Grants:Project/Rapid/pperdiga/WikiYouth: building open data together/Report

Report under review

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Please see the related sample proposal for contests.

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went? We have received positive feedback about the project since this was a central part of the IGF Youth Summit 2021, we were able to get a lot of attention to Wikidata and WMF projects among Internet Governance Youth, which was one of our main objectives. However, we still could not engage a good number of newcomers, especially in a continuous way, which was our second main objective. Youth Summit participants and ISOC Youth Ambassadors were overloaded with other tasks and chose the Wikicontest as a secondary thing to do. The most active participants were people that already had some previous wiki experience. One of them, who came from a Wikipedia background, later engaged heavily in the Internet Governance ecosystem, but our main focus was the other way around. There is still a necessity to find a formula to create and maintain a continuous engagement of Youth involved in IG with Wikimedia projects, and we do not believe that straight contests are the correct path anymore. The recording of the IGF Youth Summit 2021 is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X75SFhPSEUY Twitter with info and reports created from the Project: https://twitter.com/YouthSummit2021

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets. Please be sure to review and provide metrics required for Rapid Grants.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
40 participants	42 applications, but just 8 active	We reached a good number of people but could not engage most of them actually to edit. We believe that there is a learning barrier, and just one or two explanatory webinars are not enough to surpass it.
600 Wikidata pages edited	326 elements edited, 43 created, 4.5K total edits, 917 references added	There was a good amount of edits, but a small number of active editors resulted in fewer than expected

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

• What worked well?

The contest attracted much attention and good feedback among Internet Governance actors, including people not from Youth groups.

• What did not work so well?

We had much fewer active participants than expected, and most edits concentrated on users who already had some previous experience.

• What would you do differently next time?

We are not trying to develop contests to engage newcomers anymore. After two tries with different approaches, we concluded that prizes are not a suitable or sufficient stimulus to engage new members continuously. Maybe courses or long-term projects with a few chosen people are more effective.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on. We got EUR 430,00 to expenses. The money was spent entirely on prizes: EUR 100,00 first-place; EUR 70,00 - second place; EUR 40,00 - third place; [fourth place did not claim his prize]; EUR 10,00 - fifth to eight place (which means EUR 40,00 spent in this category).

Remaining funds

Remaining funds from this grant have been returned to WMF in the amount of 180 EUR.

Do you have any remaining grant funds? Yes. We still have EUR 180,00 left, since some participants did not qualify to receive their prizes and the 4th place never answered to us to claim his prize.

I believe it is better to return the funds. We will propose another project in the future, but the next one would be strictly focused on continuous engagement, and maybe no funding will be necessary.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project? I would like to thank once again all the WMF members that helped us with this project. We got a great amount of help from Nadee, Mehrdad, Anusha, Jan Ainali, Alex Stinson and Giovanna Fontanelle (sorry if I forgot anyone). It is always great to work with people committed to a good cause and who share their time and experience helping others trying to promote the same goals.