Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Activating Botswana 23/24, WikiConnect:Building Bridges and Fostering Free Accessible Knowledge For All

Feedback from the Middle East and Africa Regional Funding Committee on your proposal

Hello , Candy and Sandra,

Thank you for submitting your application for this round of funding. We found that this proposal had an improvement compared to last year and especially on how it was well structured. We found the budget to be detailed and organized as well.

To support us in our next stage of reviewing , please see comments, questions and observations for your comments and response;

• Would you please let us know how the community was involved in the development of the proposal and will be involved in the implementation beyond just being participants? Will they be part of the organizers for instance?
• We are interested in learning more about the partnership with Francistown project - would you say more on the motivation , key agreements for partnership. We are for instance curious to know if they would provide you with the venue or cater for some of the costs indicated as part of the partnership?
• We noticed that with different activity based budgets costs such as t-shirts, have variations - are you able to negotiate for standard rates - this could be useful for the community in relationship management with key partners important for the work.
• We also noticed that many instances the participant number varied from the t-shirts number for instance and wondered about the distribution plan and especially for such a small community?
• Tied to this , and seeing that you are trying to grow a small community, we wondered about the competition / contest strategy ? Would you speak to this competition-based strategy ? What is the strategy in your incentive program
• We see significant changes on the costs related to personnel costs between last year and this proposal and would like to learn more about the rationale behind the shift. Would you speak to the level of engagement of  the of roles - are the full time or part time? And how does this compare with the current year?
• Would you speak to how the roles are commensurate with the scope of the project and size of community and associated costs . It is unclear why the projects needs four roles - the scope of the project can be supported by 2 roles - for instance what is the clear separation between the program coordinator and project facilitator and community facilitators? There is a lot of repetition in the work they would be doing - all while taking into consideration that the community has about 20 members [ please confirm]?
• The core essence of the Wikimedia Movement is volunteerism - a global movement of volunteers contributing to achieve the mission , how are you permeating and enabling this philosophy and attitude in your community?  And especially as an emerging and growing community?
• Would you speak to how the staff so far have been sharing in responsibility and accountability with the community? Would you speak to the role volunteers hold and how the current personnel were selected or appointed?
• We are pleased that you plan to organize activities at different institutions and collaborate with them. However, we are not sure why you mentioned in your proposal that you do not have any external partners. Could you please elaborate on that? Can you share examples of partners you plan to reach out to?
• The learning questions need to align with the metrics and the other way round. Please review the learning, evaluation and sharing section.

As always we recommend meeting with the regional program officer to support you in providing any clarity needed with the feedback shared here. The committee is also available to meet and join the call if that would be meaningful for you - just let the program officer know.

Thank you so much and we continue to appreciate your work and role in advancing the mission of the movement.

On behalf of the MEA Regional Committee and Staff , VThamaini (WMF) (talk) 06:56, 25 April 2023 (UTC)

@VThamaini (WMF)

• Would you please let us know how the community was involved in the development of the proposal and will be involved in the implementation beyond just being participants? Will they be part of the organizers for instance?
• Proposal was drafted from the feedback we got from the community on which projects we can carry on doing and how we can reach out to more people hence we introduced the school clubs activation project to enable us to build a strong foundation and relationships with various institutions. Some of the community volunteers will be involved in organizing these projects  as part of their training. We have previously engaged Ms Lito, Mothusi Sekhumba whom have been very instrumental to organizing some of our events.
• We are interested in learning more about the partnership with Francistown project - would you say more on the motivation , key agreements for partnership. We are for instance curious to know if they would provide you with the venue or cater for some of the costs indicated as part of the partnership?
• We currently have active editors in Francistown that was our motivation and efforts behind the running the Francistown project. We believe if we can go there we stand a chance of having more active editors. Therefore we currently have no partnership in Francistown but are open to new collaborations in that city. We strongly believe that if we can establish a stronger presence there, we will be able to significantly increase the number of active editors in Francistown, there is a possibility build partnership with local schools to at least support with venue.
• We noticed that with different activity based budgets costs such as t-shirts, have variations - are you able to negotiate for standard rates - this could be useful for the community in relationship management with key partners important for the work.
• Yes we are able to negotiate.We will find some who provide good quality T Shirts at a reasonable standard rate.
• We also noticed that many instances the participant number varied from the t-shirts number for instance and wondered about the distribution plan and especially for such a small community?
• From our past projects we have realized that there are projects that attract more people so the distribution was done looking at the traction a project draws in people (Please note that one project can have 2 or 3 physical meetups where the Tshirts can be distributed determining this by rewarding or motivating high contributors on those physical meetups).
• Tied to this , and seeing that you are trying to grow a small community, we wondered about the competition / contest strategy ? Would you speak to this competition-based strategy ? What is the strategy in your incentive program.
• All of our projects have incentives towards completion as we mostly award top three contributors as well as certificates for participants for each project. This is to motivate editors to stay active and retain participants. Alongside social media acknowledgment for the winners with a short blog of their journey.
• We see significant changes on the costs related to personnel costs between last year and this proposal and would like to learn more about the rationale behind the shift. Would you speak to the level of engagement of  the of roles - are the full time or part time? And how does this compare with the current year?
• These roles are part time and we have realized we were under capacity and worked at least 3/4 of the time to work towards meeting targets. We only had two roles that we allocated 12 months and one communication personnel role that was assigned for 5 months when we started our first APG. Therefore we realized mid term of the APG that we were under capacitated and needed more expertise to be afloat with our  social media presence and campaign awareness as well as tutorials/documentations.  We have also introduced a new school club project which would need dedicated key contact personnels to run the project in parallel as we  plan to run it in different institutions. We also wanted to regulate stipends looking at inflation issues. Currently we have a running project per month but with the introduction of the school club project we will be meeting the school clubs twice per month scheduling regular online training and office hour session to support the students alongside other ongoing community projects.
• Would you speak to how the roles are commensurate with the scope of the project and size of community and associated costs . It is unclear why the projects needs four roles - the scope of the project can be supported by 2 roles - for instance what is the clear separation between the program coordinator and project facilitator and community facilitators? There is a lot of repetition in the work they would be doing - all while taking into consideration that the community has about 20 members [ please confirm]?
• The 20 members are the active and retained participants from our dashboards we have had. Looking at our dashboard here as we commenced the General fund project we have 68 editors who have contributed to our various projects through the year: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Activating_Botswana_2022/Activating_Botswana As a community we are trying to broaden its scope into reaching out to more people as a way of taking wikipedia to people and recruiting more community members and editors. With the school club project in the picture we will need more personnel since the project will be running in parallel together with other institutions.   As we plan to run a series of school activation clubs and ask to improve on our community awareness and social media presences we foresee  that we would need  2 new community facilitators to have dedicated attention and optimized focus to build a strong relationship with the school we will partner with. As we have highlighted above the school clubs will run in parallel for each school. The community facilitators will be carrying out online trainings will also  be carried out, social media engagement, campaign awareness events, development of any graphic design such as poster and certificates for each school, support and identifying to highly active contributors who need support with internet bundles to progress easily with editing and their continuous editing.Furthermore we have really been challenged to create more how to guide,  tutorials and create documentations on how the community can easily edit having these two roles will help us create more resourceful materials as this was one of the big gaps we identified. The social media community facilitator will be responsible for ensuring that our community’s presence is felt in all social media platforms, this means updating the pages everyday and concentrating on teaching the social media community about wikipedia and its mandate. The community facilitators will be mandated with running the campaigns on the ground, ensuring that the clubs remain active after training. This means now we are going to have different whatsapp groups for different clubs and those groups will need someone to keep them engaged and someone to answer questions and assist where possible. The program coordinator strategizes in identifying key partners to lead on projects such as Francistown and parliamentary projects and support on financial accounting bookkeeping with the accountant. Monitor and support facilitate training ran by the community facilitators and ensure the targets are met. We noticed that some government stakeholders sometimes need weeks if not months to follow up to get their buy-in to collaborate or have their support to carry out a project. Especially looking at our Parliamentary and Francistown projects, establishing some collaboration on these projects and others  can  help lead to success. The project facilitator ensures that for each and every project there is venue, catering, and advertising. The project coordinator liaises with the participants on a daily basis as she is mostly the contact person. She ensures that the planning goes well till the day of the event, at some points she can also be forced to conduct individual training if need be.
• The core essence of the Wikimedia Movement is volunteerism - a global movement of volunteers contributing to achieve the mission , how are you permeating and enabling this philosophy and attitude in your community?  And especially as an emerging and growing community?
• As an emerging growing community our key motive for all the events we carry out is to clearly communicate and explain our mission, goals and vision as Wikimedia Community User Group Botswana and to instill the spirit of volunteerism among our community that is made up of volunteers, it is not easy because only a few happen to understand what volunteerism is. Hence we actively encourage the community to join us and be organizers and lead in peer to peer support in our training mostly having experienced editors assist newbies as they join our community. We also teach the community about Wikimedia’s UCoC to instill a healthy and respectful environment for all.
• Would you speak to how the staff so far have been sharing in responsibility and accountability with the community? Would you speak to the role volunteers hold and how the current personnel were selected or appointed?
• The current personnel are the co-leads of the project. This was our first annual grant whereby the current personnel wanted to activate Wikipedia in Botswana and with the virtue of being grantees  it was upon them to ensure that the program is implemented. By then the community was still very small trying to find its ground, we had to make it work with the limited resources that we had and with the people who understood what volunteerism is. We have been sharing the work equally, sharing tasks and making sure that everyone completes their given task. We always ensured that all of us appear in almost all of the trainings except with valid reasons for missing such. All our Reports and met targets are accessible on Meta and our Community page for transparency on the proceedings of the community. Volunteers hold a crucial area when it comes to advising as the have share feedback on the types of projects to carry out specifically mentioned on this proposal furthermore they support with organizing events and carrying our peer to peer trainings to newbies.
• We are pleased that you plan to organize activities at different institutions and collaborate with them. However, we are not sure why you mentioned in your proposal that you do not have any external partners. Could you please elaborate on that? Can you share examples of partners you plan to reach out to?
• We currently do not have any external partners, the school club project will be a new pilot project in different institutions. With this project we are aiming at increasing our community reach and ensuring that we retain editors in different institutions. With this project we believe we can reach out to different students who are training to be experts in different fields, we might as well get to recruit lecturers to be part of our community. We are trying something new, something that we believe can increase our contribution to Wikipedia in diverse knowledge gaps. We have institutions like Limkokwing University, Botho University, Baisago University, Boitekanelo Colledge, GIPS, GUC and many more and plan to reach out to some of them for collaboration. We have realised that some of our volunteers have completed their tertiary school from these institutions hence we would like create our school clubs in some of them and start to liaise with the school Alumnis to hopefully easily penetrate and work with the institutions.
• The learning questions need to align with the metrics and the other way round. Please review the learning, evaluation and sharing section.
• We have revised and made changes to the section.

Many thanks,

@Shoodho and@Kolobetsoo Shoodho (talk) 20:44, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

Wikimedia Community Fund Approved in the amount of 35,000 USD

Dear, Candy and the Wikimedians in Botswana,

Thank you for submitting your application seeking General Support Funds - Wikimedia Community Fund. The Middle East and Africa Regional Committee and Staff have reviewed your application and approved funding in the amount of $35,000 for the period of July 2023 - June 2024.

After a thorough review and discussion on your proposal and based off the information you shared with us as part of responding to feedback and questions, we make the following notes and recommendations;

We see an important priority for you as being to focus on community building, building the capacity of the team in terms of both technical and organizational building skills and building the skills of volunteers. We highly recommend that you work with Wikimedia South Africa to support building these capacities. While we are comfortable with the recommended roles, we recommend that you reduce the associated costs and find ways of bringing in volunteers to support the roles and enable the community in building organizers and leaders. Please review the costs associated with the roles. We recommend that you build in time for the team's capacity building and learning and sharing. We strongly recommend participation in learning programs like Let’s Connect. We recommend establishing a volunteer led advisory board to support in ensuring healthy governance. We would hope to see more volunteers taking lead including on matters related to the governance of the community.

We hope this feedback and recommendations are useful in guiding your work now and in the future. Thank you for your contribution to the movement ; we value you as a community and partner in the movement and remain committed to ensuring you are supported in your work.

On behalf of the MEA Regional Committee and staff , --Aristidek5maya (talk) 14:24, 29 May 2023 (UTC)