Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia Morocco - Annual Grant 2023
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Applicant details
editWikimedia username(s):
- Reda benkhadra - Anass Sedrati – Rachidourkia – Farajiibrahim - Mounir NEDDI - رشيدة رقي - Ideophagous - Bonnjalal00 - Taloubant
Organization:
- Wikimedia MA 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?
- 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.
- Association du Réseau Marocain de Developpement de la Lecture
Additional information
editR. Where will this proposal be implemented?
- Morocco
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)
- N/A
M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?
- Yes
M1. Fiscal organization name.
- Association du Réseau Marocain de Developpement de la Lecture
Proposal
edit1. 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?
Our affiliate, founded in 2015, Wikimedia Morocco User Group, is working on developing, advocating and supporting Wikimedia projects, within Morocco and for any content, contributors, or languages related to it. Having started as a volunteer gathering, our vision is now to grow the organization so that we can manage annual grants and do it regularly. Earlier, through many of its members, the user group has successfully applied for several rapid grants, received a grant to organize WikiArabia 2019, and worked with an education project grant in 2021. We believe that the logical continuation of this growth path would be an annual grant, allowing the team to stabilize and gather all projects and activities under one grant and report for better efficiency and time and effort management. The overall vision of Wikimedia Morocco User Group is first to be able to sustain its activities and second to grow and diversify them. For this, an annual grant seems the adequate solution, as the team has gained enough experience to manage staff, funding, and different requirements related to such a grant. From our earlier experiences, we learned how to manage projects and funds better, how to work with volunteers both online and offline, and what the best activities to implement are, based on the context and interest. In the past, we organized several contests, including the popular “Wiki Loves” series, WikiGaps. And several editing contests, a conference, and partnered with a number of organizations. Our members have also shaped a deep understanding of the Wikimedia movement and communities by participating in local, regional and international conferences and actively writing and implementing the Wikimedia 2030 strategy. Through our earlier experiences, we have learned a lot. This helped us identify what to continue doing and what not. This proposal comes from deep and collective thinking from the group leadership, in consultation with many members, and considering all learnings and past experiences. In this regard, we would like to perform a range of activities in the year 2023, including: A continuation of the education program, an innovative photographical/documentation project, work on audio resources for local languages, editing contests, technical development, in-person event, as well as establishing routines in terms of communication and structures of governance. All these activities, as well as their impact and value, were very carefully thought of, before they were presented to the consideration of your committee. We have also incorporated them in a timeline (that will be shared in another question), and estimated the workload needed in terms of staff and volunteering for them. We hope that you will find the reading of this application useful and exciting, and look forward to discussing it with you!
2. What is the change that you are trying to bring about and why is this important?
The change that we would like to bring through this annual grant proposal is to have a stable activity for the user group, allowing it to grow, which will consequently help promote Wikimedia activities amongst Moroccan communities, and support implementing several activities, projects and events, that are important to strengthen the movement locally and give it the visibility it deserves. In particular, and being aligned with the 2030 strategy, we are committed to invest and improve skills and develop local leaders from the community to continue the work that had been ongoing for years. Current challenges:
- Community
- It is very difficult to attract and retain volunteers performing offline tasks in our region.
- User group members live in different areas, and it is not always easy to collaborate when only working virtually.
- Professionalization
- The user group suffers from a lack of manpower to conduct offline activities, as volunteering is considered a luxury in our region. This threatens the continuity of Wikimedia movement in Morocco, as the group relies on few active volunteers who can leave the movement at any moment due to other commitments in life.
++ It is not realistic nor sustainable to rely on volunteers to spend a lot of their free time organizing offline projects and programs, and performing administrative tasks that are conducted by staff in affiliates in other parts of the world. ++ Volunteers are more focused on online editing rather than on offline activities. We believe that they are right, as offline professional tasks should be done by professionals.
- Content
- Many topics and areas related to Morocco are lacking content in most Wikimedia projects. This regards in particular linguistic minorities of the country, and areas of the interior of the country (unfortunately called “Useless Morocco”). Even famous subjects of Morocco can sometimes lack important content, such as pictures of artists in CC BY, or photos of villages and places in many parts of the country.
- Main languages spoken in Morocco (Arabic, French) are also spoken in other countries, creating problems for many of our volunteers who have their articles deleted for “lack of notability” from admins not knowledgeable of our context.
- Image
- Wrong assumptions and misconceptions around Wikimedia projects, especially in the academic field, where professors and teachers criticize Wikipedia without even knowing how it works.
The main changes we would like to see:
- Community
- Increase community engagement by ensuring that a minimum number of activities will be conducted through the year, with the help of the staff working on them.
- Build a steady pool of volunteers ready to help in the future.
- Strengthen the links between community members, both existing and new ones.
- Professionalization
- Have a clear structure for the operational part of the group, with defined roles and responsibilities for each staff member and volunteer steering committee.
- Skills
- Develop skills for the user group members (especially those directly involved in this proposal), so that they can grow and eventually take more responsibilities, and enabling a rotation for the group leadership.
- Content
- Help bridge the mentioned content and representation gaps (linguistic minorities, pictures, notable local people, general content and sources, etc.)
- Develop further the local Wikipedia versions (in Darija and Tachelhit), both in terms of content quantity and quality, and also the technical grounds behind them.
- Image
- Improve the image of Wikimedia in Morocco to the maximum with the help of a number of projects and planned partnerships.
- Align activities to the 2030 strategy, and implement several of the recommendations locally
- Examples of this alignment include participating in creating WikiArabia and WikiFranca Hubs, and supporting local leaders from the user group.
3. Describe your main approaches or strategies to achieve these changes and why you think they will be effective.
To simplify our answer, we will assign numbers to each outcome we defined in the previous question to clarify the relationship between the outcomes and the strategies. The outcomes we cited earlier were the following: 1- Community, 2- Professionalization, 3- Skills, 4- Content, 5- Image ,and 6- Alignment to 2030 strategy. Our answer below describes the strategy linked with every change, as well as the explanation of why we think this is the most relevant strategy in our case.
1- Community. Our strategy is to increase community engagement by strengthening the ties between the existing community members and building a more robust pool of volunteers to join the movement and the team. This strategy is effective because volunteers are the core of our community, and ensuring their sustainability and well-being is a pillar for our work to continue locally and globally.
2- Professionalization. Our strategy is to have a professional group working with Wikimedia activities as their main task. This strategy is effective because volunteers cannot perform the same level of offline work, and we would like to prevent them from burning out.
3- Skills. Our strategy is to build skills within our members for them to grow and be able to take on even more responsibilities. This strategy is effective because it allows many people in the group to be skilled, both for offline and online tasks, which is important to share the knowledge even more, and to have a bigger pool of skilled people, so that the community is not relying nor dependent only on a few.
4- Content. Our strategy is to improve the content related to our local context in terms of languages and the actual content. This strategy is effective because nobody knows the local context better than the locals and also because this is an opportunity to bridge the content gap between different countries of the world, especially between the global north and south.
5- Image. Our strategy is to improve the image of Wikimedia projects in Morocco. This strategy is effective first because it will give more visibility to our projects, making them popular in the country Second, it will attract more volunteers to the community, which is related to our first strategy.
6- Alignment to 2030 strategy. Our strategy is to implement parts of several of the ten global recommendations in our local context. This strategy is effective because these recommendations are our main guidelines. Following them will ensure a good continuation of our activities, as they were written and agreed by highly skilled movement leaders and experts.
4. What are the activities you will be developing and delivering as part of these approaches or strategies?
To implement the strategies described in the previous question, we aim to develop several activities across 2023. For each activity, we will give the strategy/ies that it will implement directly. These activities are the following:
Education Project. As a continuation from the two last years, and having gained a valuable experience in “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom (RWC) project”, the user group would like to continue implementing the program, using the expertise of certified members already routinated with its different modules and training. Based on learnings from previous editions and having identified successful strategies to attract more teachers from various backgrounds and educate them so that they can, in turn, transmit this information to their students. In 2023, we would like to start having in-person training (which is a novelty compared to previous years, where the training was only online, due to covid restrictions). We will also engage new group members to participate in some tasks, so that experience can be shared between those who already worked in RWC, and those who would like to organize it as well. This program aligns directly with strategies 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6.
Technical improvements to local projects. We want to develop several automated bot tasks (35) to unburden editors from repetitive or tedious tasks with relatively predictable rules and decrease the effort needed to improve the level of coverage of topics and the quality of content. The outcome is a better and more pleasant experience for editors who develop local Wiki projects and more value for normal users/readers who read the site. The focus will be on Moroccan Darija and Tachelhit Wikipedias (both Moroccan languages), as well as Wikidata. This project will be beneficial in retaining existing editors, attracting new ones, and optimizing editing time so that volunteer editors can focus on more meaningful tasks. The bots will mainly be operating in (1) expanding coverage of local subjects, (2) maintenance and improvement, (3) Gamification, (4) Statistics, and (5) General Management. This activity is directly part of strategies 1, 3, 4 ,and 6.
Documentation project. Given the significant lack of Moroccan content in several areas, we propose to start a documentation project with dedicated staff, who will be working on gathering content for specific subjects, to be shared under a free license in Wikimedia projects (mainly Wikimedia commons, then to be disseminated in other projects). Among the activities of the project is to have at least one image per Moroccan commune (for the moment 1222 are missing pictures, meaning 79% of communes in the country). Since this is a pilot project, we will limit the scope to 2 regions (out of 12) before deciding on its future. This project will also document events such as sports and music concerts so that the team can have high-quality pictures of famous Moroccans, as many do not have pictures in Wikimedia projects. Moreover, and as part of gathering information, the same team will record audios/videos of languages of Morocco by having a predefined list of words needing translation in these languages, to be put on Commons and then in the Wiktionary. This project is part of strategies 2, 4, and 6.
Wiki-camp/Conference in Morocco. One of the most memorable experiences for Wikimedians is meeting other Wikimedians to share knowledge, experiences, and stronger ties both between members and also with the movement. In 2023, we would like to organize a wiki-camp for Moroccan Wikimedians to come together, learn and share. Not only is this crucial for managing internal knowledge through workshops and sharing advanced editing skills, but also an occasion to strengthen our partnerships and be more visible as a movement locally. In a country like ours, where things happen in-person, such a camp will be very beneficial to have even more advertisement and future partnerships. This 3-day event is part of strategies 1, 3, 5, and 6.
Communication. Communication is an important area for every organization. For us to grow and make our work more visible, we will have one member working mainly as a community manager, sharing the work done across several social media channels, and hosting a monthly podcast with distinguished guests. This is relevant for strategies 1, 2,4, and 5.
Writing/photography Contests and Edit-a-thons. In 2023, we plan to organize several multilingual edit-a-thons and editing contests. The main subject of the contests will be Morocco, and more specifically the areas where we identified content gaps. For example, Moroccan artists, biographies of women, as well as Moroccan writers and books.
P.S: Given the limitation of character number, this is a summarized version. A more detailed description of the tasks can be provided upon request.
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 have prepared an operational calendar showing all the activities of this annual grant in detail. You can see it at this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15ZdOaUYRf73wfxbA-yzPsb9J5_CmNtYmtjXaHldR_YY/edit#gid=572269324
7. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?
To work on the implementation of this yearly grant,the Wikimedia Morocco User Group has created a team with clearly identified roles and responsibilities, combining both staff and volunteers, to ensure a good distribution of the workload and decisions. The people working on the implementation will be:
- Main Coordinator and project manager - Staff (User:Rachidourkia). Rachid is an experienced user group member and has coordinated earlier projects. In this role, he will be working full time, overseeing the advancement of the activities concerning the timeline and the budget, and reporting to the steering group. Among the tasks performed in this position, the coordinator will follow up, have weekly 1:1 meetings with the project responsible, manage the communication plan, the documentation project, the wiki-camp, and help prepare the reports and annual grants.
- Education project coordinator - Staff (User:Farajiibrahim). Brahim is a certified trainer with extensive experience with the education program, in addition to his professional abilities as it is his work domain . In this capacity, Brahim will be the main person in charge of implementing the 2023 edition of Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom in Morocco, from the pre-project activities until the final report.
- Education project assistant - Staff (User:Bonnjalal00). Abdelilah is an active user group member already involved with the education project this year as a volunteer. He has gained experience working with the project, allowing him to step up for more responsibility during the next edition.
- Partnerships and finance responsible - Staff (User:Mounir Neddi). Mounir is an experienced group member and a certified trainer. He has strong ties with the educational sector and will in this part-time position work on fostering partnerships with educational stakeholders. He will also support the project manager in administrative tasks, finance and reporting.
- Communication expert- Staff (User: Taloubant). The user group is currently working on identifying a member who will work with communication. Among the tasks related to this role are: drafting the communication plan, continuous publishing on social media, hosting a podcast, organizing writing contests, and creating tutorials and documentation.
- Technical expert- Staff (User:Ideophagous). With over 28.000 edits, Mounir is one of the group’s most active editors and is very knowledgeable in local online projects. Moreover, he has programming capacities, allowing him to lead the technical project that we wish to implement.
- Steering group - Volunteers (User:Anass Sedrati - User:Reda benkhadra - User:رشيدة رقي - User:NajiaMokhtari). This group is experienced in steering projects from earlier years and will be in permanent contact with the main coordinator for follow-up and support. Anass and Reda are co-founders of the user-group, while professors Rachida and Najia are board members of the Reading Network in Morocco, our partner for this grant.
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, Socioeconomic Status
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.
We believe that the activities to be implemented in our proposal address the three content gap areas that we selected. In fact, by working on the technical project, we aim to primarily improve the content of the local projects, which are in local languages, and that are for the moment having an enormous gap in several subjects. This is complemented by the documentation project, where productions such as audio recordings will help bridge gaps in content in minority languages and lower socioeconomic parts of society, At the same time, the photography of different communes aims clearly to address the lack of content gap for certain geographical areas in the country. Content gaps were one of the main motivations for initiating this grant, so bridging them by creating more productions about language, socioeconomic status, and geography will be one of our priorities for this annual grant.
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.
Education, Advocacy, 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.
Gender Identity, Geographic , Linguistic / Language
11. What are your strategies for engaging participants, particularly those that currently are non-Wikimedia?
Taking into account learnings from previous years, we have understood how some activities can be particularly helpful to engage participants that are not part of or are new to the movement. For example, organizing contests is a straightforward and useful strategy to engage newcomers, who feel this aspect of “gamification” while at the same time learning about our movement and how to participate in its different projects. Another strategy we are developing in this grant application to engage “non-Wikimedians” is to be closer (physically) to the targeted audience. We are planning (for the first time) to hold in-person training for teachers, to organize several in-person edit-a-thons, and two meetings (one for the successful teachers after completing their training and a conference for the user group to keep the engagement). We have observed that physical connections and in-person meetings strengthen the ties between all, fostering sustainability, and giving stronger chances for a sustainable group of editors and organizers. A third strategy that we are using is to approach the participants from their point of interest, to keep them engaged and motivated from the start. For instance, (1) we will ask the teachers to develop a course scenario using Wikimedia projects, and apply it later, (2) we will organize editing contests with our partner (Reading Network in Morocco) about Moroccan books and writers, (3) we will engage photographers in the documentation project, and (4) we will approach people with technical profiles to work on the technical project. Finally, for the contribution gap, we are dedicating the documentation project to help address that issue by targeting specific areas and dialects of our country to be better documented (in pictures and audios) and also by having project members physically present there to drive some of theír planned annual activities in these regions. To retain participants, besides the social media (Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram) groups we usually use to update, we are encouraging the most active to join the user group in its different meetings and activities. We are also gathering contact information for all earlier participants to encourage them to join contests, edit-a-thons, or become organizers themselves. We used these strategies earlier, and many of our most active UG members were recruited and retained thanks to these strategies.
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?
We are strongly committed to creating a safe, supportive and equitable environment for all participants in our annual activities, both covered within this grant application and outside of it. First, we will make all participants in the different activities aware of the Wikimedia Universal Code of Conduct and the Friendly Space policy. These documents and their translations will be shared at the start of the different meetings and events, either in a written format (given to participants or hanging at the entrance door) or read in a loud voice. Second, given that a part of our annual grant is dedicated to hiring a general user group coordinator, one of the duties of this role will be to ensure that all the involved parties feel safe and comfortable in the different activities they are part of. This will be done through 1:1 weekly meetings with the different project coordinators, regular meetings with the volunteer steering group, and taking any necessary other meetings and measures if any participant requests. In particular, and thanks to our previous experiences, we will clearly explain the escalation path for all participants in all projects so that they know whom to contact in case of a problem. During in-person events, we will appoint safety officers, who will have among their responsibilities the duty of ensuring the wellbeing of everyone and enforcing the UCOC and Friendly space policy in case it is needed. The user group, in general, is also working on its governance by constantly implementing voting measures for the different decisions taken. We believe these efforts are also crucial so that all members feel included and supported in this environment, either as organizers, participants or partners.
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.
The Wikimedia Morocco User group developed this proposal, and all the active group members were involved in drafting it. The user group leadership has shared in different meetings its plan to apply for an annual grant so those interested could participate in its elaboration. The elaboration of the present proposal was made in a Google document to allow collaborative writing and comments. The team also had bi-weekly meetings for 4 months to finalize the application. Besides the user group, the team is also working with local linguistic communities (namely darija(ary) and tachelhit (shi) Wikipedias), who were also involved in drafting this submission. The communications and discussions related to this grant were shared at the following links:
- Wikimedia Morocco mailing List: https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-ma@lists.wikimedia.org/thread/X7A4HHUCY2GPSKWOHKRVMRQGBRBDRFBN/
- Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia Village Pump: https://w.wiki/5fT4
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.
For this annual grant, we will mainly collaborate with two major partners that will be crucial for our work.
1. The Reading Network in Morocco (RNM) We already have an established partnership with the reading network in Morocco, as we have collaborated since 2020. With the RNM, we have organized several training sessions and edit-a-thons (both online and offline), they were our fiscal sponsor for the 2022 education program grant, and several of their members are now also Wikimedians and user group members. After a successful first program, the RNM will continue being our fiscal sponsor for this annual grant, as we now have our routines and have started a smooth way of working. The RNM adds a significant value to our work, by: (1) providing us with a vast network of potential partners, as they are distributed all over Morocco, (2) Share their resources with us by facilitating contact with venues, such as the one where we organized our in-person event for teachers in July 2022 (https://w.wiki/5fT6), (3) encourage their members to participate in their activities and even become members, and (4) shares communications about us and the Wikimedia movement in general, which is an excellent advocacy effort in Morocco.
The RNM is motivated to work with us because: (1) we provide them with trainings related to Wikimedia projects, which is of high value for their members, (2) our working areas are close to each other since we advocate free knowledge, and the RNM encourages reading and sharing information, (3) we share opportunities with them to participate in different contests and conferences where they can present their work.
2. Regional Delegation of Education - El Hajeb Region Thanks to the education project deployed by our team in 2022, and after successful in-person training, the team has managed to secure a verbal agreement with the director of the regional education delegation of El Hajeb region in central Morocco. The background of this collaboration came from the fact that we invited 20 teachers from the region to intensive training as part of the “Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom”. Being very satisfied with the training, the regional director suggested that we partner on the following axis:
- The Wikimedia MA team will be able to use several public venues and facilities in the Hajeb region for in-person training, edit-a-thons, and education programs for the teachers of the region.
- The Wikimedia MA team will have access to the region's teachers to be able to conduct activities.
- The Wikimedia MA team will organize a contest for teachers who wrote the best course scenario (that includes a Wikimedia project) and a writing contest for the teacher who wrote the best Wikipedia article about the region.
Besides these two partners, we are not excluding the possibility of working with potential partners, especially in the area of education, where our user group has now started to gain valuable expertise.
15. How do you hope to sustain or expand the work carried out in this proposal after the grant?
Since this is not our first grant application, we are constantly learning from our previous experiences to improve our practices and ways of working. This applies to sustainability as well. We have learned from our earlier work that it is important to follow up with the different participants even after the end of the activities where they were active. For this, we will create a contact list combining the participants with the user group members and share different updates there. We have already started working with this model in 2022 and had good results as several participants in our different programs took part in online workshops and edit-a-thons and continued their engagement online. Moreover, as more volunteers are needed, we always suggest that more active participants join the user group and even become organizers themselves. This was a successful strategy in 2022, as many of our newest members joined, thanks to activities carried out during our latest fund.
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.
- There are several risks that can happen during the activities that we intend to carry out during this annual grant of 2023. Among these risks we are citing the following with their mitigation plan:
- Internet challenges: There are always risks related to the Internet not working while conducting our online activities. Last year, we provided a specific amount in our grant application for the Internet, but it was not used as everything went well for all participants. However, we are still aware that this can always be a challenge, so we will allocate a contingency budget in our grant application, with part of it to be used for similar issues.
- Governance issues/Leadership change: Given that the steering committee is composed of volunteers, who can leave the projects/group at any time, it is important to put routines before people, as people can change, but the processes must be there. For this, we have already established a way of working to mitigate any governance issues. There are indeed established escalation paths, clear roles and responsibilities, proper documentation, and regular meetings aimed to guide and follow up on the work performed. If a person needs to leave the project, we will be able to replace them and onboard them so that they can pursue the work without having any of the activities affected.
- Internal conflicts: Conflicts are a natural part of human interaction. In different projects, it is not unusual to have conflicts between members. Even in our group, we have witnessed earlier in past cases of conflicts and disagreements. Thanks to these experiences, we have learned how to manage these issues and have members who have now shaped valuable project management, and conflict resolution skills. In particular, we have learned how to organize mediation sessions and enforce decisions that can help the projects go forward and advance.
- Lack of engagement: Even with the world's best intentions, it can always be that we will not receive the engagement that we were expecting in terms of participation and other metrics. To mitigate this risk, we plan on preparing a solid communication plan from the beginning of the year, involving our partners, so that information is shared early during the year about all our activities. Moreover, we plan to host our conference earlier during the year, as in-person meetings usually boost the participants' motivation and encourage them to be more active in the future.
- Partnership halt: It is possible (although very low probability) that our partnership with the regional delegation does not start, as it is only a verbal agreement. However, we can mitigate that risk through various means. First, we can always extend the program to be online. Second, we still have contact with many teachers from the region who can encourage their colleagues, and third, we can also extend the partnership to other regions in Morocco.
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, Invest in Skills and Leadership Development, 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
edit19. What do you hope to learn from your work in this fund proposal?
We want to learn many things while working with this proposal's implemented activities.. In particular, we are thinking about these questions:
- How does multimedia content impact engagement in Wikimedia?
Many of the activities that we have in our annual grant aim to produce non-textual content, such as images, videos and audio. This includes the documentation project, where we would like to take pictures of undocumented regions and record audios of underrepresented dialects. The communication part of our grant also joins this area, by recording podcasts that will mainly target the local audience in Morocco. By measuring the views of these multimedia items, we can see the impact that they have. This joins the 8th recommendation, stressing the importance of identifying topics for impact.
- How does training teachers impact the Wikimedia projects?
Teachers are considered messengers, conveying important values and concepts to future generations. Through the education program we drive , we would like to understand how the information that we share with the teachers impacts Wikimedia in the long run. This can be measured first by seeing the teachers' impact on the projects (how many became editors, how many articles were created), but also on their students (how many used Wikimedia projects in the course plan, etc.).
- Does taking a proactive approach address the content gap?
To address the content gap, especially regarding underrepresented regions and topics, we are taking a proactive approach, where we decided to target these regions in different programs (education, documentation). By measuring the produced content (in terms of articles, pictures, audios, and wiktionary entries) and how much it was seen (pageviews) and comparing it with earlier numbers, we can conclude if this approach was helpful to give more representation to these regions.
- Do in-person events affect participation more than online?
After two years of struggling with covid and its different restrictions and challenges, the world seems to have gone back to normal. This annual grant reflects these changes by incorporating different in-person activities (edit-a-thons, teacher training, conference). We would like to measure if the in-person activities give a stronger sense of belonging and help retain volunteers more. For this, we will measure who from the in-person meetings continued to be active.
- What is the effect of a better and simpler interface on the content?
Our technical project aims to make life easier for editors in local Wikipedia versions in Morocco. For that, we would like to measure if, after implementing the tasks that the bots will work with, the content quality will improve as a consequence. This can be done by seeing the change in the percentage of quality articles, as well as the general growth in these versions.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Trained teachers | Both in-person and online.
Target: 300 (220 online / 80 in person) |
300 |
| Certified teachers | Target: 150 (100 online / 50 in-person) | 150 |
| Published podcasts | Average 1 per month | 12 |
| Bot tasks | Developed on Wikipedia in Darija and Tachelhit
Target: 35 (16 to improve and 19 to be added) |
35 |
| Bots | Developed on Wikipedia in Darija and Tachelhit | 2 |
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 | Concluded cooperation agreements or memoranda of understanding | 2 |
| 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 | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 80 professors in-person - 220 online professors - 20 conference participant - 50 Edits-a-thon participants - 100 contests’ participants | 470 |
| Number of editors | Contributors in Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons | 175 |
| Number of organizers | Wikimedia MA user group members organizing events and leading projects during 2023 | 10 |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 1000 automated articles in Wikipedia Darija
150 created articles in Wikipedia 300 edited articles in Wikipedia |
1450 |
| Wikimedia Commons | 700 pictures in Wikimedia Commons | 700 |
| Wikidata | 1000 items in Wikidata | 1000 |
| Incubator | 500 entries in Wikimedia Incubator (for Wiktionary) | 500 |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
21.1 If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation.
Actually, we have more metrics than the 5 mentioned in question 20 (because the limit). Please check out our metrics at the following link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xMhx_n9qqUjAU5MdNdzDVGCmYS708UKwhNcpXbqdMRU/edit
22. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?
To measure our selected metrics, we are planning to use the following tools:
- Wikimedia Stats tool: This tool will be useful for counting pageviews, both in terms of written articles and seen media (pictures, audio, video). It is a crucial tool as we would like to measure the impact of the content that will be produced.
- Surveys: Similar to previous years, we often use surveys to gather data and measure our different metrics. In particular, surveys are essential to measure the difference in perception between the start and end of a program and to collect information about areas where it is important to address the gaps, such as geography and gender.
- Outreach Dashboard: This is a handy tool for edit-a-thons and contests. We have already used it on several past occasions and will continue with it, as it has proven to be a great way to organize and follow up events, both in-person and online.
- Hashtags: As we would like to measure the impact of our different activities, it is essential to use proper tools ,even for social media publications. Besides the number of views and likes that are trivial to count, we will encourage all people working in our activities to use specific hashtags so that it will be easier to follow all these posts and measure both the numbers and the impact.
- Bots: Given that part of our projects will be technical. We will be using automated bots also to provide various statistics and measure metrics. This includes on-wiki statistics such as the number of created articles, types of edits, and general online statistics as well.
Financial Proposal
edit23. & 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.
- 716255 MAD
23.2 What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?
- 67500 USD
23.3 Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it.
23.4 Please include any additional observations or comments you would like to include about your budget.
- N/A
Please use this optional space to upload any documents that you feel are important for further understanding your proposal.
- Other public document(s):
Final Message
editBy 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
edit- Please add any feedback to the grant discussion page only. Any feedback added here will be removed.