give a chance to understand the community dynamics and reprioritize the books they digitize. One can try uploading the documents from other cities where internet connection speed is faster.

Budget

Please provide a detailed breakdown of project expenses according to the instructions here. See Budget Guidelines.

Grantees are subject to line-item scrutiny of expenses. Changes to the approved budget beyond 10% in any category must be approved in advance.

Project budget table

Number	Category	Item description	Unit	Number of units	Cost per unit	Total cost	Currency	Notes
1	Community PEG	Various community PEG				30000	INR	For workshops and edit-a-thons. Under Microgrants Program.
2	Community PEG	Tamil Wikimedia Outreach				220000	INR	For conducting workshops, book fair stall, Wikipedians in Residence and more. Under Microgrants Program.
3	Equipment	Laptops	1 Laptop	1	27500	27500	INR	Price based on a laptop requested by a community member. Under Equipment Lending and Community Support Program.
4	Travel	Bus, rail, taxi or air tickets				15000	INR	For mentor visits to campus. The college will provide accommodation and food in their guest house. Under Wikipedia in Tech Education Program.
5	Equipment	Scanner	1 Scanner	1	60000	60000	INR	Price based on same model we bought last after community consultation. GLAM Program.
6	Stipend	Wikipedians in Residence	1 hour	128	125	16000	INR	128 hours Kolkata little magazine library GLAM Program.
7	Services	Skilled professionals for digitizing old documents	1 hour	144	250	36000	INR	For St. John's Church GLAM. Ancient records need expert services in digitizing.
8	Travel, Food	Bus tickets and meals				24000	INR	For Bejoy Narayana Mahavidyalaya GLAM which is located away from volunteers
9	Outreach	Workshops, meetups and edit-a-thons		5	2000	10000	INR	For Bejoy Narayana Mahavidyalaya GLAM
10	Internet	Connection charge	1 month internet connectivity	3	500	1500	INR	For Bejoy Narayana Mahavidyalaya GLAM
11	Miscellaneous					10000	INR	For unpredictable expenses and emerging opportunities

Total cost of project: 4,50,000 INR

Total amount requested from the Project and Event Grants program: 4,50,000 INR ( approx 6,743 USD)

Additional sources of revenue that may fund part of this project, and amounts funded: NONE

Non-financial requirements

See a description of non-financial assistance available. Please inform the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) of any requests for non-financial assistance now.

Requests for non-financial assistance, if any: We will appreciate the availability of mentors and guest lecturers from WMF's Engineering team for our Wikipedia In Tech Education program. We will also appreciate if WMF's Wikipedia Education Program team can issue certificates once students complete their projects successfully.

Discussion

Community notification

You are responsible for notifying relevant communities of your proposal, so that they can help you! Depending on your project, notification may be most appropriate on a village pump, talk page, mailing list. Please paste a link below to where the relevant communities have been notified of this proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions. Need notification tips?

Announcements regarding this PEG application have been made at

Indian Wikimedia community mailing list
WMIN's FB page
WMIN's Twitter handle
WMIN's Chapter wiki.

Endorsements

Do you think this project should be selected for a Project and Event Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project in the list below. Other feedback, questions or concerns from community members are also highly valued, but please post them on the talk page of this proposal.

For grantees

If you are the grantee or representative that wrote this grant submission, you may request changes by using these links:

Create a request for an extension of the approved project completion date.
Create a request for changes to the approved project budget.