Grants talk:Conference/Hindi Wikimedians/Hindi Wikipedia Conference 2018

Local Arrangements

Hello, I have been residing in New Delhi since 2014. I volunteer to take up the responsibility of ground arrangements. -- Abhinav619

I would like to endorse Abhinavji. He helped us during 2015 first Hindi Wiki Sammelan and he is experienced AbhiSuryawanshi (talk) 17:52, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

Eligibility Review Questions

Hi Raju, thank you for submitting an application for a conference grant on behalf of the Hindi Wikimedian community. We have a few questions about your plans that we need you to answer before the committee reviews your request:

1. The grant request says that the event will be in June. We will not make funding decisions in this round until the last week of June, and payments will not be made until mid-July. If you require WMF funding to host this event, you need to change the date to sometime during or after August 2017. If you are not planning to change the event date, we will not be able to consider funding this request.
2. We would prefer you to have a fiscal sponsor for a grant this size. Please consider asking the Center for Internet and Society if they are willing to be a fiscal sponsor for this grant. If not, the individual who will be responsible for the grant needs to research local regulations and taxes that might affect them if they receive a grant of this size from a funder in the USA.

You are welcome to send me questions about fiscal sponsorship by email, but we do need you to answer these questions here on the discussion page by Monday, June 5th. We look forward to working with you over the next few weeks as we review this request. Cheers, --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 22:18, 1 June 2017 (UTC)

@KHarold (WMF): As I discussed with the community , we are postponing this meet and would like to do small meetups in the month of july by rapid grant. Thanks--Raju Jangid (talk) 17:23, 4 June 2017 (UTC)

@राजू जांगिड़: Please post updates on this page somewhere so that anyone can see that the bigger plan resulted in other, smaller events. I am already watching this page and want to invite some people to any smaller Hindi-focused events in North India. Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:44, 5 June 2017 (UTC)

Conference Grants Review Committee Comments

Hello Raju and the team;

I have two comments on the goals and lessons learned from the previous conferences:

• I understood that you want to focus on policies and strategies as basic goad! but I don't think you defined targeted audience who are needed for discussions around such important goals.
• The lessons learned are mostly related to organization of the event. What about the lessons related to the goals you were targeting then and what people wanted to see or include in the next conference?
• Also, as India is the country of languages, don't you need invited participants from other languages of India; I assume your wikipedias share similar conditions and situations? That's a suggestion.

I support your conference and wish it will be successful. --Mervat Salman (talk) 19:47, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

Response

@Mervat Salman:

• I understood that you want to focus on policies and strategies as basic goad! but I don't think you defined targeted audience who are needed for discussions around such important goals.

The target audience are the Hindi Wikimedians. Audience are those who require discussion as an intervention to (a) improve their editing experience - resolve disputes and query pertaining to a range of subjects such as info-box, category tab etc (b) having a homogenous policy for outreach (c) Leadership to develop Hindi community (d) Developing Wikipedia’s sister project in Hindi.

Hence, when Hindi community members themselves discuss, it promotes decision-making and decentralised development ( Community members themselves rather than agency).

• The lessons learned are mostly related to organization of the event. What about the lessons related to the goals you were targeting then and what people wanted to see or include in the next conference?

Hindi community is still in the nascent stages of development and we don’t have any blueprint for next conference. On Goals, a list of activities have been suggested both on-wiki and off-wiki. For on-wiki activities, maybe in the conferences ahead more learning on tools would be required as they are developed and also training on existing tools based on community wish-lists. For Off-Wiki assessment of the outreach events along with detail planning such that they reflect the essential voice of the community members and remain ethically coherent.

• Also, as India is the country of languages, don't you need invited participants from other languages of India; I assume your wikipedias share similar conditions and situations? That's a suggestion.

Yes, this will happen. However, we intend to restrict them only to resource person who can share their best practices from their language communities and other experts. Other editors are also welcome but their scholarship may be restrictive considering the essential theme of the conference. --Raju Jangid (talk) 07:49, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

Grant committee input

The committee is in favor of funding this event, however before the conference they think it is important to gather more input from the community both through surveys and in discussions at the November conference. It may make sense to delay the event to spend more time gathering input and to plan a program that will help attendees discuss and propose one or two important policies or strategies to the broader community. The sections below contain more specific feedback, questions and suggestions for the event organizers.

Community engagement

• We would like to see input from more members of the community. Either keep this survey open to continue to gather input, or make a different survey that people can respond to more easily.
• How many people have been part of discussions about the goal/focus of the event, either through the survey or in other conversations? How much of the total Hindi community does this represent?

Goals

• We appreciate the well-defined specific goals: Strategies and policies. Highlighting these goals and the potential impact is good because if the Hindi Wikipedia community want to grow their group, they must have a well-defined strategy and simplify policies or processes that may prevent new-commers from staying.
• The proposal includes several sub-goals that related to the core goals of working on strategy and policy. Due to the length of this meeting, and the number of participants, we recommend that you do not try to cover all of the sub-goals, but instead focus on one or two of the sub-goals. Making progress on one or two goals during and after the conference will help you meet the other goals over time.
• It is very important that the organizers create an agenda/program for the event. They need another survey to ask for the community's input about the current policies and how they see the future of their wikipedia. This input should formulate the discussions and key points to focus on in the conference. You might ask participants at the upcoming event to complete the survey asking about policies, and ask each participant to send the survey out to people they work with online.

Event follow-up

• Recommendations and outcomes on policies should be documented during the event and shared with the community. Since it should be related to a specific goal, suggested enhancements to policies should be simply discussed in the village pump and them reflected on the policies as the community sees.
• For the strategy, implementation of the new/updated strategy can be achieved immediately, but needs a lot of discussions with the entire community after the conference and may extend to the next conference. You could encourage/require participants to help get the community involved in reviewing and commenting on the proposed policies and strategies after the conference.

Response

@KHarold (WMF):

Community Engagement

1)

We met 17 Wikipedians face-to-face last weekend at Jaipur event and it gave us broader idea of expectations.

2)

Overall 30 people have been part of engagement and gave us feedback. This represents experienced Wikipedian community and larger geographical region of North India

Goals

We agree with you and we are narrowing down to two goals - Offline activities : We will brainstorm on offline activities and outreach events. Online activities : We are also planning few online competitions to improve Hindi Wikipedia. We will discuss this in detail during conference. We have created an agenda and program , you can view it here : https://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/विकिपीडिया:सम्मेलन/दिल्ली_हिन्दी_विकिसम्मेलन_२०१७/कार्यक्रम Please let us know if we are supposed to submit an english version for the same.

Event Dates

We have selected the dates by choosing long weekend. We conducted mini survey before finalizing the dates. Normally people have holidays during that time. Makar Sankranti marks the first day of sun's transit into the Makara (Capricorn), marking the end of the month with the winter solstice and the start of longer days.

February-March is exam time as per academic calendar and April-May is tax filing time plus financial closure which makes it difficult for many to get holidays. That’s why we chose Mid-January dates. Kindly let us know if you have any other suggestions. --Raju Jangid (talk) 02:37, 19 November 2017 (UTC)