Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Conference Fund/Wiki Indaba Morocco 2023

WMF review and feedback

Hi @Anass Sedrati, @Rachidourkia, @Reda benkhadra, @Ideophagous and @Mounir Neddi,

I thank you for taking the time to prepare and submit this proposal, and especially for your leadership and willingness to so on such a short timeline. I have reviewed your proposal and had a few comments and questions:

• I appreciate the clarity regarding the scholarship and participants allocation and clear definition for newcomers. I think it is a good framework for defining newcomers at events.
• Scholarship allocation - Do you have any specific target number for representatives from each affiliate? Do you expect to allow applications from non-affiliated participants? Also - I know that many times organizers prioritize scholarship recipients based on whether they have submitted a sessions proposal. But I want to suggest a different perspective. From our experience, it is not a good practice to condition a scholarship to a session proposal. As we have many valuable contributors in the movement, it does not necessarily mean they are all best suited to present in front of an audience. And by conditioning the two, you might end up having inexperienced speakers. It is definitely ok to have great and impactful participants, without requiring them to present in order to be eligible for a scholarship.
• How many organizing team members do you currently have? As you know from previous events we worked on in the past together, capacity is key. And as I know and fully confident of your experience, I would like to make sure you have the proper capacity to handle such a large scale event.
• Can you please elaborate more on the hybrid event? As hybrid events definitely allow more participation and diversity, I must admit that I recommend thinking again about 'how hybrid' do you want it to be. A fully hybrid event requires many resources that organizers are not aware of sometimes such as professional facilitation (it is MUCH harder to facilitate an hybrid discussion with people online and in person at the same time, making sure all voices are being heard and in constant communication), monitoring etc. If you mean just live-streaming, then I do support it.
• Learnings - I think that sharing and learning of ways to self fund is a much needed skill that is not usually addressed. Self fundraising is essential for affiliates sustainability and I'm very happy to hear you are focusing on that as well. There are many practices and experience among communities on how to do so.
• I'm really impressed by the Open Metrics you outlined, especially around Movement growth and Regional leadership. Looking forward to following up on that.

Budget:

• Why have you budgeted 130 lunches and dinner if you have 150 participants? It is ok to have self funded attendees, but it is custom that all participants are included in the food, catering and social events costs.
• SWAG - it's recommended that swag will be limited to low cost items such as stickers etc, to be more environmentally responsible.
• Branding and banners - I really recommend creating more generic banners for WikiIndaba (without indicating the year) so next year organizers can use it as well.
• What kind of translation method are you planning to provide? And for which languages?

Thank you again for this clear and detailed proposal. It is indeed a very good proposal especially in such a short turnaround. The main 2 things i would like to conclude with are:

1. Regional events are a high priority obviously, but other than having this annual space and platform to convene, we wish to see some kind of linkage or continuity from one year to the other. Can you point out at something that happened or changed since last year WikiIndaba? Are there any objectives that are directly linked to, or the result of things that were developed in the region or in the last year/event?

2. As I told you on a separate thread, I actually think your budget is relatively balanced, but unfortunately we have a very limited budget for this year and we might not be able to accommodate the full budget request. I think that one item you can reevaluate is the 80 international scholarships. Scholarships are probably the most important item, but is also the most expensive one. 120 is a lot, but even if you cut down 20-30, it will still be significantly more than last year (40 in 2022). It would be good if you could revisit the budget and see how can you relocate some of the budget items (maybe around the social events as well) to cut down the total ask. Another possibility is to look for financial partnerships and local sponsorship, or even in-kind donations that can sometimes cover for many costs. I will also look into the kind of support we can provide around it.

Looking forward to hearing from you. Best CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 02:36, 5 March 2023 (UTC)

Wikimedia Morocco response to WMF review and feedback

Hello @Chen,

We would like to thank you for your swift return. We are happy to collaborate with you on this proposal, and are excited to discuss these details with you, as they help us improve our application, and make us adjust it to what is best suited for such a conference and context. Please find below our detailed response to your feedback. We have also made the necessary changes in the Fluxx portal, so it is now reflecting also the same numbers and perspectives.

• Scholarship allocation - Do you have any specific target number for representatives from each affiliate?

According to the latest list of affiliates (here in Meta), we have counted 25 user groups and one chapter related to Africa (a total of 26). Given the new adjustment that we will make with the help of this feedback, and the budget limitations, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to have at least one participant from all affiliates. The reasons why cannot are the following: (1) Some affiliates are overlapping and have the same members, (2) some countries have a lot of affiliates, (3) some affiliates might be inactive and investing in inviting their representatives may not provide the impact we seek, (4) not all affiliates have the same goal or strategy, meaning they have to be assessed differently, and finally (5) we believe that diversity is to be seen from different angles, not only the affiliate one. What we can guarantee for sure is to have at least one participant per country, but also to guarantee a good gender balance, background equality, and allow as much diversity as possible. We anticipate that the work of both scholarship and program committees will be key, and with the help of WisCom, will make sure to have very experienced and knowledgeable members on both of them.

• Do you expect to allow applications from non-affiliated participants?

Yes, of course. One of the most important goals of Wiki Indaba is to activate participation in the whole continent. We firmly believe that inviting “isolated” Wikimedians, non-affiliated, will help them get even more motivated, by witnessing the power and impact of being within a community, that can share their knowledge and experience with you, and get to know people who can help you solve your problems once you are back home.

By non-affiliated, we define people who are either living in a country where no affiliate exists (and who can potentially found one, if well-guided, starting from the conference), but also people living in a country with an existing affiliate, but working alone. We believe that both will have the chance to be considered to attend the conference. The criteria that we will use to make the decision will be depending on the profile of the candidate, as well as their motivation and the impact that their participation will have on their work after the conference (this will be one of the important questions in the scholarship application process).

• Also - I know that many times organizers prioritize scholarship recipients based on whether they have submitted a sessions proposal. But I want to suggest a different perspective. From our experience, it is not a good practice to condition a scholarship to a session proposal. As we have many valuable contributors in the movement, it does not necessarily mean they are all best suited to present in front of an audience. And by conditioning the two, you might end up having inexperienced speakers. It is definitely ok to have great and impactful participants, without requiring them to present in order to be eligible for a scholarship.

According to our experience, the three main reasons for conditioning participation with a presentation are (1) to ensure that participants will provide value to the conference, (2) that they will actually attend the conference (at least the part that they will present in), and (3) that there will be enough presentations in the program.

This said, we acknowledge your argumentation and do agree with it. There can definitely be participants who can provide amazing contributions and impact during the conference, without needing to present a session. We did not mention in our original proposal that we would condition scholarships with submitting or presenting a session, but we can be more explicit in clarifying that during the scholarship and program submission steps if you think it will be useful?

• How many organizing team members do you currently have? As you know from previous events we worked on in the past together, capacity is key. And as I know and fully confident of your experience, I would like to make sure you have the proper capacity to handle such a large scale event.

We completely agree with you on the fact that a successful event needs a strong and complete team. We have learned that from organizing WikiArabia 2019. In fact, and although it was a great conference, we could have been much more efficient if we had a bigger organizing team.

For WikiIndaba 2023, many things are different (to the better). First of all, Wikimedia Morocco has grown considerably since then. We have a team of 6 employees (including a full-time coordinator for the user group), willing to help organize the conference in our country. We also have three experienced volunteers (among which the two main WikiArabia organizers) who will help to steer the organization. A number of volunteers from the User Group expressed the big interest in taking specific roles in the organization. Just from the user group, we estimate that we will have 8 people committed to organizing the conference. Moreover, and with the support of WisCom, we will send a call for volunteers to help with tasks where we may need extra capacity.

Joining both sources, we estimate that we can have a core organizing team of 5-6 people, plus 10 staff/volunteers supporting in operational organization, plus the scholarship and program committees, where the WisCom is actively involved in.

• Can you please elaborate more on the hybrid event? As hybrid events definitely allow more participation and diversity, I must admit that I recommend thinking again about 'how hybrid' do you want it to be. A fully hybrid event requires many resources that organizers are not aware of sometimes such as professional facilitation (it is MUCH harder to facilitate an hybrid discussion with people online and in person at the same time, making sure all voices are being heard and in constant communication), monitoring etc. If you mean just live-streaming, then I do support it.

According to our previous experience, we know that several reasons can prevent people from participating in-person. One of the most common of them is the non-attribution of visa, but there are also others (such as family emergencies, sickness, or just budget limitations). Being cognizant of these reasons, that are almost always outside of control, we do not want people to feel left out of the conference just because they are not located at the venue, at exactly the conference days.

Some of us have participated in hybrid conferences, such as the Wikimedia Summit 2022, and we fully understand the complexity of this setup. In particular, we know that this sort of event adds more layers of difficulty to the organization, and also impacts the budget.

In practice, our group does already have some resources enabling a hybrid event to happen, including a professional Zoom license and a communication responsible (both available for 2023 as part of our annual grant). To accommodate this request with the financial limitations, we propose a mixed “hybrid” setup, that goes a bit beyond only offering live streaming. In our setup, and acknowledging connectivity challenges in our continent, we would like to offer 20 scholarships for people participating online, and also offer the possibility of asking questions via written chat in the streaming (not requiring a professional facilitation, and can be done by our staff). Moreover, we will try to allow people to pre-write their questions to every presenter before the session, so that those not in the room can provide input. We will also record the sessions and have them uploaded to commons and YouTube, the same way we did in WikiArabia 2019. This ensures that this knowledge is documented and kept for a longer period of time, even for newcomers who will join the movement later.

We do not want our conference to be in one direction (in person -> online), and are very interested in hearing from everyone, this is why we would like to have a hybrid setup, and feel confident about it, given the good internet connection and infrastructure that we have in Morocco.

• Learnings - I think that sharing and learning of ways to self fund is a much needed skill that is not usually addressed. Self fundraising is essential for affiliates sustainability and I'm very happy to hear you are focusing on that as well. There are many practices and experience among communities on how to do so.

For the sake of clarity, what we meant by self-fund is participants who will pay their own travel and accommodation. This includes some WMF staff as well as Wikimedians who were not granted scholarships, but can still fund their participation. We intend to mention this information very clearly during the application process, as we know that some people will have this opportunity, and we will be happy to have them join.

We do also agree that self fundraising is important for sustainability. As mentioned in another channel, our grant application was done in a very short timeframe. While we are preparing this conference, we will investigate the possibility of involving other partners and sources of funding, which will help grow this event considerably.

• Why have you budgeted 130 lunches and dinner if you have 150 participants? It is ok to have self funded attendees, but it is custom that all participants are included in the food, catering and social events costs.

We think that this is a misunderstanding, and that we should have clarified it better in the budget to avoid confusion. In fact, in our proposal, we have mentioned 150 participants, but not all of them would be in person. We have written that we would offer 20 scholarships for remote participants. So this means that effectively, “only” 130 people will be present in Agadir. We would never expect that self funded participants would pay for their own lunch and dinner (nor for the social event), and we have of course counted them in the budget.

The 20 people that were not counted in the meals were those participating remotely, and that are still considered as scholarship recipients, since they will receive an amount (to pay internet or a meeting room or baby sitting) to allow them to be connected and join the conference online.

• SWAG - it's recommended that swag will be limited to low cost items such as stickers etc, to be more environmentally responsible.

We are aligned with you on this. As you probably have noticed, we allocated a small budget for Swag (~30 USD per participant) in order to follow this recommendation. The biggest item that will be handed out to the participants will be the conference t-shirt, as this is an important souvenir where we would like to make the conference theme as well as our local culture visible. Apart from that, all other swag items will be limited, and we will think about environment-friendly alternatives, as part of our commitment to a more sustainable planet in all our events and activities.

• Branding and banners - I really recommend creating more generic banners for WikiIndaba (without indicating the year) so next year organizers can use it as well.

Different Wiki Indabas are hosted in different places and years, and have different thematics. Every year, the African wider community suggests topics of discussion, and the conference logo based on the tree changes every year, depending on the hosting community and its context (as every country has its own trees).

Having generic banners would work perfectly if the above mentioned were similar to all wiki indaba editions, but unfortunately it is not the case.

What we can do to mitigate this is to create two generic banners for the conference (we will think of how it can be best done) out of the 6 originally planned banners (while the others will be specific to the conference and its theme). This will be a new approach, so we will need to think about other logistical challenges related to it, such as how to transport it from Morocco to the next country hosting Indaba. Banners are usually big and cumbersome, and we cannot ensure that conference participants from the next host country will be able to transport it in their luggage. It can also be that paying extra luggage/transportation to send the banners from one country to another can cost an amount exceeding the production of a new banner in the host country. We suggest exploring this point later in time, as it does not impact the overall budget, and can be adjusted when printing the banners, which is an activity that will most probably take place after the summer of 2023.

• What kind of translation method are you planning to provide? And for which languages?

We are planning to provide live interpretation (English <-> French). As you know, both these languages are the most used in the African context, and unfortunately most of the locators of one of them do not speak the other. We plan to provide interpretation for the main sessions (to be identified in the program) to allow a minimum of inclusivity for all. Interpretation will happen through Zoom, which is a VoIP application allowing live interpretation. We have a good network of interpreters, and expect to engage 3-4 interpreters across all the conference days (as shifting is important and the mental charge is high). The interpreters will be community members, having experience in this work, and should not require an excessive budget.

• Regional events are a high priority obviously, but other than having this annual space and platform to convene, we wish to see some kind of linkage or continuity from one year to the other. Can you point out at something that happened or changed since last year WikiIndaba? Are there any objectives that are directly linked to, or the result of things that were developed in the region or in the last year/event?

Wiki Indaba is more than a space to convene and network. The African communities are dynamic and growing at a rapid pace, and our continent is one with many newcomers with new ideas and opportunities. Since the last Wiki Indaba 2022 in Rwanda, many initiatives related to Wikimedia 2030 strategy took place. This includes the enrollment of many African Wikimedians as Movement Charter ambassadors, the big interest of others in becoming advisors of the MCDC, and the ongoing implementation of hubs initiatives, such as the EARTH (East African) hub, that is actively working on its research now, and has monthly meetings. The activation of EARTH hub was a direct consequence of WikiIndaba 2022, having taken place in East Africa.

In this spirit, Wiki Indaba 2023 aims to continue on the same direction, by (1) guiding newcomers and non-affiliated Wikimedians to know more projects to engage in, (2) encourage more experienced members to implement Wikimedia 2030 initiatives, and (3) have a special focus to encourage the North African region and francophone countries, the same way the EARTH hub emerged from the Rwanda conference.

• As I told you on a separate thread, I actually think your budget is relatively balanced, but unfortunately we have a very limited budget for this year and we might not be able to accommodate the full budget request. I think that one item you can reevaluate is the 80 international scholarships. Scholarships are probably the most important item, but is also the most expensive one. 120 is a lot, but even if you cut down 20-30, it will still be significantly more than last year (40 in 2022). It would be good if you could revisit the budget and see how can you relocate some of the budget items (maybe around the social events as well) to cut down the total ask. Another possibility is to look for financial partnerships and local sponsorship, or even in-kind donations that can sometimes cover for many costs. I will also look into the kind of support we can provide around it.

Considering your recommendations, we have changed the number of international scholarships from 80 to 50. This has reduced the number of participants to a total of 120, instead of the original number of 150. This change impacted of course all the different finances related to the conference (meals, social event, accommodation, transportation, swag, etc.) and the total budget went down from 186 228,07 USD to 147 420,87 USD (a decrease of -21%). We hope that this budget comes close to what can be allocated this year for the Wiki Indaba conference.

This said, we acknowledge your comments about both self funded participants, as well as other funding partners. We will be working on these points in parallel with this process, and hope to advance in it in the near future.

Please do finally note that inflation has unfortunately impacted our country, similarly to several regions of the world, which resulted in higher prices than usual in almost all aspects of life. Even if we reduce the number of scholarships to 20, we will not be able to obtain figures similar to last year, or those before. We count on your understanding, and will of course do all we can to find the best cost efficient solutions to have a great Wiki Indaba in Agadir inshallah!

Anass Sedrati (talk) 18:32, 6 March 2023 (UTC) - On behalf of the organizing Team