Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikimedia Ghana User Group 2024/2025 Annual Plan Grant

An oversight ommission of one staff salary line item in the budget

Hi Grants Admin,

During the preparation of our grants there was one line item which we forgot to add to our budget even though we had made mention of it in the Grant proposal. One of the salary/contractor roles we made mention of in the proposal was Chief Community Officer a role which is coming to help with a lot of the community facing activities of our user group which we have started piloting.

For the 12 months this role will cost 302,412 GHS (24,000 USD) when we add this to the current budget it will move us to 1,732,065 GHS (137,460 USD) as our total grant for the first year. And then we can adjust it 10% upwards for year 2 and 3.

Thank You. –– Owula kpakpo (talk) 23:07, 21 March 2024 (UTC)

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

Dear Wikimedia Ghana:

Thank you very much for your proposal, describing your activities and projects in support of the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement. The Regional Funds Committee has initially reviewed the proposal, and wishes to offer some initial feedback and questions for your review.

The committee appreciates that you are taking time to organize yourselves as a user group, involving the growing number of facilitators from your existing partners, and giving them leadership roles in organizing workshops and edit-a-thons, as well as connecting with other open source and similar movements in Ghana that are linked to our movement, such as the OpenStreetMap and Free Open Source communities and others.

It would be supportive of the Committee’s understanding of your plans if you’d be so kind as to  elaborate on our following specific few questions:

Limited capacity. One of your stated challenges is limited capacity regarding the leadership body in your user group. May you share more on why this has been a challenge for you as a user group since establishing in 2014?

Timeline of activities. Given your limited capacity, your timeline is full of activities every month and the committee wonders how much of the planned work for leadership could be realistic. Could you share more on how you plan to manage the amount of work and oversight given your capacity?

Community engagement and feedback. Could they clarify further about how you included your community of volunteers in the planning of your proposal? And how do you plan on incorporating the community in your work throughout the year?

Proposed activities. Thank you for putting together your list of activities. The committee would like further clarification on how you plan on implementing these activities and who will participate in them. For example, you plan to hold edit-a-thons (or editing workshops since they are not aimed at experienced volunteers) in multiple locations, what is your strategy or expected impact from these activities? May you share more on why you plan on implementing activities in different places and how you have resourced your team of facilitators to do so?

Team of subcontractors. How do you plan on selecting the subcontractors? What is the process and the criteria to select the contractors and how many contractors will there be and where will they be located in Ghana? And what is their expected time commitment?

Nimble tool. The committee is curious to understand what is the rationale behind using Nimble, and why the user group is not capitalizing on efforts from the Growth team, the campaigns tools, Wiki Education and Wiki Learn?

GLAM and gender activities. Your proposal states that you will be conducting GLAM or gender-related activities. May you share more on what these activities will be and how you plan on implementing them?

Budget-related questions: After reviewing the budget, the committee had a couple of questions with regards to your budget for your elaboration:

• Number of participants for each activity. The committee would like further clarification on how many participants are being targeted for each activity in the budget. May you please detail this?
• Virtual meetings. The committee was curious to understand why the virtual meetings expenses are high. May you elaborate here?
• Edit-a-thons. There are 20 edit-a-thons expenses in the budget, but it is unclear for which projects. May you please outline which projects these edit-a-thons will be targeting and who the participants will be?
• Project Manager compensation. The committee noted that the salary of the project manager is relatively high in comparison to what is typically expected for this role. May you please elaborate on the rationale for this compensation?
• Internet stipend. The committee noted that the stipend for internet for board members increased to 1,000 USD since last year despite the board members’ number being the same. May you please share the rationale for this?
  • May you please share a breakdown of expenses for the following budget items?
    • 3,000 USD for 500 Notable Ghanaians Photo Project
    • 650 USD or 800 USD for each Edit-a-thon or workshop
    • 650 USD for one Journalism School Engagement
    • 1,000 USD for virtual meetings and in-person strategy implementation
    • 2,000 USD for virtual meetings and preparations for the annual general meeting
    • 1,200 USD for meeting for training of the trainers (also how many trainers are expected here?)
  • Administrative and Communications Intern. The compensation for this position was 1,500 USD in the last budget and is 3,000 USD in this budget. May you please explain the difference between both expenses? It would be great to understand the amount of hours committed by this role.  
• Collaboration with other Wikimedia entities in Ghana and regionally. The committee is curious to learn how you have collaborated with other Wikimedia entities in Ghana over the last couple of years. And how do you plan on collaborating with other user groups, such as OFWA, Global Open Foundation Initiative, and Dagbani User Group? Likewise, how will you work with other African affiliates that are active on the topic of freedom of panorama, such as Wikimedia ZA?
• Multi-year grant request. In the last two years, Wikimedia Ghana has consistently extended the project implementation period for various reasons, including not having capacity to implement some planned projects. May you explain the rationale for going for a multi-year grant when you may still need time to figure out consistent programming?
• The committee recommends that you significantly scale down the requested grant amount, reduce replicating less impactful work (such as editing workshops) and focus on policy advocacy and upskilling of existing community members to build a strong base for more programmatic work the following year.
• Metrics. May you elaborate on why there has been a decrease in the Wikidata metric from the previous year?
• Movement Strategy Implementation program. The committee would like to learn how you plan on implementing this program.
• Partnerships. May you outline the strategy for developing partnerships - what areas of work are your partnerships contributing to and what does this contribution look like?
• Policy Advocacy. The committee appreciates that you are already pursuing significant advocacy opportunities through pre-existing relationships with the Ghanaian parliament. How do you plan to build on advocacy initiatives and lessons from the past year? How do you plan to “engage the public using created materials”? How do you plan to “engage allies to build coalitions and plan campaigns together”? What allies have you identified?

Regarding the schedule for our review process, please complete your review and responses to committee feedback by the 1st of May 2024. After this time, the Regional Committee will begin a final review of the proposal to make a formal decision.

Thanks again for your work on the proposal and for supporting our review.

On behalf of the Regional Committee, User: FElgueretly-WMF (talk) 10:49, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

Response from Wikimedia Ghana User Group

Hello Farida and the Regional Committee, we have some responses:

We accept to modify grant

"The committee recommends that you significantly scale down the requested grant amount, reduce replicating less impactful work (such as editing workshops) and focus on policy advocacy and upskilling of existing community members to build a strong base for more programmatic work the following year."

We have spent time considering the merits of your recommendations, juxtaposing it to the needs of the Wikimedia Ghana UG community, the need to support Movement Strategy implementation and the relevance of our work to both global and local needs around open knowledge.

So instead of defending our earlier grant proposal, we would rather spend time presenting an updated proposal that considers the merits of your recommendations, and also the needs of the stakeholders who are impacted by our work.

We agree to scale down the requested grant amount, but in proportion, scale down on the targets.

Upskilling our people

Thank you for emphasising the upskilling of our people. We did present some interventions in this area by looking to train more trainers, creating a pool for various roles including governance and we are happy to prioritise this work. Please let us know if you are referring to these specific actions or you have any other suggestions.

We want to maintain multi-year planning

While we agree to modify the grant, we want to maintain multi-year planning for two years instead of three if possible, for the following reasons:

1. Multi-year planning holds importance as a way to maintain program consistency and our operational stability. We have established a comprehensive programmatic approach expected of a national/geographically based affiliate and piloted this consistently for 3 years. What we need now is the stability of multi-year budgeting.

2. Multi-year planning better accommodates changes in programmatic timelines than a tightly packed single year plan.

3. Planning for one fiscal year only means we have to go through hiring processes all over again at the beginning of each year. Since 2021, we have not been able to confidently give long-term staffing or hiring contracts or ensure continuous development of our talent. Simply because, we don’t know how each grant proposal will turn out.

This unstable way of employment means we hire based on yearly renewal of grants. Hiring at the beginning of each grant year annually delays the start of our programs for months, it is costly both in time and effort for the board to do this every year, and it is one of the reasons for continuous requests for grant extensions because some program work can’t begin until teammates are hired and onboarded to start work. Board members because we are all skilled Wikimedians have sometimes donated time to handle projects until paid teams can begin work. Board behaving as staff or contractors has many disadvantages. It is not sustainable to run a non-profit this way. We need some stability in this area.

4. Some key projects we have had like Nimble, Freedom of Panorama, research work on languages and even more flexible work like training workshops and editathons are better scoped and executed over a longer period of time than annually, upon reflection.

“Impactful work”: clarification and alignment needed

We want to learn more about what the committee means by “replicating less impactful work”. Where lies the replication please?

Also we want clarification on what is “less impactful” about editing workshops.

From our standpoint Africa has very few active editors; an underrepresentation problem with ripple effects on the open internet. This is a problem stakeholders including our user group are working to understand and resolve. It’s work in progress.

There is anecdotal evidence and personal opinions around this topic. But the movement is still quite far from concrete data, decisions and interventions endorsed by all stakeholders about what impactful intervention means for our program-driven Africa. That is what we know so far in our 10+ years as a group.

In the surveys and conversations we have had with the community members, and the public demand for an understanding of how Wikipedia works and in what ways Ghanaians can contribute and benefit of it, we see workshops and editathons – campaigns that increase participation and create and improve content overall as a community priority. Although the approaches to this work can be further refined.

We are happy to have you elaborate more on what we should do with editor recruitment and retention.

We also want to address your mention of community engagement and feedback in this topic because it is related. You asked: Could they clarify further about how you included your community of volunteers in the planning of your proposal? And how do you plan on incorporating the community in your work throughout the year?

As we have mentioned above, we ran a survey to ask the community what to include in our grant. That is one of the ways we learn about their needs. We also learn about the community through feedback we get during our events. Additionally, there is the Movement Strategy, which Ghanaian Wikimedians participated in drafting, we also consult that. Lastly, we continue to monitor discussions around open knowledge in Ghana which impact our community. We use learnings from all these angles as input for a grant proposal.

To incorporate the community, we have structures within our Content Creation and Community Development programs:

• Our hiring practices require us sharing job and volunteer opportunities with the members first. We intend to continue.
• We will continue sourcing facilitators for events from the community.
• Our weekly edit-a-thons for members will continue.
• Our media projects that contribute to Wikimedia Commons will continue to be executed mainly by community photographers
• Our monthly newsletter that gives the community visibility into all activities past and upcoming, as well as Whatsapp and Telegram groups where instant updates on ongoing programmatic are shared will be continued and assigned to a paid role to make sure we remain consistent.

Hence, it is key for us to establish what impact means to us as representatives of the group, and the committee so we can align and make progress, as well justify to the user group our revised activities for 24/25.

The spread of our activities: our mandate and expected impact we expect of ourselves

We noticed the committee was concerned about the spread of our activities.

A bit of our history we want to share about ourselves is that Wikimedia Ghana User Group was founded in 2012 with the aim to be the national affiliate – a precursory group to the chapter Wikimedia Ghana.

Unlike the other Ghanaian affiliates who have and should have thematic and specific work, while we are based in Accra, our work is to promote Wikimedia projects throughout multiple locations around the country.

There are socio-economic divides in the country, our work should not further widen that gap. Our affiliation recognition was granted as a national affiliate. Spreading our activities nationally is an equity, diversity and inclusion requirement.

Reasons for past extensions – staffing, Nimble, research work

As we have highlighted in the section: “We want to maintain multi-year planning” our hiring setbacks do contribute to late execution of projects.

However there are more reasons:

• Nimble had overlaps with Growth features that required monitoring over the years. We have elaborated on that in a section below about Nimble. Monitoring to see which direction Growth features were headed meant pausing development work and delaying recruitment of hundreds of editors in the Nimble project, and hence requests for extensions.

• We have also consistently pushed back previous work on research on the impact of Ghanaian language Wikipedias and asked for an extension because a key stakeholder with access to various language communities to be interviewed on this was not available. We requested an extension at a point in time for this as well.

• Freedom of Panorama work was not work meant for single-year annual planning either.

Extensions have been a way for us to let projects organically spread into the true amount of time it takes to complete them. It teaches us that our programs may be better spread beyond a year.

The story of Nimble

The rationale behind Nimble was to build a tool that could guide newcomers through Wikipedia account creation, teach them the basics to getting started and enable them make their first edit through an iFrame. That said, Nimble could load Wikipedia within itself, so people can both follow the guide and edit at the same time.

Nimble would be for recruiting Ghanaian contributors who don’t follow the conventional path of discovering Wikipedia through programmatic work or affiliate community involvement. There are millions of Ghanaians on the internet who may never encounter our affiliate, however should have equal access to education about Wikipedia.

The plan was to run measurable ads on the internet for people to use Nimble, which is something the global community may not endorse if we were running ads linking to Wikipedia itself.

Customizability of a newcomer onboarding tool to our Ghanaian market was the point of Nimble.

And the issue of having homegrown technological solutions as compared to tools built for other markets, is what previous grant officers rightfully understood.

The Nimble project started in 2021 when the Growth Tools were still in early development and WikiLearn and so on were either not existent, or promoted for visibility to affiliates.

Currently, of all the tools the committee mentioned, the Growth features come close to what we were trying to achieve with Nimble. Hence we even participated in the WMF-community consultation for the features to be implemented.

After building the proof of concept, we paused Nimble in its first year, so we could monitor the product direction of the Growth Tools (it was beginning to gain traction) so we can re-scope or discontinue Nimble if there were substantial overlaps.

But as the committee knows, features developed by the WMF don’t always get accepted for implementation on all wikis, or where they are accepted, it may not end up as a default, or visible feature for discoverability. We kept monitoring especially for enwiki which was our target wiki.

In December 2023 we concluded Growth has reached a level where we can take a final decision.

In our current grant which ends in June, we have planned one last community study to determine finally what we should do with the Nimble project. All tools that seek to onboard newcomers have their own challenges and there are overlaps.

Nimble is likely to be re-scoped depending on our findings. We are happy to get back to the committee in about 2 weeks to confirm what is next.

Please note that in the years where we paused development for Nimble, we recorded an underspend and returned the money to the foundation and we will do the same for the upcoming grant if need be.

Collaboration with other Wikimedia entities in Ghana and regionally

Our collaboration with groups in our country has been mostly ad hoc. Recent examples include:

• Our partnership with the Wikimedians of the Twi Language (GOIF) in the Wikidata for Education campaign as the campaign's partner.

• We have also partnered with OFWA to manage a Wikimedia booth at the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum.

For Freedom of Panorama, since 2018 we have received assistance from Douglass Scott of Wikimedia ZA. We were able to launch our advocacy at the Republica Conference, Accra edition, where he was flown to Ghana to help with FoP sessions at the conference.

Concerns about capacity and overall thoughts on staffing and subcontractors

Though we were designated as a user group in 2014, it was in 2020 we registered as a legal entity that has a board. When we talk of limited capacity, we were referring to one board member resigning earlier. Hence being down to 2 members, going into 2024/25.

Our other perception about being under capacity is more of a representation matter. We want to include a board member elected solely by the community, a female board member and possibly one member from the north of the country, as the current board consists of southerners. (There is a north-south development divide in Ghana which we seek to address as a matter of improving our practices around equity, diversity and inclusion.)

The board usually has done the hiring.

We share the job postings with the community, the African Wikimedian community, and the general Ghanaian public.

The criteria depends on the role, but in addition to the role-specific skills, we have a preference for contractors who are Wikimedians or are likely to embrace the Movement (within probationary time) for all roles.

The board, and other long standing community members who volunteer for the non-profit in 2023 for example, collaboratively vetted and recruited applicants.

For 2024/25 the board will still lead hiring, a community member will join the panel, however, we were impressed with a program/project manager whom we collaborated with for our Wikidata For Education Project and we intend to let her sit on the panel and also overall make capacity building inputs into our admin team for the year 2024/25. We are still negotiating her fees.

“How many contractors will there be and where will they be located in Ghana? And what is their expected time commitment?"

“Project Manager compensation. The committee noted that the salary of the project manager is relatively high in comparison to what is typically expected for this role. May you please elaborate on the rationale for this compensation?”

“Administrative and Communications Intern. The compensation for this position was 1,500 USD in the last budget and is 3,000 USD in this budget. May you please explain the difference between both expenses? It would be great to understand the amount of hours committed by this role.”

We would like to address these three questions as a focus area. Please see this document which we have put together to explain how we see our team vis-a-vis community needs. We have also modified some of the roles and responsibilities to make things simpler. We are not too attached to the roles, we are more concerned about the community needs that call these roles into being.

For now, we have not provided answers on metrics and program implementation details. Please let us know if we have responded to your satisfaction the underlying issues above. Once we are in agreement, we can confidently send an updated plan, budget and timeline.

Additional request for list of trainers

Please find below the list of trainers:

• Justice Okai-Allotey - User:Owula kpakpo – Wikimedia Commons
• Robert Obiri - User:Robertjamal12 – Wikipedia and Incubator
• Mohammed Kamal-Deen Fuseini - User:Dnshitobu – Wikidata

-- Best regards,

On behalf of Justice, Sandister and Enock. ---Robertjamal12 ~🔔 20:51, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

Modified 2024/2025 Two Multi-Year Grant

Hello Farida and the Regional Committee, we have some responses:

We have modified our grant as we requested earlier.

You can find our Revised Annual Plan here, timeline of activities here and updated budget here.

Our revised Budget requests are as follows:

Year 1: GHS 1,237,399.07 in USD: $89,046.50 Year 2: GHS 1,356,845.69 in USD: $97,386.40

Total for both years GHS: 2,594,244.76 in USD: 186,432.9.

We have email them respectively as well.

-- Best regards,

On behalf of Wikimedia Ghana User Group Board Justice, Sandister and Enock. --- Owula kpakpo (talk) 00:24, 11 May 2024 (UTC).