Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Dagbani Wikimedians User Group 2022 Annual Programs/Final Report
Report Status: Accepted
Due date: 2023-07-31T00:00:00Z
Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund
Report type: Final
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General information edit
This form is for organizations, groups, or individuals receiving Wikimedia Community Funds or Wikimedia Alliances Funds to report on their final results. See the midpoint report if you want to review the midpoint results.
- Name of Organization: Dagbani Wikimedians User Group
- Title of Proposal: Dagbani Wikimedians User Group 2022 Annual Programs
- Amount awarded: 42728.08 USD, 55000 GHS
- Amount spent: 485702.4 GHS
Part 1 Understanding your work edit
1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented.
- Hybrid events: We employed the hybrid method in the various workshops that we embarked on. We organized physical and online workshops to build on the skills of existing editors and teach new editors the skills to contribute to the Dagbani Wikipedia and the other sister Wikis. This together with the Dagbani Wikipedia Saha program, has helped more volunteers learn how they can contribute to our projects even if they can not attend our in-person events.
Workshops: We organized a series of workshops to train participants of our Parliament of Ghana contest, which resulted in creating 1,375 biographies of Ghanaian parliamentarians across 5 language wikis.
To retain editors, we employed a module where new editors and experienced editors were placed at different levels during events. In this module, new editors were made to compete among themselves and experienced editors were assigned tasks that suited their skills.
Mentor-Mentee Program: In order to encourage peer learning, we introduced a mentorship program in which we assigned selected experienced editors to groups that are created from the new editors for them to mentor the new editors to become more skillful in contributing to Wikipedia and its sister projects.
To avoid IP blocks, newly recruited volunteers were made to create their user accounts before coming together for an event.
We also leveraged the power of social media to broadcast our events and projects that took place within the second half of the project period
We successfully established a Wiki Hub at the Department of Computer Science at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.
To foster collaboration, we partnered with the Wiki Green Team to execute the Wiki Green Conference which contributed substantially to planting seedlings at selected schools.
2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals?
- Contest: The maiden project of the second half of the project implementation period was the Parliament of Ghana Contest. This involved the community members of the Dagbani Wikimedians User Groups and its sister communities. Using contest as a strategy to implement this project yielded substantial results. The participants worked hard with the aim of winning the prizes at stake. They competed among themselves fiercely, prioritizing the quality of content. Appreciable results were achieved in Dagbani Wikipedia and the Wikipedias of its sister communities.
Hybrid events: Hybrid as a strategy was also very effective in achieving our results. We covered a large number of participants using the online method and also catered for volunteers who could not be present at the physical workshops.
Mentorship program: This strategy helped create a cordial relationship between existing and new editors and gave new editors the opportunity to learn from experienced ones. As a language community, we created partnerships with like-minded organizations to collaboratively achieve the aim of contributing to the growth of African languages.
3. Would you say that your project had any innovations? Are there things that you did very differently than you have seen them done by others?
- We have used Wikimedia Diff and Newsletters platform and our Social media handles to update the world about the programs in the community. These have provided people with alternative sources to access updates about our community.
The Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, having sister communities that we strive to grow with, we organized quarterly meetings for the various community team members to review the programs that we have embarked on. This makes all the communities keep at the same pace in project execution.
We have held capacity-building workshops where we share knowledge and ideas. In these meetups, we bring all team members from the various communities to a physical location and equip them with skills and knowledge to keep their communities running.
4. Please describe how different communities participated and/or were informed about your work.
- Our community remained well-informed and up-to-date about the projects and activities of the community through newsletters and our vibrant social media handles. The Wikimedia Diff platform has always been used to post updates about our activities and projects as a community.
We share our upcoming projects on our mailing list and telegram channels. We also share more information on our meta talk page.
Again, we use official letters to invite like-minded organizations to participate in our activities and projects.
We also adopted the use of collaborative and project management tools to facilitate our work process. This allowed us to have more members on board in situations where we needed to embark on projects that required us to work in smaller groups.
Prominent digital platforms, including City News, Sagani TV, and various radio stations, have featured and published information about our projects and activities.
5. Documentation of your impact. Please use the two spaces below to share files and links that help tell your story and impact. This can be documentation that shows your results through testimonies, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, etc.) social media posts, dashboards, etc.
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
- List of dashboards:
Parliament of Ghana Contest(Dagbani Wikipedia) https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Dagbani_Wikimedians_user_group/8th_Parliament_of_the_4th_republic_of_Ghana/home
Parliament of Ghana Contest(Gurene Wikipedia) https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Gurene_Wikimedia_Community/Gurene_-_8th_Parliament_of_the_4th_Republic_(20_April_-_20_June,_2023)
Parliament of Ghana Contest(Moore Wikipedia/Incubator) https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Moore_Wikimedia_Community/8th_Parliament_of_the_4th_Republic_of_Ghana_Contest_-_Moore_Section/home
Parliament of Ghana Contest(Dagaare Wikipedia/Incubator) https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Dagaare_Wikimedia_Community/Parliament_of_Ghana_Edit-a-thon_2023/home
6. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.
| A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups | Strongly agree |
| B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community | Strongly agree |
| C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups | |
| D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives | Strongly agree |
| E. Encourage the retention of editors | |
| F. Encourage the retention of organizers | Strongly agree |
| G. Increased participants' feelings of belonging and connection to the movement. | Strongly agree |
7. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?
- We have implemented targeted outreach strategies to engage with the masses that are part of the underrepresented communities. We engaged in a publicity drive by participating in radio discussions about the work we do in order to keep the public abreast of our projects and activities.
We have also made our community WhatsApp and Telegram groups open for people to join and learn about Wikimedia projects.
We have also collaborated with organizations, forums, and social media groups to foster meaningful connections that contributed to achieving the goal of our user group and Wikimedia at large.
The importance of multilingual content encouraged us to embark on translation efforts to make our content more accessible to different language speakers. We did this by having common projects that our sister language communities contributed to. This allowed the speakers of these languages to read the content in their own languages.
We established mentorship programs to support and guide new contributors from underrepresented communities. By pairing them with experienced editors, we facilitated knowledge transfer, skill development, and a sense of belonging.
We prioritise advocacy, diversity and inclusion and have also always welcomed diverse perspectives within our community and the broader Wikimedia movement large. We strive to create more representation by engaging with Wikimedia Foundation initiatives and conferences to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Part 2: Your main learning edit
8. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?
- We conducted biweekly meet-ups in the hubs to help retain and support volunteers and editors and students.
We reached out to more volunteers through TV broadcasts of the Dagbani Wikipedia Saha program and social media campaigns. Through this, we had a lot of people joining the community and several others were retained.
Preserving, promoting and documenting the languages and culture of volunteers on the Wikimedia projects to prevent their languages from going into extinction was what motivated community members to contribute to the Dagabni Wikipedia.
Our partnership with Sagani TV has helped us to promote our programs and outreach campaigns using digital TV.
We adopted a module where selected Dagbani language experts were engaged to carry out a quality assessment of articles after every contest or editathon where articles were created. This resulted in improved article quality contributed to the Dagbani Wikipedia.
Before we adopted the above module, a number of articles on the Dagbani Wikipedia were of low quality. This was due to the fact that some contributors lacked knowledge of the orthography of the language and that resulted in poor articles being created.
9. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?
- The Dagbani Wikipedia Saha program has helped to reach more volunteers within Ghana and abroad. Other sister language communities that have watched the program have now joined the user group. These are the Moore, Dagaare and Kusaal Wikimedia communities.
Also, we collaborated with the Ghana NLP who have found some of our projects more useful and have developed automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text translation AI app for Dagbani and Gurene using the audio data we collected on Wikimedia Commons.
10. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?
- We intend to include subtitles in their local languages to enable them to understand the content that is taught in the TV series.
We hope to increase the number of episodes to cover more topics.
11. If you were sitting with a friend to tell them one thing about your work during this fund, what would it be (think of inspiring or fascinating moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes, or anything that feels important to you)?
- The Parliament of Ghana Contest series has been very successful, for it has contributed a substantial amount of content to the Dagbani Wikipedia, Gurene Wikipedia, Moore Wikipedia(Incubator), Kusaal Wikipedia(Incubator) and Dagaare Wikipedia(Incubator). It has increased the visibility of the various parliamentarians of the 8th parliament of the 4th Republic of Ghana on Wikipedia space and the internet at large. We translated the biographies of these parliamentarians into the 5 languages Wikipedias and have created/improved their Wikidata items.
Our flagship Tele-education program, the Dagbani Wikipedia Saha, has contributed significantly to addressing the Knowledge gap challenge that is faced by Wikimedians and at the same contributed to outreach campaigns.
12. Please share resources that would be useful to share with other Wikimedia organizations so that they can learn from, adapt or build upon your work. For instance, guides, training material, presentations, work processes, or any other material the team has created to document and transfer knowledge about your work and can be useful for others. Please share any specific resources that you are creating, adapting/contextualizing in ways that are unique to your context (i.e. training material).
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
- N/A
Part 3: Metrics edit
13a. Open and additional metrics data
| Open Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Awareness Campaign | 1. We will broadcast 24 episodes of our Dagbani Wikipedia Saha on partner TV station to recruit, train create Wikipedia awareness using Digital TV broadcast.
|
27 | N/A | A stand-out program dubbed the Parliament of Ghana Contest was implemented in the second half of the project period in all four sister communities including Dagbani Wikimedia Community. This gave rise to the recruitment and retention of a significant number of editors from the contest. | Outreach dashboard |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Additional Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities | We will retain at least 200 editors after this project | 200 | 255 | We retained a substantial number of editors from the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group and its sister projects from implementing the Parliament of Ghana Contest. | Outreach dashboards |
| Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities | At least 20 organizers will be retained after this project | 20 | 23 | We surpassed the set target due to a launch of a Wiki Hub at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in the second half of the project. | Outreach dashboard and manual recording of program activities. |
| Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability | We hope tp retain at least 8 active strategic partners/institutions after this project | 6 | 6 | We have been able to secure partnerships from vibrant institutions that are ready to help our course. | Writing letters and engaging with them in physical conversations. |
| Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors | We will share surveys after each project to learn more about how we can improve on our programs | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Diversity of participants brought in by grantees | We will evaluate the diversity of our participants and community from our project survey responses | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of people reached through social media publications | We will reach at least 10,000 people from our TV program and at least 20,000 from all programs | 30000 | 12819 | We achieved a massive social media presence. This was achieved due to the advocacy and campaigns we had as part of the programs. | The result was computed by visiting our social media handles and manually computing it. |
| Number of activities developed | We hope to develop atleast 4 new projects from our current projects and communities | 4 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of volunteer hours | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
13b. Additional core metrics data.
| Core metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | This will include people who participate in our campaigns, workshops, contests, photowalks,edit-a-thons etc. Dagbani, Gurene and Moore communities) | 800 | 255 | We were able to retain a substantial number of editors after completing the second half of the project. | Outreach dashboards
Fountain tool Hashtag tool Google form |
| Number of editors | This will include new, existing and returning editors from the Dagbani, Gurene and Moore Wikimedia communities. | 400 | 255 | We recorded a massive turnout for project participation from Dagabni Wikimedia and its sister communities. | Outreach dashboard. |
| Number of organizers | This will include the total number of event and campaign organizers from our community hubs, partners, Wiki communities | 40 | 42 | We retained a significant number of organizers from the Dagbani Wikimedians User group and its sister communities | Outreach dashboard and manual record keeping of programs. |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | The total number of Dagbani Wikipedia articles created or improved. | 1200 | 5221 | There has been a significant increase in the number of articles created or improved on Wikipedia due to the implementation of the Parliament of Ghana Contest, which yielded a lot number of articles. All the communities involved created 275 articles each in the second half of the project implementation. | Outreach dashboards. |
| Wikimedia Commons | Total number of photos uploaded to Wikimedia Commons | 7000 | 577 | Although we have not embarked on any main photo walk event, photos from our workshops were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. | Glamorous Tool |
| Wikidata | The total number of Wikidata items created or improved, Lexemes and Wikidata labels described in Dagbani. | 10000 | 8679 | This represents the number of Lexemes created. There has been an increase in the number of Lexemes from the first half of the project. | Wikidata query service |
| Incubator | The total number of articles created on Gurene and Moore Wikipedia incubator. | 1000 | 1321 | The communities involved contributed an appreciable number of articles to their Wikis as a result of taking part in the Parliament of Ghana Contest. | Outreach dashboard. |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
14. Were there any metrics in your proposal that you could not collect or that you had to change?
- No
15. If you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results, please describe and add any recommendations on how to address them in the future.
- We did not encounter any difficulties in collecting data to measure our metrics. We successfully gathered all relevant data to measure our metrics without facing using Wikimedia data collection tools and Google products.
16. Use this space to link or upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your data collection (e.g., dashboards, surveys you have carried out, communications material, training material, etc).
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
- N/A
Part 4: Organizational capacities & partnerships edit
17. Organizational Capacity
| A. Financial capacity and management | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| B. Conflict management or transformation | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| C. Leadership (i.e growing in potential leaders, leadership that fit organizational needs and values) | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| D. Partnership building | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| E. Strategic planning | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| F. Program design, implementation, and management | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| G. Scoping and testing new approaches, innovation | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| H. Recruiting new contributors (volunteer) | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| I. Support and growth path for different types of contributors (volunteers) | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| J. Governance | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| K. Communications, marketing, and social media | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| L. Staffing - hiring, monitoring, supporting in the areas needed for program implementation and sustainability | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| M. On-wiki technical skills | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| N. Accessing and using data | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| O. Evaluating and learning from our work | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| P. Communicating and sharing what we learn with our peers and other stakeholders | |
| N/A | |
| N/A |
17a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
- Peer to peer learning with other community members in community/ies of practice* (structured and continuous learning and sharing spaces), Using capacity building/training resources onlinee from sources OUTSIDE the Wikimedia Movement, Using capacity building/training resources online from sources WITHIN the Wikimedia Movement
17b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
- Lack of volunteer time to participate in capacity building/training, Barriers to access training because of language, Barriers to access training because of connectivity or equipment
18. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your organizational capacity has grown, and areas where you require support?
- Having 2 paid staff has helped us improve our work significantly. We have been able you onboard more volunteers for our team, making it easier for us the support our communities. We require support with capacity-building training for our team members.
19. Partnerships over the funding period.
| A. We built strategic partnerships with other institutions or groups that will help us grow in the medium term (3 year time frame) | Strongly agree |
| B. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to bring in more contributors from underrepresented groups | Strongly agree |
| C. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to build out more content on underrepresented topics/groups | Strongly agree |
19a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
- Permanent staff outreach, Board members’ outreach, Volunteers from our communities
19b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
- Difficulties specific to our context that hindered partnerships, Local policies or other legal factors, Limited funding period
20. Please share your learning about strategies to build partnerships with other institutions and groups and any other learning about working with partners?
- In building partnerships, we look out for mission-aligned organisations that can help us grow as a user group, such as Ghana NLP and Sagani TV.
We partnered with educational institutions, organizations that contributed to the internet space, and organizations and groups that contributed to language preservation.
Our Wikimedia outreach campaigns have helped tell our story and also established partnerships with several organizations. We usually get the privilege to use radio and TV programs to communicate and invite more volunteers to our projects.
We crafted our work to be of importance to every stakeholder in education; parents, teachers, and officers in education. This has made it easier for us to have partnership requests accepted by all that are involved in education.
Part 5: Sense of belonging and collaboration edit
21. What would it mean for your organization to feel a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement?
- Dagbani Wikimedians User Group identifies strongly with the core mission of Wikimedia, which is to provide free and accessible knowledge for everyone.
Our organization actively participates in the collaborative processes of knowledge creation and dissemination. We see ourselves as an integral part of individuals and groups who contribute to the pool of free knowledge.
We have access to the numerous resources, tools, funds, and support provided by the Wikimedia Foundation and the broader community. Access to these resources helps us to amplify our impact and improve the quality of our contributions.
22. How has your (for individual grantees) or your group/organization’s (for organizational grantees) sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?
- Increased significantly
23. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.
- Due to the incredible support we receive from the Wikimedia Foundation and the community resource team; we have been able to create more projects to increase content on 5 language Wikipedia projects.
24. How has your group/organization’s sense of personal investment in the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?
- Increased significantly
25. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.
- Our community volunteer base has significantly increased from last year to date; this reflected in the contributions of the User Group at large.
We also created the Mentorship program, which led to an increase in skills development.
26. Are there other movements besides the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement that play a central role in your motivation to contribute to Wikimedia projects? (for example, Black Lives Matter, Feminist movement, Climate Justice, or other activism spaces) If so, please describe it below.
- Yes. Feminism movement and Climate Justice. We have participated in these initiatives to increase content related to these topics on the Dagbani Wikipedia as a way of contributing to them using Wikimedia projects.
Supporting Peer Learning and Collaboration edit
We are interested in better supporting peer learning and collaboration in the movement.
27. Have you shared these results with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?
- Yes
27a. Please describe how you have already shared them. Would you like to do more sharing, and if so how?
- We have regularly shared our project reports and metrics with the various language communities and have frequently shared our learning and metrics with the broader community via our mailing list.
28. How often do you currently share what you have learned with other Wikimedia Foundation grantees, and learn from them?
- We do this regularly (at least once a month)
29. How does your organization currently share mutual learning with other grantees?
- We share our learnings on Wikimedia Diff, WhatsApp groups, Telegram groups, and at our community events, during “Let’s Connect” meetings and other external Wikimedia community events.
We also do this through personal interactions with people who want to learn and the people from whom they want to learn.
Part 6: Financial reporting and compliance edit
30. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.
- 485702.4
31. Local currency type
- GHS
32. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Report funds received and spent, if template not used.
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tTydBsdchenO29mVwmTpKzYdHp9J69o4Y7PidjsDUr0/edit?usp=sharing
33. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.
- N/A
34. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?
34a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.
- N/A
34b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?
- N/A
34c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.
- N/A
35. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?
As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund 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.
36. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
- Yes
37. 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 Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
38. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.