Grants talk:Conference/KCVelaga/Wikigraphists Bootcamp (2018 India)/Report

WMF comments

Hi KCVelaga and all the Wikigraphists Bootcamp team. Thank you so much for taking the time to write this very thorough report. I highly appreciate your effort. Especially being so informative and transparent, and sharing a lot of links to illustrations and documentation so we can get a better sense of the work that was done. I reviewed your report and have some comments and questions I would be happy to clarify.

1. I was glad to read about your partnership with CIS-A2K. We encourage this kind of partnerships, as well as In-Kind support and think it's a really good way to create sustainability.
2. What was the skills set you required in order to participate? Was there any technical needs like software's people needed experience with (or to have them set up on the computer)?
3. Online sessions is a very good idea and i'm really glad to hear that was productive. Especially the small tasks. That sounds like a great usage of resources and a way to get more engagement. It would be good to hear some Do's and Don'ts specifically for those so the rest of the community could learn from your positive experience. Also, could you please specify how many participants were on the online sessions?
4. You mentioned you spent a lot of time during the main workshop on revising and clarifying doubts. So why did that happen if you had the online sessions? What was the doubts about? technical issues?
5. I also share your thoughts regarding not splitting community efforts, by working with existing Graphics Labs on Commons. Thank you for keeping the wider Wikimedia community interests in mind.
6. Could you please share some highlights regarding the plan to involve the design students? What kind of work have you thought about?
7. Could you please share more information about the Design and Open Knowledge discussion?Do you have any interesting inputs to share?
8. Thank you for sharing the participants reports publicly. This is indeed very helpful.
9. the Panel discussion - who else was supposed to attend? Was it an open session? How did you published and promoted the session?

It seems like you are very aware of what didn't went well, and have a lot of learning inputs for future conferences. At the same time, it seems like you had a very productive conference, and we are very appreciative of that. It would be great to learn a bit more through this questions. Looking forward to hearing from you. Best, CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 10:52, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

@CAlmog (WMF): Hi Chen, many thanks for the review. Your questions are very much thought-provoking, I'm glad to read them. Actually, I am quite occupied this week (both on-Wiki and in real life), so I would like to request you for some time before I respond to your comments. I hope to provide detailed responses by the end of next week. KCVelaga (talk) 16:16, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi KCVelaga. Sure, take the time you need. CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 22:39, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank You, KCVelaga (talk) 00:03, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Here are my responses; I took the liberty of replacing the asterisks (*) with hashes (#) for your points so that both of us can easily refer to each other's points using point numbers while referring and responding. I hope that is okay :)

1. Yes, I agree. This partnership saved the costs for the venue, and which helped to increase the participants count.
2. There weren't any specific skills that were put as a prerequisite for participation. Though it is a basic requirement for the participants of any such workshop to be comfortable using a computer, that was not specifically mentioned we already had a criterion of having 1,500 global edits while filling the scholarship application. This helped to ensure that the participants have the required skills, and also have basic knowledge of Wikimedia. The technical need was for the participants to have the Inkscape software installed on their computers. Since it is a small software in terms of disk space (~60 MB) and is open source, we didn't face many difficulties in installing and using the software.
3. Recording the online sessions worked out very well. Though we did not have this thought initially, we did so to help those who could not make it to the online sessions due to several reasons, and also these training videos can be used by other Wikimedians later. From the organising team, we personally contacted all the participants after the second online sessions to check whether if they are following, and if they didn't attend—understanding the reasons and following up with them to watch the recordings. This helped to make sure that by the time the main workshop commenced all of us had a basic understanding of SVGs and using Inkscape. One important note to learn about what not to do is not to have online sessions during weekdays. These are few things I can think of now, but I will write a more detailed learning pattern in the coming month about this. I have updated the lists of participants of three online sessions here and updated the same in the report.
4. Since this was a complete training event, and that too it was a new skill for many of the participants. The major problem that we had to deal with was the learning capacities of the participants. Some participants learnt it quickly, while some took more time than others. Though we had online sessions, during the main workshop we felt the need to revise stuff and individually attend to participants if required. Also, the trainers felt that we had discussed enough for an initial workshop i.e. training on very advanced techniques might lead to information overload and there exists a risk of participants bailing out from proactive participation. We also wanted to give the participants a good amount of time to practice stuff, so that their basics are strong.
5. That was a discussion we had during the main workshop, and but now we are heading the other way. We are planning to form a graphics lab for Indic communities in order to deal with the language barrier. We have been working to set up that for about a month now, I'll update the same on the report in the "Next steps" section in May 2019.
6. We've conducted a Wiki workshop for the design school students in March 2019. Its report can be seen at CIS-A2K/Events/Wiki-workshop at AU Delhi (Feb 2019)/Report. I'll be updating about the same in the report as mentioned the previous point.
7. The summary of the discussion can be seen at Wikigraphists Bootcamp (2018 India)/Panel Discussion. Saumyaanaidu has recently written a blog post on this which has intresting insights. It can be read at https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/saumyaa-naidu-design-and-the-open-knowledge-movement.
8. 
9. We expected more students from the university to attend the discussion, with a thought that it will help us introduce the open knowledge movement and Wikimedia to the students there, which could help us in future for any potential outreach activity. Though some students (about 10) came, we were expecting more. Yes, it was an open session. We used social media and the participants' personal contact to promote it. We even had posters around the university campus. But by the time we had the promotional materials ready (posters for example), we were too close to the event dates. This left us having not enough time for promotions and attracting more participants.

@CAlmog (WMF): We've also conducted an excellent followup to this project with the support from CIS-A2K. It is a project in progress, and as I mentioned in point no.5, I'll be updating all our follow-up activities in the Next steps sections around mid-May 2019. Many thanks for your comments, they really helped me to retrospect on certain aspects of the project, which I completely missed. KCVelaga (talk) 07:28, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Grant report accepted

Dear KCVelaga,

Congratulations on completing your grant!

Your complete grant report has been reviewed and accepted, and documentation of expenses has been received. Thank you for your engagement with the reporting review process, and with your work throughout the grants process. We appreciate the outcomes from your project, and what you learned with WMF and the community.

We will ask that you use the remaining 30USD for future in mission-aligned activities.

We also warmly welcome any updates you would like to provide us about your completed project. We thank you for your work for the movement, and offer you our best wishes for your future work.

Thank you! CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 09:47, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

@CAlmog (WMF): Thanks for your review, and accepting the grant report. We conducted some excellent follow-up activities after this program, I'll post updates about them by the end of May 2019. KCVelaga (talk) 13:55, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Noting here that the remaining 30USD helped fund #1lib1ref session in Guntur -- Best, JTud (WMF), Grants Administrator (talk) 19:41, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Six months update

Hello @CAlmog (WMF): I would like to give some updates from the followup of this project.

• A few participants are actively fulfilling requests on the Graphics Lab of Wikimedia Commons (for example, User:Sushant savla).
• Materialising our plans to foster the partnership with Ambedkar University Delhi, we have conducted a three-day Wiki workshop for the students of School of Design, which hosted us during the Bootcamp in September last year. KCVelaga and Saumyaanaidu facilitated the workshop, and it was supported by CIS-A2K. The report can be seen at CIS-A2K/Events/Wiki-workshop at AU Delhi (Feb 2019)/Report. At the end of the workshop, we also did a short workshop on SVGs and Inkspace.
• A major follow-up campaign was organised in February/March 2019—the c:Commons:SVG Translation Campaign 2019 in India. It was a 38-day long campaign that was started on 21 Feb (International Mother Language Day) and continued until 31 March 2019. 194 users from 19 Indic languages participated in the campaign and translated more than 2,500 SVG files. Also, 11 onsite workshops/events on the basics of SVG and Inkscape were held across the country. Full report can be studied at c:Commons:SVG Translation Campaign 2019 in India/Report. Several participants from the bootcamp were language-organisers during this campaign and promoted the concept of vector graphics in their communities. It helped to reach out of the larger Indian community and create awareness about vector graphics and with basics of Inkscape.

Apart from these, as we are already in a conversation over email regarding the survey, I hope to complete it and publish a report about the survey by mid-July. KCVelaga (talk) 12:18, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

@CAlmog (WMF): KCVelaga (talk) 19:00, 6 November 2019 (UTC)

Final update

Hi @CAlmog (WMF): We have published the survey results of both, Wikigraphists Bootcamp and its follow-up, SVG Translation Campaign, Wikigraphists Bootcamp (2018 India)/Follow-up Survey (Aug 2019) and c:Commons:SVG Translation Campaign 2019 in India/Feedback survey (Aug 2019) respectively. Sorry for the delay and thank you. KCVelaga (talk) 18:59, 6 November 2019 (UTC)