Grants talk:Project/DPLA/Extending the DPLA digital asset pipeline to improve quality and discoverability

Eligibility provisionally confirmed, Round 2 2021 - Research and Software proposal

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've provisionally confirmed your proposal is eligible for review in Round 2 2021 for Research and Software projects, contingent upon:

• confirmation that the project will not depend on staff from the Wikimedia Foundation for code review, integration or other technical support during or after the project, unless those staff are part of the Project Team.
• compliance with our COVID-19 guidelines.

Schedule delay

Please note that due to unexpected delays in the review process, committee scoring will take place from April 17 through May 2, instead of April 9-24, as originally planned.

• Please watch your talkpage, which will be the primary method of communication about your proposal. We appreciate your timely response to questions and comments posted there.
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• After the scoring period ends, you are welcome to make further changes to your proposal in response to committee comments.

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• You must review and can comply with the guidelines linked above.
• If necessary because of COVID-19 safety risks, you must be able to complete the core components of your proposed work plan _without_ offline events or travel.
• You must be able to postpone any planned offline events or travel until the Wikimedia Foundation’s guidelines allow for them, without significant harm to the goals of your project.
• You must include a COVID-19 planning section in your activities plan. In this section, you should provide a brief summary of how your project plan will meet COVID-19 guidelines, and how it would impact your project if travel and offline events prove unfeasible throughout the entire life of your project.

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We look forward to engaging with you in this Round!

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

Marti (WMF) (talk) 06:53, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Extending the DPLA digital asset pipeline to improve quality and discoverability

Scoring rubric	Score
(A) Impact potential Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both? Does it have the potential for online impact? Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?	5.5
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	5.8
(C) Ability to execute Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe? Is the budget realistic/efficient ? Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?	7.3
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	5.0
Additional comments from the Committee: Ambitious project but I do not see the software development as a crucial point. It looks more like a GLAM project assembling existing tools. The project fits with Wikimedia's strategic priorities but its long term sustainability and scalability needs further evaluation. Not sure if it would be adaptable for other GLAM institutions but the potential impact of DPLA itself is so huge that it is certainly enough. They have done a lot without any WMF funding and I am sure they will continue to maintain it afterwards. And I hope that they will work on pywikibot framework to handle SDC, so, it will probably be easier for others to use it I find the intended development exclusionary, and I don't see in general how this can be adapted and sustained. SDC is still under construction and to me it makes more sense to have the general infra-structure developed rather than focus on a specific institution, especially one from the Global North. The project is iterative - it is aimed at continuing the past work. Potential impacts are great but there are some risks related to acceptance of such large scale changes by the Commons community. There is a satisfactory evaluation plan. It is unclear what the community will learn from this proposal. Ambitious. Only the dashboard requires consistent efforts. The scope can be accomplished in 12 months. The budget is reasonable. The participants probably have necessary skills. seems realistic and people have already done a lot on their way If this is accepted this could be done by the team. The community engagement could be better especially taking into account that collaboration with Commons is necessary for the success of this project. Not penalising, seems not having enough time. It's a project of GLAM that tries to be presented as software development. The project is interesting but it needs to be clarified how interaction with the Commons' community will proceed. The long term sustainability of this project will depend on this interaction. Expensive but worth of that: It can give us millions of media files with structured data and information of their usage with contribution to upload framework (pywikibot)

Mercedes Caso (platícame) 01:26, 8 May 2021 (UTC)

This proposal has been recommended for due diligence review.

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal and recommended it for due diligence review. This means that a majority of the committee reviewers favorably assessed this proposal and have requested further investigation by Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Next steps:

1. Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal. We recommend that you review all the feedback and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page.
2. Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on Thursday, May 27, 2021.

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

Mercedes Caso (platícame) 21:23, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

@Mjohnson (WMF) and MCasoValdes (WMF): We want to thank the committee for its review. We had a very good discussion with Marti, and hope it cleared up any remaining concerns. I know this is very late in the process, but I did want to leave one more comment about what I perceive as the main question still remaining for some members of the community, which is around community involvement with this project (and, I infer, specifically the SDC part of it). For that, I want to address it in two parts: first, our engagement plan for this project, and second, our track record of community involvement which demonstrates we could successfully pull off that engagement.

First, I want to point out that we recognize that involving the community in this project, from even before the first SDC edit takes place, and this is why we have included in our request funding for a program manager. Serving in this role, I would be responsible for working with the Tech Team to help the tech team to ensure it meets the needs and expectations of the Wikimedia community, and I would also be the on-wiki representative for the team, handling our engagement with the community. How I envision this work proceeding is that once we have internally developed the technical capacity to edit/add SDC statements as part of our existing bot's workflow, we would also begin community consultation, and this would take a couple of forms. First, before making any bulk edits, we plan to (unless the feedback is that its unnecessary), submit a new bot approval request that would cover the scope of the new types of tasks for the bot, which is currently approved as an upload bot. Here, we would describe our bot's workflow and its code, and we would not be able to proceed with our project until we had community buy-in. I have had several successful bot requests in the past and am familiar with the process. Aside from this, we would engage the community in the actual data modeling process necessary for the project's goals. We are not planning to undertake any mass-adding of SDC statements for which there is not already community consensus around the statements and their format. In practice, this means (1) for statements that are already commonly in use, we would be sure to follow standard practice (e.g. for copyright, we would we would map our terms to the Wikidata items and use properties such as copyright status (P6216) and copyright license (P275), as is already done by other SDC-adding bots); (2) for all other types of statements where there is not pre-existing clarity, we would have to participate in any ongoing discussions or initiate our own (either in a general forum like the COM:SDC project page or, depending on the subject, another relevant discussion page. In these discussions, I feel our effort will help move the SDC project as a whole forward, by helping to prompt these discussions that will further standardize or document the data modeling. This is also why Giovanna Fontenelle will be advising the project, as the WMF shares our interest in this outcome, which will make these types of projects easier for future GLAM partners.

Now, for the second point, as to whether the committee can have confidence in our ability to have these sorts of consultations and work together with the community in carrying out the goals of this proposal, I would point out point out some examples of my track record. Perhaps it is not obvious in my recent edit history, because I have been working hard in setting up this DPLA pipeline as well, but I have been heavily involved in community discussions around SDC and data modeling, both on- and off-wiki, (as well related discussions in Wikidata, where I have over 1 million edits and have successfully proposed several properties related to describing cultural collections). As an example, please check the Commons project talk page for the SDC modeling, where you will see my edits from back in 2019 (see this thread especially. Another more recent example which aligns very closely with one component of this proposal is the work I did with the Cleveland Museum of Art, and their bot which was successfully approved and is now running on Wikidata. At that request for permission for bot approval, you will find an example of my experience working with community members on a proposal, listening to feedback, and making changes to our bot code until it meets the expectations of that community. This is the type of work we are prepared to undertake as part of this grant, and we are well-aware the work is more than just code, and that for this project—especially the SDC component—the community will be even more involved than was necessary for the upload bot we've operated so far. Dominic (talk) 19:14, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Round 2 2021 decision

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for a Project Grant.

The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, $54,684

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to support further improvement to the DPLA digital asset pipeline, which has an enormous impact on Commons. We especially appreciate DPLA’s emphasis on knowledge equity, both in terms of supporting underresourced GLAM institutions to participate in the Wikimedia movement, and in terms of adding underrepresented content to Commons.

NOTE: Funding of any offline activities (e.g. travel and in-person events) is contingent upon compliance with the Wikimedia Foundation's COVID-19 guidelines. We require that you complete the Risk Assessment Tool:

• 14 days before any travel and/or gathering event
• 24 hours before any travel and/or gathering event

Offline events may only proceed if the tool results continue to be green or yellow.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
2. Review the information for grantees.
3. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
4. Start work on your project!

Upcoming changes to Wikimedia Foundation Grants

Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We are also currently seeking candidates to serve on regional grants committees and we'd appreciate it if you could help us spread the word to strong candidates--you can find out more here. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.

Marti (WMF) (talk) 17:56, 1 June 2021 (UTC)