Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Conference Fund/Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024

WMF review and feedback

Hi @Zafer,

Thank you very much for this proposal and for your initiative in organizing the 2024 CEE meeting. I highly appreciate the time and effort you put into this proposal. I have reviewed your proposal and have some comments and follow up questions:

• Can you clarify the length of the conference? The proposal suggests 5 days but the budget suggests 3 nights. Can you please clarify?
• Why do you think you received such a low number of responses to the community engagement survey? 24 is a very low number, especially for a regional conference of such scale. I see you also sent the survey to only 60 people. That is not a good practice to determine the interest and need for this event.
• Main objectives: “Proving help and support for small-size Wikimedia affiliates” - Do you have any examples for this impact since the last CEE meeting? I’m interested in understanding the role of this event in encouraging/ executing this objective.
• I want to highlight and acknowledge Wikimedia Turkiye’s work in creating and maintaining these partnerships.
• What are some of the internal aspirations you have (locally) that you hope to achieve by organizing this conference?
• You mentioned 90 scholarships. Is it right to assume that you are expecting 60 local/ self funded participants? Isn’t that quite a lot for a regional wiki focused event?
• I appreciate that the COT already has quite a lot of experience in reviewing and managing the selection process for communities/ affiliates delegates. Including engaging with communities to determine the right representation.
• Great go see that you have CEE Hub representation in the COT among other partners.

Budget:

• What is the ‘Reimbursements person on the spot’ item?
• Streaming and video recording - Do you also have any statistics or evidence on how the recordings from past years were used? How many views or people who participated online during past events maybe? I have a concern that this is a relatively high expense for very minimal use, especially when there are less expensive methods of recording and documenting.
• Coffee breaks - I’m confused about whether it’s 5 or 10 USD.
• Learning days - I know that in the past year we have stretched the budget to accommodate this element of the CEE meeting. But in fact, given there is a full 3 days regional conference that is targeting among other things capacity building and skill sharing, the learning days are not necessarily a priority and shouldn't be part of the Conference proposal. Unfortunately we will not be able to commit to supporting the learning days component as well and this will be based on revaluation of the Conference Fund program budget later in the year.

When you're able, please respond to the questions on meta and revise the proposal on Fluxx if needed (I have sent the application back on Fluxx so you can edit it, just don't forget to re-submit when you are done). These revisions will be due by March 4, 2024 after which the Conference Grant Committee will begin formal review of the proposal to make the funding decisions.

Best, CAlmog (WMF) (talk) 05:04, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

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Dear @CAlmog (WMF),

Thank you for reviewing our application and for your questions about the grant. I will try to answer your questions in detail below.

1. We have written here the total number of days during the conference, including the day the delegates arrived, Learning Day, the days of the conference itself, and the day the delegates departed. Perhaps this is incorrect; therefore, we will correct the dates in the application and leave only the conference days.

2. Unfortunately, our region is not very active in providing feedback when requested. The community may be tired of the constant requests for feedback, especially when different parties and the WMF ask them to provide feedback actively. In the future, we are considering recommending that the following organizers implement a feedback system as part of the mandatory scholarship process. In this case, affiliations must provide feedback to receive a scholarship to attend the conference. This year, we specifically selected an audience that is most active in regional and global processes (therefore, the number of people to whom we sent the survey was 60). Unfortunately, we still could not achieve the desired result.

3.

• After the 2023 meeting, the CEE Hub began to develop the CEE Youth Group initiative actively, supporting and encouraging youth initiatives.
• The communities of Central Asia became more active, and after last year’s meeting, it was proposed to create two new UGs in this region, and the new Tajik UG is actively developing its projects, which were helped by the knowledge acquired at the CEE Meeting.
• Many connections were created between different communities during the CEE meeting, which subsequently grew into bilateral cooperation.

4. Wikimedia Community User Group Türkiye is expecting the following benefits from this conference.

• Motivating those local user group members and members of the editor community who have never attended an in-person event to join an event and build trust among ourselves. The local wiki community highly values anonymity, and since the user group was founded in 2016, efforts to hold off-wiki meetings and collaborate in ways other than on wiki-editing were received suspiciously from some parts of the wiki community. Fortunately, the adverse reactions have been reducing since then, and having this conference in Istanbul -where, to our knowledge, most of the Turkish project editors live- provides an excellent opportunity for many local editors to join an international in-person organization for the first time; experience the positive wiki atmosphere; and to demonstrate everyone how organizing off-wiki meetings is legitimate.
• Creating awareness about the global Wikimedia Movement and motivating local community members to participate. Historically, representation of the Turkish community in global and regional Wikimedia events and activities has been restricted. Having this event in our country is expected to increase awareness of the global movement and encourage more people to take part in regional and global Wikimedia initiatives as well.
• Strengthening the user group in local partnership search. Organizing an international conference brings prestige to the group and helps build trust between the user group and the potential partners.

5. Yes, we are expecting 60 self-funded participants. This includes about 20 volunteer university students as conference assistants and helping the organizing team. We expect local self-funded participants to come from Istanbul, not traveling from other parts of the country. However, the most self-funded individuals will be from outside Turkey, who permanently participate in this conference, as well as WMF staff. We select this number based on the number of CEE Meeting in 2023.

Budget:

1. Armenian citizens need an e-visa for Turkey, which costs $100 per person. The reimbursement is calculated for two delegates from Armenia.

2. We analyzed data from last year (unfortunately, we do not have data until 2023 to analyze) and found the following: in total, the recordings of the 2023 meeting were viewed approximately 900 times, and during streaming, around 50 people, on average, followed online. If you feel that it’s not worth the cost that we have to spend on online streaming and session recordings, you can withdraw the amount calculated for this from the total budget that we have proposed to you. At the moment, this amount is 16,500 USD. We are also interested in your proposal for less expensive recording and documentation methods. Could you provide examples for this, and perhaps we will rework our proposal?

3. The budget was copied from last year's template, and there was a technical error. Everything has been corrected now.

4. Learning days were always delivered under a separate component, as there was no space for this on conference days. The conference days were busy with sessions from communities, etc. But, given the new realities, perhaps we should abandon learning days altogether if it’s impossible to integrate them into the conference days. You can also cut the cost of learning days from our budget. Currently, this amount is 4280 USD.

If you have any other questions or comments, we will be happy to answer them.

Kindly, Zafer (talk) 20:05, 3 March 2024 (UTC)