Grants talk:Project/FLG/History of Quebec and French-speaking North America 2020-2021

Outputs and impact

I see that the expected outputs are very small in number compared to the costs, so I assume the idea is that they'll have a very wide audience. What was the reach of the 2 videos you already made, and of the other materials? Sorry if you already wrote it elsewhere, I couldn't see it in Grants:Project/FLG/History_of_Quebec_and_French-speaking_North_America/Final#Project_Impact. Nemo 13:35, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Yes, we are targeting a wider audience than would be possible with only synchronous training and support (in-person or online). This is to answer the strong demand that we have felt, especially from academia. We cannot follow up on all the demand that we receive: there are only so many events we can organize properly in a year.

The 2 shorts videos mentioned in the grant proposal were produced late in the project, so we are only just now beginning to promote them! We could not really use them as examples right now.

That being said, we are confident that through our network we can reach our main audience. We are well-connected in the higher education sector and with several cultural institutions, so we will benefit from access to general as well as targeted channels and tools to promote our educational resources and render them discoverable where it counts. A perfect example of what I mean by targeted is the webinar that we produced for APOP in May 2019. APOP is a non-profit producing and promoting digital resources (notably OER) for college level professors. Also, all the OER we have produced in the past are referenced in Ceres, a semantic search engine dedicated to digital resources for higher education in Quebec. As for more general tools, our educational resources are and will continue to be references in BAnQ's search engine. Etc.

In any case, we will try to think of reasonable metrics we could use for the audience reach of the educational resources we intend to produce in 2020-2021. Stay tuned! :-) -- Mathieugp (talk) 14:53, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, I'll be happy to hear about these when you come up with something. Nemo 17:19, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, Round 1 2020

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for Round 1 2020 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community comments period, through March 16, 2020.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for Round 1 2020 will occur March 17 - April 8, 2020. We ask that you refrain from making changes to your proposal during the committee review period, so we can be sure that all committee members are seeing the same version of the proposal.

Grantees will be announced Friday, May 15, 2020.

Any changes to the review calendar will be posted on the Round 1 2020 schedule.

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:23, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for History of Quebec and French-speaking North America 2020-2021

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?	5.2
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	5.0
(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?	7.4
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	5.8
Additional comments from the Committee: Biggest potential for impact is through either significant contributions/improvements to content or retention of new editors. However, I’m not sure the proposal in its current form is clearly working towards either of those goals. Given this is essentially a renewal request, there needs to be a lot more planning and thinking around sustainability of the work after grant funding has ended. It an ongoing activity that risks to be stopped without these resources. I am glad to see people interested in continuing outreach. This proposal did not establish a need for this type of content and support. Did they explore existing materials and support? This is an under-supported and under-reported population, and it is helpful to see how this initiative has started already. It's not clear from the proposal how the impact of this project would be measured. Simply creating some videos is not an effective way of measuring impact. How many people do they plan to reach with these videos? It's important to know how they plan to reach their target audience. These aren't clear from the proposal and makes it difficult to determine how much impact this would make. Having read the final report of their last grant, I’m not seeing a strong enough argument to continue focusing on smaller training and contribution events or new partnerships. I’m also not seeing a lot of meaningful learning captured in that report and then translated into the new proposal (for example, how will they engage and keep new editors active?) Usual GLAM activity. I am encouraged to know more organizations are still interested in engaging with Wikipedia in communities where a presence exists. I would like to know more about how they will engage with existing resources and expand on these to create measurable outcomes! This is iterative and as such fills a need amongst our Movement and community. It's not clear from the proposal how the impact of this project would be measured. Simply creating some videos is not an effective way of measuring impact. How many people do they plan to reach with these videos? It's important to know how they plan to reach their target audience. These aren't clear from the proposal and makes it difficult to determine how much impact this would make. The budget seems reasonable for supporting a WiR. The activity is already set. Likely this can be completed in the timeline, but any in-person engagement may not be possible due to the pandemic. I am confident what was proposed is doable within scope, time, and resources. Considering that they have done something similar in the past, chances are that they would be able to execute this project. This proposal expresses how they’ll engage with the target community but not how they will engage with existing community members to support the effort. Clear evidence of community involvement. The project team has clearly been active and done a lot of great work building awareness and partnerships over the course of the last grant. While I am generally supportive of a continued WiR with FLG, I don’t think the proposed activities in this grant are best suited for the desired outcomes and impact. Specifically, I am less certain of the value of video tutorials or the focus on creating new partnerships (instead of supporting the existing ones). Based on the findings from their final report, it also seems like engagement with education/university courses would yield more of the type of significant contributions they are interested in than the smaller one-off training events. Finally, there needs to be a plan for sustainability and transitioning off of WMF funding. The results are already acquired and without these resources they can be lost. Unfortunately at this time I see this project needs to establish a need for this type of work to secure funding. It's not clear from the proposal how the impact of this project would be measured. Simply creating some videos is not an effective way of measuring impact. How many people do they plan to reach with these videos? It's important to know how they plan to reach their target proposal. These aren't clear from the proposal. It's difficult to determine how much impact this would make and there is no clear plan on how to follow up with trainees after the project. It isn't clear from the proposal what the WiR would be doing for 32 hours in a week. If I get this clearly from the proposal, the WiR would only work for three days in a week and on average, 10hrs per day? I don't think this is realistic. 3 - 4hrs per day should be sufficient and a total of approximately 12 hours should be enough per week. The grantee also needs to break down the budget. We do expect to see the amount of remuneration per hour.

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:

• 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.
• If you have had an interview with a Program Officer, you may have orally responded to some of the committee comments already. Your interview comments will be relayed to the committee during the deliberations call.
• You are welcome to respond to aggregated comments here on the talkpage to publicly share any feedback, clarifications or questions you have.
• Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on May 29, 2020.

If you have any questions, please contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 23:09, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for recommending our proposal for due diligence review. We are exited to continue the work we have already started! We will carefully read the additional comments and questions from the Committee and post our reply here ASAP. :-) -- Mathieugp (talk) 18:48, 14 May 2020 (UTC)

@Mjohnson (WMF): Here is our reply to the above:

1. How we will retain new editors or re-engage them after a dormant period

While we were successful at retaining between 10 to 15% of the participants to our main events in 2019-2020, we want to get better at this. As hinted in our final report and before that in the mid-point one, we want to experiment with a newsletter (publicizing what's been done by active participants, announcing events to come, etc).

We expect that our new Open Educational Resources (OER) will help us in this regard. For example, some tutorials will complement our training sessions, while others will serve as memory refreshers. It is well known that people tend to be shy to e-mail and phone just to ask questions, no matter how much we insist that they can. New OER could be announced in the newsletter.

Also, focusing more on the academic community will likely increase, among our trainees, the percentage of people who have sufficient writing skills and digital literacy to become autonomous rapidly.

2. How we will remain available to existing community members while creating new partnerships

With our training sessions and other actions, we aim to render people and organizations autonomous. While we intend to remain available to existing community members (for e-mail and phone support or to co-organize new events), we want to be proactive and constantly establish new partnerships. There is a lot of untapped potential.

Also, new partnerships means we can identify new sources of funding for our Wikimedia-related projects.

3. How our new OER will complement existing material

We did explore existing material. The most obvious quality audiovisual material out there for French speakers in the WikiMOOC produced by Wikimedia France. This course is 6-week long and students are expected to put over 3 hours per week in effort. The new material we propose is quite different: max. 60 min. long webinars and max. 5 min. long tutorials. These OER will not only complement what is already there, they will enhance our training work and also our support to the community.

4. How we will measure the impact of the OER (in particular the videos) we will produce and consequently reach our target audience

We already have a good idea of actions we can take to reach our target audience (see the late February 2020 discussion I had with Nemo above). However, estimating that audience with real numbers in order to come up with realistic ways to measure our impact is proving difficult for lack of good data. I was already on the case in mid-March, seeking empirical data like the number of university students currently enrolled in a history BA or MA, the number of graduates in that field over the past years, the number of members of Histoire Québec federating all historical societies (some 280 organizations), etc. In the short term, even thought it leaves us unsatisfied, we will have to work with less precise estimates of our audience because we have not yet gathered all the information we want to use.

We estimate that the people who are passionate about the history of Quebec and French-speaking North America enough to (let's say) buy and read books on the subject must number in the tens of thousands. However, we will produce videos that will be "generic" enough to be of interest to a larger audience. Being more generic will allow for greater reuse among our partners (like Acfas or BAnQ) and within the larger open knowledge community.

We will measure the impact of our OER quantitatively through direct and indirect means and also qualitatively.

Our most direct quantitative means will be the following metrics:

- number of views in Wikimedia Commons

- number of views on FLG's YouTube channel

For those, we aim to have a total combined count of over 2 500 views from North America.

Other indirect means will be for example the metrics provided by partners who decided to reuse our OER elsewhere. Depending on the case, they could be view counts or retweets or number of subscribers to a list, etc.

For qualitative, we will collect feedback.

And we are open to suggestions of course! :-)

5. How the WiR will spend his 32 hours per week working on this project

During the previous grant, our WiR was working regular 8 hours a day, four days a week (Monday through Thursday), alongside FLG's permanent staff. We thought this was the right amount of time not only considering the expected work load, but also because FLG want to create an interesting and stable position for potential candidates. What the FLG did not want (based on previous experiences) was a part-time independent contractor always busy searching and planning for other contracts to pay his bills. (In the future, the WiR position at FLG could very-well become a fully salaried one.)

For the 2020-2021 project, we expect the same amount of working hours will be required by our WiR since the tasks will be somewhat the same and possibly even greater if we factor in the production of our proposed OER. The 2019-2020 project had more details about the tasks (coordinating with partners and training them when required; evaluating possible improvements to articles so as to propose improvement "missions" to participants; preparatory work prior to event to facilitate contribution ; etc.) that we did not recopy this time, but we could have. We can make sure we detail them properly in the monthly reports if our proposal is selected for funding.

6. How we will stop depending on WMF funding over time

We are happy to already be in a position to ask for $9,000 USD less than the previous grant. We will be working hard during the June 2020 to June 2021 period to secure more permanent funding from current and prospective partners in the hope that we can rapidly stop depending fully on WMF grants to pay our WiR. Prior to the COVID-19 situation, FLG finances were quite healthy and it seemed reasonable to expect that we could independently finance our WiR position at 100% maybe within a 2 to 3 years period. Estimating that period will now depend on how well the economy recovers over the next years, in the our new post-COVID-19 world.

--Mathieugp (talk) 21:56, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Round 1 2020 decision

Extended content
This project has not been selected for a Project Grant at this time. We love that you took the chance to creatively improve the Wikimedia movement. The committee has reviewed this proposal and not recommended it for funding. This was a very competitive round with many good ideas, not all of which could be funded in spite of many merits. We appreciate your participation, and we hope you'll continue to stay engaged in the Wikimedia context. Comments regarding this decision: We will not be funding your project this round. The committee appreciates your past work in Project Grants as well as the continuing support of the FLG in this proposal. Of note, the focus on developing quality content with content experts is appreciated, as well as the concerted effort on building relationships with relevant partners in this domain. The committee further acknowledges the importance of increasing knowledge equity by reducing knowledge gaps in Wikimedia Projects, and that disparities in content related to French-speaking groups in North America represents an example of this gap. However, the most significant concerns expressed by the committee were the following: That while the scope of the proposal concerns French-speakers across North America, there is not an explicit plan to engage with institutions or French-speakers outside of Québec. We appreciate the activities in your last Project Grant that capture this scope (i.e. “Major Figures or Events in the History of Franco-Americans”), and that you have been in contact with some remote institutions across North America, a clearer plan for engagement was critical to demonstrate the intended scope of your proposal. This could be captured, for example, by specifying specific partners or targeted regions across French-speaking North America that you plan to support by carrying out training or contribution events. That the general activities proposed may not be best suited to have sufficient impact on the stated goals of 1) improving and enriching contents related to Québec and French-speaking North America, and 2) increasing participation to Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Commons. Specifically, developing videos for single training/contributions events with several new partners may not result in sustained engagement from participants, which would also affect content improvements. The committee instead recommends more sustained training with existing partners or with a wider audience, such as in university courses. Next steps: Applicants whose proposals are declined are welcome to consider resubmitting your application again in the future. You are welcome to request a consultation with staff to review any concerns with your proposal that contributed to a decline decision, and help you determine whether resubmission makes sense for your proposal. 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. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 22:57, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Decision amended

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, 40,000 USD

Comments regarding this decision:
Due to circumstances around the pandemic and the availability of committee members during this round, more recent feedback from the committee has resulted in sufficient support for funding the current proposal. Your responses to more recent committee questions around the scope of the your work in North America, how videos would be used in conjunction with more in-depth engagement with partners, and highlighting the impact of your prior Project Grant were considered satisfactory in addressing committee questions and concerns.

Importantly, in this grant, we would like to see prioritization of your work engaging with French-speaking institutions and communities outside of Québec, which is consistent with the goals of this proposal as well as with the Wikimedia movement strategy with respect to knowledge equity. It may helpful, for instance, to connect with relevant user groups and affiliates for potential collaboration. For instance, reaching out to the Community Wikimedia User Group Haïti could help support both this project's goals as well as needs the user group may have as well. We know you and the FLG have already been contacted by institutions across North America eager to work with you, and we are excited to see the continued impact of your training and engagement with these partners and content experts to better represent knowledge and history of French speakers in continent.

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.

I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 18:30, 8 June 2020 (UTC)