Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Wikimedia Hackathon Local Meetup Accra 2023 (ID: 22114455)

Feedback from Rapid Fund review team in the Middle East and Africa funding region

Hi Joris Darlington Quarshie, thank you for submitting your grant application. We are excited about your plan to run a Wikimedia Hackathon satellite event in Accra! After reviewing your grant proposal, we have some questions and requests, mainly regarding to the requested budget:

• Do you hold any leadership roles at Open Foundation West Africa? Are you a staff member at any of the Wikimedia affiliates? (add your response here)
• As mentioned in question 11, you are required to inform all related communities about this proposal and project in advance. Please notify, inform, and engage all related communities and update your response to question 11.
• From what we could understand from the proposed budget, you are planning to rent an expensive venue for the event. Given your connection to the Open Foundation West Africa, why won't you organize the event in their office? (add your response here or review the budget)
• Your plan is to offer flat travel scholarships to all participants. We request that you reconsider this approach and offer travel scholarships only to those who need them. (review the budget)
• Additionally, the requested budget is double compared to your last year's budget. We recognize that some of this increase is caused by the extensive inflation in Ghana. But we also think that some expenses are higher than average prices in Ghana. Therefore, we kindly request to revise the requested budget. (review the detailed budget and update questions 19-19.2).

Please make the indicated changes to your grant application on the Wikimedia Foundation Grantee Portal (Fluxx). Log in to the Grantee Portal and you will see your application in the 'Proposals need attention' section. Edit and re-submit your application by April 17, 2023.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks for your time, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 09:29, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

• Do you hold any leadership roles at Open Foundation West Africa? Are you a staff member at any of the Wikimedia affiliates?

Hello @DSaroyan (WMF),

I currently do not hold any leadership role at Open Foundation West Africa at the moment. I was a technical programmes officer for Open Foundation West Africa for a moment. But that ended after a year. Currently, I do lead a wikimedian underrepresented community called the African Wikimedia Technical Community which its main objective is to nurture and grow wikimedia technical contributors in Africa as a whole. For an updated version of my wiki page, kindly visit my wikipedia user page

• From what we could understand from the proposed budget, you are planning to rent an expensive venue for the event. Given your connection to the Open Foundation West Africa, why won't you organize the event in their office?

Open Foundation West Africa's office is a good space to use however, their office is not spacious enough to contain the minimum number of participants expected to attend and contribute to this satellite event. If we should consider using their space, the venue will be crowded and some participants will have to stand throughout the event. Just confirmed from the current Programs Manager (Ruby D. Brown), the maximum capacity its office can hold is 20 people. Since we are not using only chairs but both chairs and tables. If this event was a non-tech event ofwa's office would have been the first place to consider.

Also, if I will have to scale it down to 20 people I will have to consider sending a cancellation invitation to some of the open source communities such as google developers group accra, pyladies, python community ghana and the microsoft communities in Ghana. Which will be a bit difficult since most of the participants from these communities already do have the adequate skill to contribute to the success of this satellite event with a little guidance on how they can contribute.

Lastly, I have reviewed and edited the budget and I will like to communicate that with regards to the space. if the budget does not fit for the planned activities or there is an increase in prices. I will have to reduce the duration of the event in other to have some funds left to manage other expenses. All remaining funds will be sent back to the foundation unless accepted by the foundation to use it as a top up for future grant.

Thank you very much for the first review. Please do feel free to share more questions or concerns about this proposal.

Peace... Joris Darlington Quarshie (talk) 14:03, 12 April 2023 (UTC)