Grants talk:Project/Ammarpad & DonCamillo/Outreach in Northern Nigeria/Midpoint

Report approved

Dear Ammarpad,

Thank you for submitting this midpoint report. I am approving it now because of my own delay in reviewing your report--to avoid delaying your further. I apologize for my late response.

Though I am approving the report now, I would like to ask you to flesh it out with a bit more detailed information. Can you please add the following information into the report itself, then ping me here on your talkpage when you are done?

• In your summary section, can you please provide the specific names of the two schools and two organizations you are partnering with? Also, please give a brief one sentence summary of your workshop.
• In your Methods and Activities section:
  • For each individual university or organization, please provide a brief summary of the partnership work you have done so far: Whom did you meet with and what were the outcomes of the meetings you had (for example, were specific agreements made during the meeting? What was accomplished or changed because of the meeting)? What comes next?
  • Can you also provide a paragraph summary of the workshop? How many participants attended? What did they learn? How many new accounts were created? What follow-up happened, if any?
• Where you make reference to the materials that were translated into Hausa, please provide a link to the translated materials.
• I have copied and pasted the main Budget table from your Finance tab into your Midpoint Report. I am not sure how to interpret the table you have put into you Midpoint Report, which shows you have spent a total of $730, while the table in your Finance tab shows you have spent $3049.64 USD. Can you add an explanation to each table to help me and others understand the difference between what you are trying to show in the table you put into your report and the table in your Finances tab (now also copied into your report)?
• Please answer this question, found in your Finances section: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project
• You mentioned you are having challenges because of "Depletion of resources due to use of Nigeria's Central Bank rate." Can you say more about what you mean?

Ammar, it's fantastic to hear that many prospective partner organizations are so enthusiastic about your outreach. When there is a lot of interest, as it sounds like your are experiencing, it can be easy to spread yourself too thin. In general, most of our grantees find that there is greater productivity if they narrow down their focus and choose one or perhaps two partners to focus on. More important than the initial meetings are the slow, gradual work of helping an organization build a program. So, I encourage you to think about where you want to focus. Once you choose your focus area, there are a lot of resources we can offer to help you deeper the partnership. I am looping in Alex Stinson (WMF), who supports GLAM partnerships, and Nichole Saad (WMF), who supports our Wikipedia Education Programs]], to see if they have additional recommendations for you. Alex and Nichole, if you have any resources or insights to share, please reach out. Ammar is (largely single-handedly) working on developing partnerships to expand the Hausa Wikipedia community. We've all been really excited about his expertise and insight into this community and his willingness to work on bringing more awareness about Wikimedia projects to this context. Any support and encouragement you can offer are welcome.

Ammar, I haven't checked on the expense documentation you have submitted yet. We will need to confirm your receipts before we disburse your next payment.

Kind regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 22:02, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

Response

Thank you Marti,

I've have expanded the report and updated the figures. Specifically;

1. I've the added the name of the specific universities, organizations and the summary of the workshop.
2. I explained more about the meetings we had.
3. I added link to the translated materials.
4. Concerning the budget table, I have updated it now and synced them across all the subpages. The reason for the earlier anomaly with $730, was because at the time I submitted this Midpoint report on 19 November 2018 we had not yet conducted the main program and had not made many other purchases. And after the program I had been waiting for responses concerning what I submitted that's why I've not updated it since then.
5. I answered that question about the budget expenditures.
6. I explained more about the resources depletion.
7. I sent the initial documentation.

Also thank you for looping Alex and Nichole, we indeed discussed about Wikipedia Education program at length in Kano and would love any resources and support about that. We identified key challenges and as I said in the report we're working to remedy them, for now we want the people to understand the editing environment as quite a number of people find it difficult to understand than I thought it could be. –Ammarpad (talk) 06:11, 25 February 2019 (UTC)