Grants talk:Conference/Wikimedia MA User Group/WikiArabia 2019 Conference/Report

WMF Feedback

Hi Anass Sedrati and Reda benkhadra,

Thank you for submitting this grant report.

It is clear that WikiArabia 2019 was a successful and thought out event. I especially admire your devotion, time and energy you put in this considering the small organizing team. I hope you too see it as a success and I hope the hard work will not hold you down from continuing being valuable members of the Wikimedia movement.

I reviewed your report carefully and am happy to let you know that it has been approved. I did however leave a few comments for your consideration.

Budget and planning - I think you will agree that there were quite some gaps between the budget planning and execution. You have received 2 increases throughout the year + an additional sponsorship from Google, so I would expect the budget to be enough at least for what you initially planned. If it wasn't, that is usually an indication that the budget was not well planned. This is something to consider for the next activity/event budget you will hopefully plan.

• 48,000 MAD for Videos and Photos - was not mentioned on the proposal. That is quite a large amount and we normally wouldn’t approve such an amount if the impact and usage is not clear.
• Same for the prints - 55,000 MAD for prints (not including the design) is a lot. The proposal suggested 6,000 for all materials. What has changed and why was there such a significant difference?
• The 10K USD sponsorship from Google was supposed to be allocated towards scholarships. But I see that there were 35 flight scholarships as opposed to the 40 that were initially suggested. Can you please clarify how the sponsorship funds were allocated? How many local and international scholarships were awarded?
• You planned on using 10,000 MAD for a social event, but eventually ended up with allocating 40,000 MAD. What was the reason for such an overspent?
• In the future, the report budget should align with the same budget items that were mentioned on the proposed budget so it can be compared.

Program design

• Good focus on local content and languages. This is a great demonstration and use of the regional platform aspect. I’m happy you choose this focus (and also to have most sessions in Arabic so the conference could be more inclusive to your community) even though it is an international event. Good balance of regional focus interest as well.
• It seems like you demonstrated very good practices for knowledge sharing, with many of the Arabic communities. Focusing on many projects and perspectives, with different methods of sharing and presenting.
• There were good 'breathing spaces' in term of the location (rooms and facilities) and also in term of the schedule. But as you mentioned, in the future, participants should be more encouraged to attend the sessions and to have better balance between the time they spend socializing outside the session rooms.
• Organizing team capacity - this is maybe the most important issue for me. As much as we want to see and support as many community events as possible, which undoubtedly are crucial and impactful, the motivation; wellbeing and capacity of the volunteers is even more important. Organizing such a big regional conference with only 2 volunteers + production representative, is almost impossible. I’m thankful you managed to do it and still remain active long after the conference, but we really want to be mindful of volunteers burnout and in the future, we ask you to do the same and to be more aware and careful with how much capacity you really have, and how realistic it is to organize such activities with low capacity.

I also want to use this opportunity to point out how responsive, collaborating and flexible you have been throughout the time, and to thank you for it.

Thank you for the work you have done and we appreciate the outcomes from the event, and what you learned with WMF and the community. We highly appreciate your effort and were very happy for this opportunity to support this community gathering.

We sincerely hope to see more proposals from the community in the future and warmly welcome any updates you would like to provide us about this event. Best, CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 14:34, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

WikiArabia 2019 Organization Team Clarifications

Dear CAlmog (WMF),

First of all, we would like to thank you very much for your return, encouragement, and constructive feedback. In fact, it was a very challenging exercise. The organization of such a big event with only three people was a difficult task, but we are very happy that we made it work. This is mainly due to the support and guidance we received from the WMF, and from you in particular.

This said, there were many learnings in the way, and if such an event is to be repeated, we will probably have a different approach regarding a number of matters.

Coming to your well-thought questions and feedback, we would like to provide the following answers to clarify the context related to the different points mentioned:

Budget and planning - We do in fact agree that there were a number of gaps between the planning and the actual costs. Thankfully, with the 2 increases and the Google sponsorship, most of them were bridged, and the final budget was close to the planned one. In my opinion, most of these gap came from our inexperience in event management at that time, and most specifically in areas related to the practicalities, such as the price of the social event, prints and videos. These items were either not planned or performed by professionals who required a different price that what was planned, in particular:

• Videos and Photos - It is true that it was not mentioned in the first proposal, but between that first proposal and the actual event, we had a budget increase as well as the Google sponsorship. We discussed this question few weeks before the start of the event as many participants were not given visa (all of participants from Iraq, and many from other countries, at least 10), which left them not being able to attend the event. As it is important to provide knowledge from the conference for them also (as well as for community in general), we had this work done with a professional company that took also editing in charge. Results from this work are still being used as videos of WikiArabia 2019 sessions are documented on YouTube, as well as several interviews with participants. Moreover, 3 teasers and video summaries were made, tp document the event and can be also used at any moment by anyone from the movement. The videos are also available on commons, as I have uploaded all of them to this category. Many of them are actually used in Wikipedia articles related to the discussed thematic.
• Prints - Quality of the prints was very high, and many participants enjoyed the booklet and its design. The fact that the prepared 110 of them was because we had journalists participating during the first day, which resulted in highlighting the event in different media (in fact the print section could be better called "print and marketing"). If we split the amount of 55.000 MAD on 110, it would give us 500 MAD/participant, or roughly 50 USD, for material including rollups, and high quality badges, booklets, notebooks and bags. My personal interpretation is that we made a wrong estimation about the initial price, that was too low.
• Google Sponsorship - In the beginning, the aim with the Google scholarship was to finance a number of additional trips as well as language interpretation. Unfortunately, language interpretation was expensive, and we had to let it go. The full scholarship was therefore allocated to travels. Not all travels were flights (local participants came by train, bus or own cars, and even 2 international participants came by car). The refund part reflects this dynamic, as refunds were really of a high cost (over 50.000 MAD, Vs the originally planned 5000 MAD). Most of the refunds if not all were about visa fees and flight/train expenses. As you asked about how many people were awarded scholarships (fully covered travel expenses), the answer is: 35 international participants and 27 local Moroccan participants, many of which not coming by plane. Hotel costs were covered for total 80 persons, (partial scholarships of other local participants). In addition, many of the planned participants were refunded visa fees (since they were sometimes expensive) even if unfortunately they did not receive a visa or were refused to leave their country (the case of a participant from Palestine).

Please note that the Google scholarship was also intended to help us invite more local participants, which did in fact happen. Also one participant changed her city of departure rather late during the process, and her flight was not refundable (according to the flight company - probably that the local agency omitted this while booking), which caused us an extra 700 USD to re-book the flight. We could have been "following the rules" and not have booked again for the participant, but we wanted them all to feel welcome, even if this costed a price as you notice.

Finally, please note that we planned initially (in the original application) that the event would be for 60 participants, while we had over 80 covered (either fully or partly), thanks to the increase and the Google scholarship.

• Social Event - The reason a social event was more expensive was in fact that the first price was underestimated. In the actual social event (called team building full pack), participants visited a local village and had local guides to know the area better. This participated in documenting the region a lot, especially through Wikimedia commons.
• Budget Alignment - We do totally agree and understand the need to align budget items between the plan and actuals in future occasions. The reason this was not possible during this specific events were 2 major points: (i) Organizing team capacity (as you rightly mentioned), as not items could not be followed simultaneously, and other areas needed to be prioritized during the conference, especially in relation with safety of all participants, and (ii) the corona pandemic that made many partners and companies either closed or not reachable, and prevented us from having the exact information about the same items we had in our initial plan.
• Interpretation - We would like to add that initially, we planned to have interpretation (and had it as an item in the Google Scholarship), but due to all the expenses explained above, we had unfortunately to discard that path, even if it would have been very beneficial for many participants, but the rates asked by the interpreters (~ 1000 USD/person/day) were too high to afford.

Program Design

• Organizing Team Capacity - From the very first, we were aware about the difficulty of the task given that only me, Reda and Yassine would be working with all the aspects. But on the other hand, if we decided not to start, this conference would probably not have happened, and the community would have missed a lot. In our region, volunteering is unfortunately a luxury, and retaining volunteers is very difficult. As members involved in Wikimedia 2030 strategy, we know and hope that this will be changing soon, by having maybe more resources (either human or financial) allocated to such regional events, where affiliates do not have working staff. Please note as we discussed the financial part that none of the organizers did allocate an amount for themselves (even if they would definitely deserve it - for organization efforts). The reason is that we wanted every single dollar to be put at the profit of the community and their needs, and that as you saw the budget was already burned by different expenses, so we would definitely not unbalance it even more.

We hope that these answers clarify the picture for you, and are happy to provide even more details if needed. Just let us know if it is the case :)

Thank you again for your kind support, patience, and professionalism during the whole process, and we hope that our paths will cross again in further collaborations. All the best, Anass Sedrati (talk) 16:22, 25 November 2020 (UTC) (on behalf of the organization team)