Grants talk:PEG/UG TH/WLM 2014

Evaluation by the GAC

GAC members who support this grant request

1. Fits the scope, perfect project for kick off of the "serious to-be-chapter's business", amount is not any critical, suggesting its rounding up to $1000.
   — Danny B. 07:33, 10 July 2014 (UTC)
2. Yes. Please see my comments below, too. I don't, by the way, see this as a "to be chapter's business". Tony (talk) 07:11, 13 July 2014 (UTC)
3. Happy to support this, prior experience minimizes the risks and it seems well thought out. --Shipmaster (talk) 06:29, 14 July 2014 (UTC)
4. Be sure you will have right budget amount for realization of this. It is better to have some funds in reserves and you can return it if you will have saving. --MikyM (talk) 10:34, 14 July 2014 (UTC)
5. See my esteemed colleagues' comments above. I see no other addition, and I approve - thank you for submitting! NLIGuy (talk) 14:15, 14 July 2014 (UTC)
6. --Ilario (talk) 09:00, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

GAC comments

Completion date

Just to ensure, as it is obvious copypaste mistake: assuming the completition date is April 1st, 2015, right?
— Danny B. 07:29, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes, at the time of writing, I intended for the 1st of April 2015. Sorry for that. --Taweethaも (talk) 14:00, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Comment on the budget

I think THB 3,000 is very small for incidental cost in this case, citing that you intend to use this for a whole lot of things. You may want to consider increasing that unless you will just be strained on your budget during the actual implementation. -- Roel (talk) 23:01, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your consideration. I was a bit too conservative with the numbers when I put in this proposal. If the committee wish to round this up to USD1,000 or greater, we are happy to allocate it to this last category. --Taweethaも (talk) 10:10, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

We learned a lot in the Philippines when we first held WLM in 2012. We were too conservative with our budget, straining us during implementation. Rounding it off to USD 1,000 may still be insufficient, considering you plan to hold (a) exhibition of photos (b) trophies (c) transportation/travel. Unless you already have obtained sponsors who will cover the costs then it should be fine, but without actual sponsors as we speak, I urge you to evaluate the cost of a photo exhibition, trophies, etc. -- Roel (talk) 16:15, 11 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your insightful comments, Roel. (1) We have local partners but we do not expect financial contribution from them. We had discussed during WLM-TH 2013 that we can get a free venue for exhibition. However, the political situation (and also our budget) did not permit us to do so last year. (2) I have double the incidental budget to 6,000THB (<200USD). With this revision, it is still <20% of the total budget. I hope that it is still acceptable. --Taweethaも (talk) 03:46, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

Comments

• Good. I'd also not be unhappy with a larger budget if you can make a case for it. In the meantime, a 10% contingency addition would be quite ok with me, refundable to the WMF if not spent (we'd hope to have it returned, but going on what Roel says above, you may need it).
• It was a pain to divide the budget items by 35. Equivalents in euros or US$ would be so much easier for non-Thais to read.
• There's no mention of how the prizes will be judged. No panel? No guidelines/criteria?
• Any organisation required to get the upload pages properly completed and categorised (so important for utility on WMF sites, if not merely to get the photos used freely elsewhere). I'd be putting one of those 10 other prizes towards best documenter, and establishing a small team of people for the purpose
• You mention partners, but there's no information about them. Chosen yet? What kind of partner? What roles?
• Tip for next time: include a few pics, like that prize-winning one, on the application page. Tony (talk) 07:17, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Not part of my review. Memo to grantmaking staff: again, the "Benefits" section appears to be a poor use of the applicant's and our time. Please consider making it explicitly optional, or shorter. And I've always found it hard to separate benefits from fit to strategy. "This project will help both Wikimedia Commons and the Wikimedians in Thailand User Group."—this is not useful. In fact, I'd rather have the benefits embedded in the narrative explanation of the goals, if they need to be explicated at all. The default, after reading the goals, is that there are benefits, in my view. Unless it's a very large budget, this could be rationalised. Tony (talk) 07:29, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your comments, Tony. I take most of them as a suggestion for future proposal. The rest of the questions are addressed below.

1. WLM competition has a general structure on upload tool and categorization. First of all, there is a list of monuments by region. Participants must specify monument IDs. There are a team of volunteers to help on this issue. The list for Thailand is by province and this is used for categorization. This is one of the eligibility criteria. So, almost all submissions are categorised within a few weeks after the deadline for submission (Sep 2014).
2. WLM competition also has a general structure on judging. We follow the general guideline of the competition and continue what we did last year. Basically, we want the best photo for encyclopedic purpose. There are three confirmed juries. One was the international jury for WLM 2013. The other two are from our partners. The scoring method will be discussed after we see submissions. Last year, there were two rounds and it took about two to three weeks to select the best 20. (This year we aim to get only the best ten.)
3. For partners, please refer to "Additional sources of revenue that may fund part of this project" section. The two partners from last year have confirmed their intention to continue the collaboration on the project. It's for PR and juries.
4. Please refers to the links in the proposal for more information. The rules, the prizes, the juries, the winning photos, etc from last year are there. I understand that we should make them more explicit or include them in the proposal next time. We are not implementing any drastic changes to the last year structure. We are only expanding the scale and trying to improve quality and professionalism of the work. We believe that WLM-TH may reach its peak this year or next year.

--Taweethaも (talk) 23:55, 16 July 2014 (UTC)

Approved

Thank you for this thorough and well-planned first grant request. We appreciate your engagement with the GAC on this request and we are excited to support activities in Thailand. This grant request is approved.

Comments on approval:

1. We encourage you to organize an editing event, ideally between the submission of the photos and an award ceremony. Holding an edit-a-thon (even if on a small scale) explicity focused on integrating new photos into articles greatly increases the impact of the competition.
2. Please be sure to provide participants with photo guidelines. For example a "Top 10 Photography Tips" on the home page of the WLM Thailand website. Here are some good photography resources we've pulled together: photo event program resources. We are most interested in the quality of the photos, not quantity, because high quality photos have the best chance of being used on wiki projects.

Best, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 20:30, 18 July 2014 (UTC)