Grants talk:Project/Global Open Initiative/Wikidata GLAMs Campaign Ghana

Budget

After doing a few events with the team i would suggest revising the budget to include either a TV with HDMI inputs or a projector. Often 20-30 people crowd around a laptop during demos. I have not read the RFP but if equipment purchases allowed I highly suggest this revision. Jgmac1106 (talk)

Wikidata outputs

I don't understand what you mean by importing 10k "bibliographic records" into Wikidata. Do you mean authority files, which would become new biographic items? Nemo 14:33, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi Nemo, we will be adding new publications currently hosted by the University of Ghana as new Wikiata items. —M@sssly^✉ 15:42, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer. What kind of publications? What's the purpose of having them on Wikidata? Is it for WikiCite? Nemo 15:58, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Yes, this is part of WikiCite. Most of the publications are doctoral theses, and some publications from the departments. —M@sssly^✉ 16:14, 23 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) 21:55, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

In line with other projects, and seems to be high potential

In general, this project is in line with the kinds of developments we are seeing in other parts of the world of working with GLAM institutions and other authoritative sources on data, and publishing them on Wikidata. We have seen very successful projects like this emmerge in Europe, North America, and India in the last couple years. Moreover, they have proved to be very effective in the implementation of these projects so far -- so I have high trust in it being a success. We reviewed another project as part of the WikiCite intiative recently, so pinging @LWyatt (WMF): for visibility. Also, @Asaf (WMF): who pays attention to Wikidata capacities in the movement and emerging communities. Astinson (WMF) (talk) 16:04, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Please complete survey for your Project Grants proposal

Dear Global Open Initiative,

We have sent you a survey link to the email address you provided in this Project Grants proposal. We need you to open the email and fill out the survey as soon as possible. We have emailed you twice without response (on March 20 and March 23), and we are not sure if you still wish for your proposal to be reviewed. If we do not receive your survey response by March 31, 2020, we will mark your proposal withdrawn.

We hope to hear from you!

Warm regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 02:38, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

Dear Mjohnson (WMF), sorry for the delayed response. We have filled the survey as requested, thank you.Celestinesucess (talk) 14:50, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Global Open Initiative/Wikidata GLAMs Campaign, Ghana

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?	7.8
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	7.0
(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?	8.0
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	7.0
Additional comments from the Committee: Usual GLAM project, but it's difficult to evaluate the material. It can be charged using a bot in short time, while here it's more an educational project because there is a training to do. Considering the high budget I expected more. The project fits with Wikimedia's strategic priorities and its results will have a lasting impact on Wikidata. I am glad to hear that the organizations are allowing volunteers to retrieve the data even though the organizations are not posting the information online. This shows great possibilities for new organizations to engage with Wikipedia/Wikidata in the community! Significant potential to improve Ghanaian content on Wikidata and build capacity about the knowledge and use of Wikidata (and open linked data) with Wikimedia communities and partners in Ghana. The format of the project is quite old and not innovative. The project is more of iterative nature as similar activities in different countries have already been done. The risks seem low as far as on-line activities are concerned. However due to COVID-19 all in-person events are unlikely to happen this year. In addition it is not clear what GHS 44,000 allocated for supposedly on-line editathons will be spent for? This project is not innovative, but this does not reduce the impact of this project. We still need to have regular outreach, training, and record preservation done. Has all the potential to be a significant project working with a range of educational, government and GLAM partners. Would like to see more information about plans to monitor and evaluate the project. In addition to more about how learning from similar projects will be adapted and how this project's learning will be shared with the wider community especially affiliates in Africa. The on-line activities can be accomplished in 12 months.The budget for on-line events and WiR is realistic but all expenditures related to workshops should be removed. The participants have necessary qualifications and skills. This community has proven their engagement and outreach skills time and time again. I hope they grow their group of organizers so they can spread this great work. Very obvious that the application is from an experienced project team who are committed members of the Wikimedia community. However, the budget is very general with no separation of what I assume are professional fees, equipment costs, activity costs, travel and other expenses. The cost per events seems relatively high - can this be explained because it includes professional fees for a trainer? Will the partners be making in-kind donations nations towards the project, for example, venue and internet/data, will these costs be entirely covered by the grant? Glad to see a WiR post at the Parliament of Ghana will research be their only role? For how many days/weeks will they be contracted? As a commentor in the talk page highlighted - are there any equipment costs or have these been incorporated into the budget? There is a target community and community support and the project supports diversity. I am excited about the 16 sessions, and I do hope there is a way even if the pandemic continues that you all can hold workshops. Perhaps would you all consider 8 online workshops, or other workshops just teaching people about Wikipedia/Wikidata? Application has strong support from the Wikimedia community in Ghana and a project team taken from the local community which is great to see. I would have more about is the potential to ensure that content generated is reflective of the local languages - both in how the project works with their major partners and the aim to deliver workshops across the country. I don't see a huge impact despite the comment in Talk Page because the data are those of the politicians but will increase mainly Wikidata. Quite skeptical also on the description of the project which indicates to me a some kind of inexperience. Although the activity is online, there are still several items in the budget that refer to travel (travel costs, hotel and so on). I am always perplexed on the calculation of the cost of human resources: how are they calculated? For how many months? What do they include? These questions are important to show a certain fairness of treatment also on other projects that instead indicate at least the cost per month of the Wikipedian in residence. I support this project but all money planned for in-person events should be removed as it is unlikely that they will take place this year. In addition, it should be clarified what GHS 44,000 intended for ediathons will be spent for. I would only recommend fully funding this program if there were going to be workshops in some capacity (online, asynchronous video recordings) regardless of the pandemic. Otherwise I would recommend funding with reduced funding. It isn't clear from the proposal about what kind of awareness they are planning to do that requires travel and hotel accommodation. 80,000Ghs (~14,814USD) was budgeted for this purpose. If this is a kind of offline awareness, it would violate WMF's response to COVID-19. If they still which to proceed with the awareness campaign, the proposal and budget should be revised to reflect this. The budget for this campaigned should be reduced by at least 70% and should be broken down to show the exact component the Project Grant would fund. 1000GHS (185USD) was budgeted for paperwork, it isn't clear from the proposal what component of paperwork they intended to fund with this budget. 38500GHS (7130USD) was budgeted for Wikidatian-in-Residence at Parliament of Ghana library. It isn't clear from the budget the number of hours per day (and per week) this person would be working. This should be broken down. It is not clear from the proposal if the edit-a-thons are online. This should be clarified the budget should be broken down either way but we may recommend funding for offline edit-a-ton. 10000GHS (1851USD) was budgeted to prepare batch upload of bibliographic records to Wikidata. It isn't clear from the proposal what the intend to fund with this budget. Any component they wish to fund with this budget should be broken down. I am not sure what component of QuickStatements Technical they intend to fund with 4000GHS (741 USD) In general, I believe offline events would play a key role in the success of this proposal if funded. WMF would not fund any offline activities in line with the Foundation's response to COVID-19 and I am not sure the group could achieve optimal results if funded without offline events. I'd not be recommending funding for this proposal at this time. Unsure whether the budget clearly reflects the travel, equipment and data costs necessary to delivery 16 events across the country as well as responding to opportunities arising for the partnerships. The budget may need to be increased.

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) 22:50, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Offline Events Removed and Budget Updated

Dear Mjohnson (WMF) and members of the project committee, thank you so much for all the comments, questions and suggestions. We have removed offline activities and updated the budget to address many of the concerns which have been raised. Secondly, aside our advisor, Mohammed Sadat Abdulai, we are in contact with Liridon Selmani. With these two, and possibly others from the global community who have experience with this kind of project, we will ensure our team and the six Wikidatian-in-Residence are fully equipped with the needed skills to execute the task at hand in order for us to attain our goals. Celestinesucess (talk) 17:13, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Round 1 2020 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, 119,470 GHS

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to support Global Open Initiative’s efforts to establish and further develop partnerships with government and academic institutions to improve content on Wikidata. The project represents a good opportunity to make improvements to Ghanian content on Wikidata and develop capacity of mission-aligned institutions to work collaboratively with your organization. The committee emphasizes that it will be important to plan how to involve and encourage participation given that the data you will be working with will not be machine readable.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
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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) 19:00, 29 May 2020 (UTC)