Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Audio-visual documentation of endangered Igbo dances in Nigeria.

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Applicant details

Wikimedia username(s):

Dolphyb

Ptinphusmia Emmanuel Obiajulu

Organization:

G. Have you received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation before?

Applied previously and did receive a grant

H. Have you received grants from any non-wiki organization before?

No

H.1 Which organization(s) did you receive grants from?

N/A

M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?

Yes

M1. Fiscal organization name.

Wikimedia Nigeria Foundation

Additional information

R. Where will this proposal be implemented?

Nigeria

S. Please indicate whether your work will be focused on one country (local), more than one or several countries in your region (regional) or has a cross-regional (global) scope:

Local

S1. If you have answered regional or international, please write the country names and any other information that is useful for understanding your proposal.

T. If you would like, please share any websites or social media accounts that your group or organization has. (optional)

Twitter and Facebook- Wikimedia User Group Nigeria

Instagram - officialwikipedia

M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?

Yes

M1. Fiscal organization name.

Wikimedia Nigeria Foundation

Proposal

1. What is the overall vision of your organization and how does this proposal contribute to this? How does this proposal connect to past work and learning?

We are individuals from the Igbo tribe and also members of the Wikimedia Hub, Owerri dedicated to promoting wikimedia projects in Imo State and south east as a whole. We focus on building knowledge about Imo State, South East and Igbo ethnic groups in general. In the past, we have participated in photowalks in the region related to Water Bodies and health and wellness, Edit-a-thons and the 2021 WPWP Campaign. We also played a role in assisting research.

2. What is the change that you are trying to bring about and why is this important?

The Igbo tribe is the second largest ethnic group in Nigeria primarily found in the southeastern part of Nigeria comprising Imo, Abia, Enugu, Ebonyi and Anambra states. Igbo people are great lovers of music and considered one of the musically oriented people in Africa. Their musical activities are associated with every stage of one’s development in life. Hence, there are specific dances for children, adolescents, adults, women and even men, for each local government area and state, resulting in the existence of several dances in the region. However, there is no record of these dances or even their possible number anywhere in Nigeria including the [Archives of Nigeria]. The typical information available is trivial mentions of dance troupes hosted during significant national events in the 1960s-1980s. Even so, these sparse information, mostly on paper form and not preserved elsewhere, are in a vulnerable state with potertial risk of destruction by rodents and humidity. These records are also unavailable in the National institute for Cultural Orientation and are attributed to lack of funds and interest to document them. Instead, they are mostly found in the aging population, many of whom are great storytellers but not literate. There is also a dwindling interest of the younger generation in this cultural heritage posing risk of extinction of igbo dances.

In addition, this intangible cultural heritage of the Igbo people are underrepresented in wikimedia projects. Less than 10% of Igbo dances are covered on English Wikipedia and Igbo wikipedia. This cultural expression of the Igbos could play a role in identifying the origin of other indigenous dances. For example, available records have shown that the Valencian dance, [[1]] originated from the Igbo dance, [[2]](https://www.eltemps.cat/article/12830/entrevista-pau-pertegaz;https://revistasao.cat/les-arrels-negres-de-la-muixeranga/). Yet, this igbo dance, important to the Valencia culture, is inadequately covered on wikimedia projects and the internet.This project will identify, document, digitize and preserve Igbo indigenous dances and make them available under an open license. We hope that this project will bring increased awareness and care and eventually spur people to write about indigenous dances in and outside of the movement.

3. Describe your main approaches or strategies to achieve these changes and why you think they will be effective.

Documenting and Digitizing Contents

This will entail developing a knowledge base of the identified dances that includes dance name, custodians, history/origin, in the form of high quality audiovisuals that will be properly described and archived on wikimedia commons, US Library of congress, internet archives and possibly other open license platforms. The audiovisual contents/interviews will be transcribed/typed on wikisource and then used as oral citations for write-a-thons on local language wikipedia.

Production of audiovisuals

This involves production activities to produce not less than 56 videos of Igbo dances focusing on history, significance, performance, costumes, demography, and period of performance in a format (WebM, .ogg) that is acceptable on wikimedia commons. We will also produce audios of the pronunciation of the dances. This will be done by a professional cinematographer in collaboration with native performers, owners and guardians of the cultural heritage across the 5 states in Igbo tribe.

Photowalks

There will be a photowalk in the course of the project to take pictures of costumes, equipment and performance of the dances. This will be in cases where objects of interest require travel to different locations.

Edit-a-thons

We will work with the Wikimedia Usergroup Nigeria and Igbo Wikimedia Usergroup to organize Edit-a-thons every last Saturday of every month to use uploaded audiovisual contents on wikimedia commons on relevant articles on Wikipedia. Although participants from the said user groups will be mostly experienced editors, they will be trained on how to upload audio/video files to Wikipedia articles. Additionally, wikidata items for the documented dances will also be created by the participants on the designated days for Edit-a-thons.

Write-a-thons

This knowledge will likely fail Wikipedia's notability criteria considering that most of them are not documented elsewhere under open license. Nevertheless, the knowledge should not be neglected. Because notability is not strict on the local wikipedias, we will write articles about the dances on Igbo wikipedia. Therefore, we will organize a training and writing contest every last Saturday of every month engaging at least 15 participants. This will be done by working with members of the Igbo wikimedia Usergroup and local wikimedia communities whose members are Igbos and resident in the Igbo states.

Kindly note that the clause "This knowledge will likely fail Wikipedia's notability criteria” is applicable to only English Wikipedia which form one out of 300+ wikipedia projects where this content will be used.

Additionally, owing to the fact that the audiovisuals, images and audios will be uploaded on the internet archive and Library of Congress, will aid researchers and educationists in their work boosting the potential of coverage of this knowledge area in the future thereby resulting in reliable sources for the articles on English Wikipedia.

4. What are the activities you will be developing and delivering as part of these approaches or strategies?

Identify, document, digitize and preserve not less than 56 endangered Igbo dances in the form of audiovisuals, images, audios and make them available under open license on Wikimedia commons, internet archive and library of Congress to be used for researches, educational purposes as well as use them on relevant articles on Wikipedia projects within six months.

List of Igbo dances: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dtVLxl-SPMr_h3cBz724hWTVtfKqqL0BT3gDQbdxY68/edit#gid=0

5. Do you want to apply for multi-year funding?

No

5.1 If yes, provide a brief overview of Year 2 and Year 3 of the proposed plan and how this relates to the current proposal and your strategic plan?

N/A

6. Please include a timeline (operational calendar) for your proposal.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AJbu-LO5lgLlKw-IJKJ0pRcatn1EGBGt-YTxFu9ldhA/edit?usp=drivesdk

7. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?

Name: Chibuike Adolphus Role: Project Coordinator (paid staff) Username: Dolphyb Responsibilities: Overall management and coordination of project activities, staff, funds and volunteers. Liaise and manage working relationships with partners. Ensure participatory Monitoring and Evaluation as well as produce monthly progress, financial, final reports etc. Ptinphusmia will also be supporting me in this role in a voluntary capacity.

Name: Tunde Oladimeji Role: Producer/Director (paid staff) Username: Nil Responsibilities: Managing the audiovisuals production from pre-production stage to post-production stage. He will also take relevant images in this project to save the cost of a photographer for this task.

Name: Christian Nwaru (Ph.D) Role: Documentation Support Officer (Paid Staff) Username: Nil Responsibilities: Work on the metadata of audiovisuals, providing description on name, title, location, speaker, producer and others for the videos. He will also structure questions ( avoiding sensitive ones) and our storyline to obtain answers that align with project objectives. Chris holds a doctorate degree in theater and performance from the University of Northampton, United Kingdom; a lecturer in the department of Theater Arts, Imo State University, Owerri and has over 18 years experience as a dancer/choreographer.

Name: Euphemia Uwandu Role: Production Assistant (Volunteer staff) Username: Ptinphusmia

Name: Emmanuel Obiajulu Role: Production/Logistics Manager (Volunteer staff) Username: Emmanuel Obiajulu

There will also be a paid post-production officer who will cut and fine-tune the videos after production. The project advisors (Wikimedians) will be Daniel Bogre Udell, Satdeep Gill, Olaniyan Shola, Uzoma Ozurumba and Tochi Precious. We will also have Ibe Michael Ogbuu, from the National Institute for Cultural Orientation (NICO) Enugu State office Enugu.

8. Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified CONTENT knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.

Age (regency) , Geography, Language, Socioeconomic Status, Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial

8.1 In a few sentences, explain how your work is specifically addressing this content gap (or Knowledge inequity) to ensure a greater representation of knowledge.

This project has identified the number of endangered Igbo dances which represent a huge content gap on the internet and Wikipedia. Our task here is to record audiovisuals of all these dances, archive them and use them on all the related Igbo dances pages on Wikipedia. This will help to address the content gap on the history line and the relevant information about the dances.

9. Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or THEMATIC focus. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work and explain the rationale for identifying these themes.

Culture, heritage or GLAM , Diversity

10. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Please note, we had previously asked about inclusion and diversity in terms of CONTENTS, in this question we are asking about the diversity of PARTICIPANTS. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.

Geographic , Ethnic/racial/religious or cultural background, Socioeconomic status, Age, Digital Access

11. What are your strategies for engaging participants, particularly those that currently are non-Wikimedia?

This points to one of the reasons why this cultural heritage faces the risk of extinction. If native dance performers and cultural leaders had digital skills and access to smartphones and internet, they will play a huge role in preserving their culture through means that will ensure perpetuity.

There are also participants from the National institute for Cultural Orientation and academia (whom we have been in contact with) who will play an advisory role and assist in securing contact with the cultural leaders and dance performers in the different Igbo states.

Aside from the above-mentioned participants, we will work with the leaders and members of Wikimedia Nigeria Usergroup, Igbo Wikimedia Usergroup and Wikimedia hubs in the region in advisory, mobilizing, editing, and writing roles.

Based on the different roles of the participants, only the members of relevant wikimedia communities will require community experience. In consideration of this, experienced Wikimedians will be targeted. Although we have not worked with cultural leaders before, we have past experience working with wikimedia communities in Nigeria, and also people from the Igbo tribe.

Through this project, we hope to make participants, especially new ones, to be culturally awake and oriented on the need and means to preserve their culture. In as much as cultural institutions such as National institute for Cultural Orientation (NICO) are designated with this responsibility, the understanding that this responsibility extends to also the cultural custodians, owners as well as performers is very important. Hence, cultural institutions should work towards empowering them with the skills to contribute to this knowledge and how they can achieve this through wikimedia projects. For this purpose, we will share the link to the produced contents on commons with participants (NICO, National Archives, subject knowledge experts) to see the results of their contributions, content views around the world, and the potential to raise awareness about their culture globally and locally through wikimedia projects.

12. In what ways are you actively seeking to contribute towards creating a safer, supportive, more equitable environment for participants and promoting the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy, and/or equivalent local policies and processes?

The project is working with structured communities like Igbo Wikimedia community and wikimedia Nigeria Usergroup, who are advocates of the UCOC and friendly space policy in the movement to help in managing the activities of the selected participants from their communities that will work on this project. The project will also encourage gender balance among the participants as well as staff of the project. One of the key focuses of this project is to improve on communal engagement around igbo dances which happened to be one of the endangered knowledge within the movement.

13. Do you have plans to work with Wikimedia communities, groups, or affiliates in your country, or in other countries, to implement this proposal?

Yes

13.1 If yes, please tell us about these connections online and offline and how you have let Wikimedia communities know about this proposal.

We have made contact with User:SGill (WMF), User:Tochiprecious who is the current leader of the Igbo wikimedia Usergroup, User: Uzoma Ozurumba, User:Olaniyan Shola, leader of wikimedia Usergroup Nigeria who have also worked on a similar project and Daniel Bögre Udell, co-founder of wikitongues via emails and calls. We have also shared the proposal with the different advisors and leaders of relevant communities.

14. Will you be working with other external, non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal?

Yes

14.1 Please describe these partnerships and what motivates the potential partner to be part of the proposal and how they add value to your work.

We will be working with National Archive of Nigeria, National institute for Cultural Orientation, and knowledge experts from academia in the southeastern states, such as Department of theater arts, Imo State University, Owerri. These institutions will provide relevant information and contacts of cultural leaders, dance groups, and use their communication and mobilization capacities to assist in engaging target participants. Considering that this knowledge is unavailable at the National Archives of Nigeria, with information resources only on paper, we will provide access to the produced contents on commons and relevant language wikipedias to them for educational and research purposes. This will strengthen their service delivery and ensure access to stories of this culture by the owners through wikimedia projects. Similarly, this benefit will be extended to NICO and the academia. We will also establish contact with the Library of Congress to document the contents in perpetuity.

15. How do you hope to sustain or expand the work carried out in this proposal after the grant?

We have decided to make the pilot project in a scalable version so that the initial 56 dances will be doumented and preserved as a sample of the larger project.

#We intend to train the external partners and the participating Wikimedia communities on how to execute the documentation of the dances in the future so that the project can as well be handled by them .

We will also consider seeking funding from other mission aligned organizations to support the execution of this project in future.
We plan to assign some of our volunteers to the production team to learn from their expertise.
We plan to also work with cultural heritage institutions in this space to serve as content partners for the project.

16. What kind of risks do you anticipate and how would you mitigate these. This can include factors such as external/contextual issues that may affect implementation, as well as internal issues, such as governance/leadership changes.

Igbo dances happen to be one of the endangered cultures in Igbo land. This means that either the custodians are dead or old or unable to transfer some of these skills to their children relocated in the urban city or out of the country. We have established contact with professional Igbo dancers, researchers in academia, to focus on identifying and connecting us with the very few Igbo dances' custodians.

COVID-19 can impose mild risk on places where the audiovisuals will be recorded. At the moment in Nigeria, the government has lifted a ban on all COVID-19 restrictions.
Contents on Igbo dances are not available online and offline: The team has concluded research on locations and custodians of Igbo dancers in the South East of Nigeria. The identified group have agreed live performances of the dances for documentation, history and archiving.
Planning/Optimization of project timeline: Considering that the focused group for this project is scattered across the 5 states in Southeast Nigeria and in remote ends where internet/network services are limited, it will be very important to determine the time, location, and person (s) for recording of each dance, in each episode of the dances. So, we have identified a location officer who will serve as mediator between the project and each of the local dancers as well as custodians.
Cooperation of the Local dancers: We are aware that some of the local dancers might not want to cooperate or might need a gratification before they could participate in the project. In this case, we have planned to print souvenirs as gifts for each performance.

17. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select a maximum of three options that most apply.

Coordinate Across Stakeholders, Invest in Skills and Leadership Development, Identify Topics for Impact, Innovate in Free Knowledge

18. Please state if your organization or group has a Strategic Plan that can help us further understand your proposal. You can also upload it here.

No

Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation

19. What do you hope to learn from your work in this fund proposal?

What is the number of indigenous Igbo dances in Nigeria and how many are covered in the project?

What strategies would help to limit the knowledge gap in cultural heritage topics in wikimedia projects and otherwise in future?

How effective are the methodologies adopted in this project in achieving its objectives?

20. Based on these learning questions, what is the information or data you need to collect to answer these questions? Please register this information (as metric description) in the following space provided.


Main Metrics	Description	Target
of audiovisuals produced	The narration of will value systems, culture, beliefs, lifestyle and the environment of the people where the production is done.	56
of audiovisuals uploaded to Wikimedia commons, Internet Archive, and Library of Congress.	The preservation and transfer of culture and knowledge to other generations. We will have a one stop digital repository where educators and researchers can access information about these dances.	56
of training and capacity development.	Possible replication of the project and ability to work on preserving endangered culture by trained participants in the future.	30
of Edit-a-thons	The projection of the culture and tribe of the Igbo group to people beyond their language and tribe by reusing the contents on Wikipedia pages.	5
Social Media Awareness	Project visibility will be attained through awareness on relevant platforms.	N/A

Here are some additional metrics that you can use if they are relevant to your work. Please note that this is just an optional list, mostly of quantitative metrics. They may complement the qualitative metrics you have defined in the previous boxes.


Additional Metrics	Description	Target
Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities	N/A	N/A
Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities	N/A	N/A
Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability	N/A	N/A
Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors	N/A	N/A
Diversity of participants brought in by grantees	N/A	N/A
Number of people reached through social media publications	N/A	N/A
Number of activities developed	N/A	N/A
Number of volunteer hours	N/A	N/A

21. Additional core quantitative metrics. These core metrics will not tell the whole story about your work, but they are important for measuring some Movement-wide changes. Please try to include these core metrics if they are relevant to your work. If they are not, please use the space provided to explain why they are not relevant or why you can not capture this data. Your explanation will help us review our core metrics and make sure we are using the best ones for the movement as a whole.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics	Description	Target
Number of participants	The number of participants in all activities including cultural leaders, native dance performers, staff of partnering organizations, and other knowledge experts. They are going to be mostly new participants and a few returning ones.	100
Number of editors	The number of editors in all activities including a mix of new and returning editors from wikimedia Usergroup Nigeria, Igbo Wikimedia Usergroup, wikimedia hubs in Southeastern Nigeria, and other language wikimedia communities that will be interested in participating. We hope that 10 out of this 30, will be new editors.	30
Number of organizers	The number of organizers in all activities including advisors, coordinators, trainers, facilitators and planners.	13

**Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project**
Wikimedia Project	Description	Target
Wikimedia Commons	Minimum of 56 audiovisuals uploaded to wikimedia commons	56
Wikidata	Minimum of 56 wikidata items created or improved.	56
Wikimedia Commons	Minimum of 100 images uploaded to wikimedia commons.	100
Wikipedia	Igbo Wikipedia. Minimum of 100 articles created or improved.	100
N/A	N/A	N/A

21.1 If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation.

Not Applicable

22. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?

Programs and events dashboard https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/

Event Metrics https://eventmetrics.wmflabs.org/programs

Wikimedia Hashtags tool https://hashtags.wmflabs.org/

We will use the program and events dashboard to measure the number of participants, editors, organizers, commons upload, wikidata items and articles creation or improvement. We will also use the hashtags tool to track articles created or improved related to the project within the specified timeline.

Financial Proposal

23. & 23.1 What is the amount you are requesting from WMF? Please provide this amount in your local currency. If you are thinking about a multi-year fund, please provide the amount for the first year.

18219200 NGN

23.2 What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?

45548 USD

23.3 Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rBAigrckiI7EUL57YznpLhvdQ9jLvL-05sCX6WZbw-0/edit?usp=drivesdk

23.4 Please include any additional observations or comments you would like to include about your budget.

The project was designed with a view to engage three categories of personnels namely;

Paid staff Project Coordinator Producer/Director Documentation Officer Post-production

Volunteers (Community members) would provide support services for the project.

Advisors

The paid staff are the professional personnel who will be recruited to handle core professional work and non routine tasks of the project. They are also expected to commit a significant amount of time to drive and supervise every task of the project. While the volunteers (community members) would be engaged to learn from this group of people and also provide support services e.g. production assistant and logistics officers.

Generally, personnel costs for contractual projects are always higher than non-contractual or full-time based ones in Nigeria, because all the allowances such as transportation, accommodation, wardrobe, utilities and related taxes (PAYE) are built into the total emolument. While in full-time ones only the basic salary are disclosed and other part of the emoluments are treated as allowances and do not form part of the Salary.

Kindly note that professional aspects of this project such as Cinematography, Documentation Personnel (Imo State University) and post-production personnel were outsourced to experts with the lowest cost of engagement because we do not have the requisite skills for this task in the community. While the Project coordinator would invest a significant amount of time from the start to end of the project. He/she is expected to drive the entire aspect of the project. In this regard, we will engage someone with the core idea of this project and such a personnel should be a member of our community.

Kindly see the details of personnel and their corresponding roles below:

Paid Staff Name: Chibuike Adolphus Role: Project Coordinator (paid staff) Username: Dolphyb Responsibilities: Overall management and coordination of project activities, staff, funds and volunteers. Liaise and manage working relationships with partners. Ensure participatory Monitoring and Evaluation as well as produce monthly progress, financial, final reports etc. Ptinphusmia will also be a co-cordinator supporting me in this role in a voluntary capacity.

Name: Tunde Oladimeji Role: Producer/Director (paid staff) Username: Nil Responsibilities: Managing the audiovisuals production from pre-production stage to post-production stage. He will also take relevant images in this project to reduce the cost of a photographer for this task.

Name: Christian Nwaru (Ph.D) Role: Documentation Support Officer (Paid Staff) Username: Nil Responsibilities: Work on the metadata of audiovisuals, providing description on name, title, location, speaker, producer and others for the videos. He will also structure questions (avoiding sensitive ones) and our storyline to obtain answers that align with project objectives. Chris holds a doctorate degree in theater and performance from the University of Northampton, United Kingdom; a lecturer in the department of Theater Arts, Imo State University, Owerri and has over 18 years experience as a dancer/choreographer.

The Post-Production Team will be responsible for post production activities such as. audiovisual editing, sound mixing, color correction and subtitle.

B. Volunteers

Name: Euphemia Uwandu Role: Production Assistant (Volunteer staff) Username: Ptinphusmia

Name: Emmanuel Obiajulu Role: Production/Logistics Manager (Volunteer staff) Username: Emmanuel Obiajulu

Advisors

The project advisors (Wikimedians) will be Daniel Bogre Udell, Satdeep Gill, Olaniyan Shola, Uzoma Ozurumba and Tochi Precious. We will also have Ibe Michael Ogbuu, from the National Institute for Cultural Orientation (NICO) Enugu State office.

Please use this optional space to upload any documents that you feel are important for further understanding your proposal.

Other public document(s): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dtVLxl-SPMr_h3cBz724hWTVtfKqqL0BT3gDQbdxY68/edit?usp=drivesdk

Final Message

By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.

We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.

Yes

Feedback

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