Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Reviving Wikimedians of Cameroon User Group Initiating Programs

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Applicant details

Wikimedia username(s):

Eugene233

User:Bile rene User:Lexy Tchuileu

Organization:

Association Wikimedians of Cameroon User Group

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?

Yes

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

Goethe Institute Kamerun

M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?

No

M1. Fiscal organization name.

N/A

Additional information

R. Where will this proposal be implemented?

Cameroon

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)

Website: wikimedia.cm

Twitter: Wikimedians of Cameroon User Group - @WikimediaCM

M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?

No

M1. Fiscal organization name.

N/A

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?

After existing for close to five years, the Wikimedians of Cameroon User group has faced quite a number of challenges which ranges from the acceptance of the Open Culture at the local level while executing its activities to the actually addition of content into the Wikimedia projects as part of its contribution to the sum of all knowledge. To list a few of the major challenges which are in conception to be handled are:

Newcomer recruitment and retention/Increasing participation Looking at the Wikimedians of Cameroon user group page on Meta, one could see that we have over 50 members which are listed there. This is not the actual number on field. so, we will like to clearly define who actually is a member of the User Group and design activities which will keep them active while they are still members.

Since our community is distributed in 4 different towns, we are also looking at different ways in which we can recruit members from these different towns in order to grow our community. There have also been requests to create various sub-groups in other regions.

Improving in various ways in which content is added to Wikimedia projects while including other local organisations Keeping in mind that the only way to keep a community active is by introducing new and better ways to contribute, we have decided to design projects which will be replicated throughout the nation where our community is represented instead of engaging in sporadic activities.

These projects are projects which have been run for over one or two years and have been thought to be expanded based on our evaluation and have been welcomed by our contributors and the local community. Exposing the educational sector to the use of free tools in education In the Cameroonian context, there’s quite a lot of challenges with implementing the open knowledge tools to facilitate the learning process in educational institutions.

This poses a big problem as most of our editors who are student still find it hard to contribute knowledge on a platform which has been previously described to them as “fake”. We consider this as a great barrier which we need to overcome as a community and as a movement because we believe this is a general problem in Central Africa if not the entire Sub Region. Better communication of Wikimedia movement’s mission, vision, and projects to the local community and also the work which is currently done by the Wikimedians of Cameroon User group to contribute to the sum of all knowledge.

One of the aspects which we have not gotten hold of in the past years has been our communication both with the local and international community. After looking at our projects and the work done within the past years and talking with just few people in the local and international communities, we received a lot of encouragement and many advised that we share the work with other communities and also learn to communicate in a proper way the work we do so as not to only get other communities interested but also to showcase the good work we do. Developing/Standardizing our community to be able to integrate fully well into the local community activities. One of the main issues we have faced as a diverse community is defining our community bureau to have effective coordination in our activities. This has been because community members have been involved a lot into private projects (which is generally not a bad idea) and this made it difficult to track our activities.

With the coming of the interim bureau, there have been a lot of changes as the user group now has a staff structure which ensures that activities are defined and coordinated. Now the term of office of this bureau has come and their proposed plan needs to be executed as from the elective general assembly from this year. We deeply think that maintaining this bureau is a challenge, the reason why our proposal holds an item with this aspect.

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

Since our work across the Cameroonian region and African continent at large is to promote the contribution of content to Wikimedia projects, such as Wikipedia, our main objective by July 2023 is to give the chance to more than 150 Cameroonians to discover Wikimedia, adhere to its vision, embrace its projects, train them on the different ways in which they can contribution to the mission and accompany them in their journey while they contribute to the sum of all knowledge. This would be done by activating more than 7 new communities in programs and 5 major partnerships to aid in our course.

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

The main approach we make use of here is to define a program for each concern we have to handle. The programs are:

Increasing Participation

Our increasing participation program aims basically at exploring and creating resources (both offline and online) which will recruit new editors, provide help to both new and existing members as they contribute to Wikimedia projects.

Content Creation

In the content creation program, we aim at creating content and keeping editors engaged through edit-a-thons which are project based. We have two projects (African German Phrase book and Wikikwatt) which constitute our basis for providing a means of contributing during edit-a-thons for this period. In this light, the content creation program is meant to engage and retain users who work on both projects.

Improving Our Communication

Our communication with both the local and international community has been very poor. This could be the primary reason why the work we do has had a smaller impact than we expected in the past. We intend to change our strategy by improving the ways in which we communicate our user group activities, projects and partners.

Community Development

The community development programme consist principally of bureau and community member-focused activities to promote the growth of the user group

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

Below are the following programs with their activities listen out.

Increasing Participation

Creation of a Wikipedian Guide to make known the Wikimedia movement to newcomers and existing members who have not been exposed yet to the movement in few words and pictures.

Launching monthly masterclasses on interesting topics which will be obtained upon request from the community members and sharing with the Sub Saharan Africa community.

Organizing online monthly community sharing meetups where members share experiences on new ways of contributing and their learning experiences.

Content Creation

- Project: African German Phrasebook

Organise offline and online edit-a-thons across the country for content creation on languages with communities activated in the first phase of the project.

Activating Language communities and creating partnerships with institutions of the four cultural airs of Cameroon who support local languages.

Support languages to become participating languages in Wikimedia projects(Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wiktionary)

Developing/exploring tools which facilitate the entry of language content into Wikimedia projects.

Develop software which makes available for learning the content which have been added to Wikimedia projects.

Incubating community languages into Wikipedia

Developing educational resource materials for taught languages

- Wikikwatt project

Engaging on a series of photowalks to get more than 1000 photos of the cities in the major sub-regions where the user group is represented.

Engaging in taking photos at 10 festivals in our country and uploading them to Wikimedia Commons.
Producing content on these 10 festivals on Wikipedia making use of the images captured during the festivals.
Organising upload sessions to upload the above images and add structured data to the images as well.
Organise edit-a-thons across the country for content creation (Wikipedia and Wikidata) on the neighbourhoods in the respective cities making use of the photos in the articles about these neighbourhoods.

We shall also be carrying out the Wikipedia Pages wanting photos and the Wiki Loves earth campaigns as part of our content creation program.

Improving Our Communication

Adding Television to our communication plan.
Including Radio communication to the communication plan
Adding press to our communication means
Designing gadgets to communicate

Community Development

Annual General Meeting (online and offline)
Membership management

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.

We are currently developing the entire proposal timeline at the moment.

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

- Project Coordinator (Full time)

Communicate with Wikimedia Foundation
Overseas implementation of project and Programs
Plan and organise weekly meetings/working sessions and execute global community perspective findings.
Writing all reports applicable to affiliate project and programmes requirements
Representing the group where representation for community leadership is required.
Heading continuous learning and evaluation
Interacting with other communities to expose programs and projects
Communicate constantly with the Wikimedia Movement to find potential experienced Wikimedians for masterclasses.
Organize monthly masterclasses and training sessions.
Establishing a governance system in respect of WMF protocols

Community Manager (Part time)
Collaborating deeply with the Project Coordinator to execute the project
Recruiting and on-boarding volunteers
Working with regional Leads to deliver programs
Assisting new recruits to use online resources
Planing stories to be written on websites and partners blog posts
Initiating useful partnerships
Training community organisers/facilitators on different programs.
Supervising the aspect of social media strategy that has to do with projecting the community.
Administering grant funds to relevant recipients
Coordinating the work of volunteers and partners
Training on governance system

Sub-Regional Leads(4) (Part time)
Collaborating deeply with the Community Manager to execute programs at the all sub-regional level.
Organising events related to each program in the sub-regional regions.
Training and accompanying of sub-regional community members
Ensuring the execution of UCoC and Friendly space Policy.
Track project metrics at a lower level

Communications Lead (Part time)

Collaborating deeply with the Community Manager to execute communication plan
Creating and proposing a communication plan
Overseeing the execution of the communication plan for each program.
Managing communication on social media
Managing press relationships (paper, radio, TV, blogs…)
Creating visuals for all programs and projects

Inter community Relations (Experienced volunteer: Possibly WMF Staff)

Working closely with Project Coordinator to establish partnerships between community and incoming interested partners at a global level.
Provide insights on which action to take given global community requirements.
Creating a bridge between Cameroon User group and other interested communities.
Attend sub-regional organizers training sessions to provide experience on projects and events.

Finance Consultant (Intern Volunteer:Paid) (Part time)
Manage project finances
Track and assemble invoices for reporting
Collaborate with Project coordinator to come out with project report
Provide financial assistance to the Community Manager on funds distribution.

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.

Geography, Language, 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.

In this project, we have three different projects and each project is unique to address one of the above gaps.

The first program (Wikikwatt) address the geographical aspect by solving the aspect of lack of information about neigbourhoods on WIkipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

The second program called the African German Phrasebook seeks to provide knowledge in the variety of languages which are spoken in Cameroon which were did not exist nor were used in Wikimedia projects.

our increasing participation program comes to solve the issue of contribution of content in our four distributed sub-regions where our community members are located. This program also permits us to increase our community presence in other cities which are already in conception.

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.

Advocacy, 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, Linguistic / Language

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

Currently, our community is distributed in five different regions of the country and we seek to recruit new members from these regions and even other regions using different channels of our communication which have been placed at our disposal in the said program.

We also take into consideration of bringing to responsibility older members and giving them major roles in the community especially those who show a regular interest in community advancement. This will go a long way to help other experienced members to hold other important responsibilities.

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?

In all our sessions and collaborations, we make sure we remind our members of all the pillars of the UCOC and friendly space policy. This year during our general assembly, we plan a organise session about the policy where we intend to invite a staff from the Foundation to give us a talk on these policies.

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 are in constant collaborations with Wikimedia Ghana User Group and also the Wikimedia Ivory Coast User group. These are experienced communities whose members will accompany us through the programs they have been running in the past which are similar to ours.

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 closely with Pegniyi Consulting and the Goethe Institut Kamerun. These are very experienced organisations in community management and project development with a good track record of building and sustaining communities and projects. These partners will provide resources such as physical space and some of the equipment which we will use in our projects. They will also use their expertise in community management and partnership establishment to help us to set up more partners. Being influential communities, their communication will go a long way to increase our visibility in the local and international communities. With the strengthening of these partnerships, the work of these organisations would be made more visible especially on Wikimedia sites.

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

Firstly, the projects we are conceiving are a potential target for other African communities (especially the Wikikwatt and African German Phrasebook projects). This year we intend to expand these projects to other regions where our sub-regions will be represented.

After this year, we intend to involve many other Affiliates in Africa and accompanying them so as to extend the implement these projects in their local regions.

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.

The first risk we anticipate is running our activities in one of the cities which has been hit by political crisis and another which is partly under terrorist attack. However, in the places where our activities are organised, we can find some safe towns to organise meet-ups as per request from our sub-regional leads.

There's also the risk of political disfavour in accepting executing our projects concerning photography even within the political capital region which is not hit by any crisis but has restriction of photography in some areas.

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.

Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement, Provide for Safety and Inclusion, Coordinate Across Stakeholders, Invest in Skills and Leadership Development, Innovate in Free Knowledge, Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt

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?

Amongst the many things we hope to learn from our programs, we hope to answer some of these major questions.

What are the best places to look for community members?
What are some of the factors that make community member retention effective?
What content is relevant at first glance when referring to culture which appears interesting to the local government at first glance?
What are some of the challenges encountered in setting up sub-communities and what can be done to solve these issues?
What kind of organisations are quick to target for partnerships and how to keep partnerships alive.
What are the proper ways to communicate the work and what media are to be targeted the most

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
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A
'		10
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	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	Number of participants involved in all programs activities as language contributors, photographers, and editors from sub-regions This metric can be shown in detail below: Language participants: 25 (5 per group for 5 groups) Community group members from sub-regions: 100 (25 per group for 4 regions) Number of photographers: 20 (5 per region)	145
Number of editors	The number of editors in all program activities. Every participant in our community ought to be an editor.	130
Number of organizers	Added to the 4 sub-communities is a lead for each language community (sums up to 5) and photographers community (1)	10

**Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project**
Wikimedia Project	Description	Target
Wikipedia	New articles on the neighbourhoods in Cameroon	1000
Wikimedia Commons	Images and audio file pronunciations for words (Could be more if batch uploads could come from potential partners)	6000
Wiktionary	Words added with connection to local languages	3000
Wikidata	Items created consisting of words in local languages (Could be more if batch uploads could come from potential partners)	5000
N/A	Mediawiki words while translating interface into local languages	5000

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

N/A

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

Since most of our work affects Wikimedia projects directly, we intend to create a campaign on the outreach dashboard and add events with participants under this campaign. With this we can be able to see statistics grow as we execute our programs and evaluate progress.

We will also, will make use of the Wikimedia hashtag tool to count the number of articles created on Wikipedia.

For other campaigns on images and adding structured data, we will make use of the ISA tool.

All offline encounters will be properly documented and/or recorded and shared online as well.

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.

40384663 XAF

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

69151.82 USD

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

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SA2eD077HS8-6g4xJmpEPsXy51Cm0GGVKmIXh9GMqT0/edit#gid=2099383086

Budget.xlsx

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

This budget is tentative and some items may be adjusted or are missing. We are open to advise

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

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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