Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Wiki Loves Earth 2023 in Kazakhstan (ID: 22055313)

Endorsements and Feedback from User:Batyrbek.kz

Hello! I would like to mention that this project is very important for our region since it has many potentials to bring closer all the active Wikimedians in the region, regardless of the language they use in everyday life. It will help the participants get to know each other, exchange ideas, do some collaborations. Needless to say, the project also has been done last year and it was very successful: The Commons was filled with thousands of very meaningful, rare and beautiful photographs. It also aligns with one of the recommendations from the Movement strategy - Improve User Experience, i.e. continually improve the design of our platforms to be inclusive and to enable everyone — irrespective of gender, culture, age, technological background or skills, or physical abilities. Batyrbek.kz (talk) 19:48, 1 February 2023 (UTC)

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

@Kaiyr and Batyrbek.kz: Hello Kaiyr and Batyrbek.kz, and thanks for your proposal to support WLE in Kazakhstan later this year. Here are my questions and comments about the proposal:

• Thanks for taking the time to prepare the landing page on Commons to support some of the organizing and informational work related to your WLE event.
• It's great to see you are supporting broad accessibility in the region by preparing materials in Kazakh, Russian, and English. I hope this supports broader participation in the events.
• Can you provide more information on how you determined compensation rates for the different roles related to this proposal? I am asking because while we can offer compensation for these roles, the amount in local currency (KZT) seems somewhat high. I acknowledge that funding for these roles was approved in your last grant in 2022, but it is important that funding we provide around organizing and jury roles for movement activities is generally consistent throughout the movement.
• Related to the above question, it would be helpful to understand more concretely what substantive roles and responsibilities will be done by the positions that are proposed to receive compensation. Could you provide more detail around these roles?:
  • Organizer
  • Tech consultant
  • Jury members

I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 21:58, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

This year we consider our experience in 2022 that wasn't ideal: competition was organized "at the last moment" that had impact on organizers busyness and participants expierience. That's why we've decided to separate organizer role from jury member role. Their duty will be to control of timing of different procedures (creating, updating and translating of pages, media relations, contacts with winners etc.) and coordinating jury and tech consult work. It needs part-time irregular but mostly every day work during all period of competition and jury work (from June 15 to August 30).

This year we've decided to have 5 jury members instead of 3 in 2022 and offer some 2022 finalists to join jury committee. Last year experience showed us that at the time the committee of 3 can evaluate more than 3000 pictures, their eye can got blurred that can lead to mistakes. Also having more jury members can provide us wider specter of opinions and decreased busyness of each member.

Tech consult is not as necessary as in 2022 because most of their work was done last year, but we still needs them to maintain nature monuments list in case of breaking of one of modules at toolforge and to help jury creating bot withdrawal of results from Montage (images evaluation tool for the competition). So they're needed occasionally for all competition and evaluation period (from June 15 to August 30).

Speaking of the amount of compensations they were recalculated according to official inflation rate in Kazakhstan for 2022 that is 20,3%. That's why even at the time we are expecting lower amounts of work per each jury member and compensation was counted as 66,6% of 2022 amount (166000 KZT), it was increased by 20,3% afterwards. That is exactly 200000 KZT when the median month wage in Kazakhstan was 196728 KZT in 2nd quarter of 2022 (more recent data is unavailable).

Compensation disproportion between organizer and jury members is coming from the fact that organizer role means part-time employment (like 1-3 hours per day) and doesn't depend on the amount of uploaded photographs. At the same time jury work will be strictly dependent on this number and has considerable amount-per-time counts, because of the fact we will have only 45 days to evaluate pictures and decide the winners. Kaiyr (talk) 07:39, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

@Kaiyr: Thank you for this context around inflation and around how you determined the compensation rates for these roles using median wage information in Kazakhstan. Our team currently does not have any official or globally comprehensive resources to help applicants determine compensation rates for many different roles than individual may occupy in movement events and projects, so the work of determining budgets for these items varies a bit from project to project. However, there are still some limitations on how much resourcing we support for a single campaign, particularly on compensation, in the context of the Rapid Fund program which is geared toward smaller scale work and projects. The use of median wage data for Kazakhstan is not particularly consistent with how these rates are determined in other communities in the movement. More practically, I don't think we could sustainably support the compensation of most other organizers in the movement if their compensation was determined in a similar way. Based on these circumstances, we can approve the proposal with the following changes:

• That the budget for the compensation for jury members is reduced from 1,000,000 KZT to 800,000 KZT. This means we could support 4 jury members at the rate you are requesting, or you could continue to support 5 members at a reduced level of compensation.
• Given that there may be fewer jury members, this may impact some of the proposed goals in your metrics section. You are welcome to let us know if you want to adjust these, and that such changes are acceptable and understandable.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for your proposal, and good luck with this year's campaign! Thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 15 March 2023 (UTC)