Grants talk:Project/May Hachem/HerStory

Project Grant proposal submissions due 30 November!

Thanks for drafting your Project Grant proposal. As a reminder, proposals are due on November 30th by the end of the day in your local time. In order for this submission to be reviewed for eligibility, it must be formally proposed. When you have completed filling out the infobox and have fully responded to the questions on your draft, please change status=draft to status=proposed to formally submit your grant proposal. This can be found in the Probox template found on your grant proposal page. Importantly, proposals that are submitted after the deadline will not be eligible for review during this round. If you're having any difficulty or encounter any unexpected issues when changing the proposal status, please feel free to e-mail me at cschillingwikimedia.org or contact me on my talk page. Thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 20:04, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, round 2 2018

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 2 2018 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community comments period, through January 2, 2019.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for round 2 2018 will occur January 3-January 28, 2019. Grantees will be announced March 1, 2018. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us.

--I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 16:30, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Some questions to clarify your proposal

I think this an interesting and potentially useful proposal. Can you provide some replies to some of the questions I have about it May_Hachem93?

• I am not clear on how you will know if you have met your goals. What does a successful implementation of this project look like, and how will we measure that?
• The online and offline activities you list are vague. Can you develop those steps more? For example, you state you will "Deliver an online training program to approximately 3000 non-Wikipedian volunteers" and also the project will involve "Editing 10,000 articles on Arabic Wikipedia starting March 2019 till March 2020" though it is not clear how these will be done, who will do these, and where they will occur. Can you clarify how the communities and participants will be targeted?
• How will office space, any fringe, and materials be covered in the budget?
• Can you clarify what other budget contributions or matches have already been attained?
• How will these project items be sustained once this funding ends?

I look forward to your replies to this. Thank you. --- FULBERT (talk) 20:32, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

@FULBERT:

Thank you for your questions, questions are always a good sign. :)

1. There are targets we want to reach by the end of the year including the number of articles and community reach out.
2. We do not only run offline workshops "that requires physical attendance" I have been working for 5 years on training non Wikipedian "new" volunteers" through online platforms like Facebook or WhatsApp due to the diversity of volunteers who come from different countries. So, this goal was to deliver online training on how to use and edit Wikipedia online and offline (through workshops). I added plenty of links of blogs to the proposal about the work I have been doing for 5 years from Wikimedia blog and the UN Women website, I would love to invite you to read. The culture is different, we have huge human resources so we have plenty of options to implement ideas and run workshops and a huge capacity to teach volunteers how to edit Wikipedia.
3. I mean by "targeted communities" Arab communities or in other words "Arab countries" who can speak and edit in Arabic because we have a huge knowledge gap in Arabic. This is my main focus on the project grant.
4. How can I reach the target of 10,000? Volunteers! I have a page on Facebook with the project's name and I get more than 1000 applications everytime I open a call for volunteers. I run events with up to 500 volunteers! The project is in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon. We have the human capacity, last September we edited 1,000 articles with the World Food Programme in one month about the SDG2 "Zero Hunger". Also, I have a team of 25 trainers who are qualified to deliver "How to Edit Wikipedia" training, the middle layer between me and the attendees.
5. I mentioned earlier in the project proposal that this project is funded by the UN Women, they pay for fringes, renting events venues and everything but they do not pay me, they only pay for logistics, now I am expanding the project with them so I need the support from Wikimedia Foundation. Also, this project is a partnership between the UN Women and Wikimedia, so both parties are involved. For the past three years, the UN Women only has been funding it, but now it is getting bigger and more regional so that's why I am asking for the foundation's support to be able to run it on a wider scale.
6. After the fund ends, I will apply for a new one :) but at least the outcome of the knowledge produced will stay forever. I am also exploring external funding from UN agencies and corporate sponsors, like I did last year, I got funds from WFP, UNESCO, the Embassy of Canada in Egypt, the Embassy of Sweden in Egypt, Rabat, Iraq. NGOs like: Fe-Male. The private sector in Tunisia: Vermeg. We may also apply for additional funding from Wikimedia Foundation and possibly Wikimedia chapters if this does not cover the full cost.
7. I will invite you to read more about the project, I love your questions! I am also happy that I have this chance to share details with you. Please ask me more questions :) Thank you!May Hachem93 (talk) 17:11, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for this reply May_Hachem93, this is all very helpful for more fully understanding this important work. --- FULBERT (talk) 18:25, 12 January 2019 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for May Hachem/HerStory

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?	8.0
(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?	5.8
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	6.3
Additional comments from the Committee: Fits with strategic direction of knowledge equity by focusing on both the gender gap and areas outside Europe and North America. There is potential for online impact when it comes to improving content however few details are provided in terms of editor retention for the long-term. Project’s sustainability seems to depend on continued grant funding. Very high impact potential. Project is ticking three cases: underrepresented content, underrepresented gender and underrepresented countries, thus a perfect fit with strategic priorities. Looks like the project is targeting building a stable community of women editors in Arab World that should be sustainable in itself once the grant ends. Gender equality, especially in an Arabic context, is an important area for Wiki project expansion, and is consistent with knowledge equity that would make a positive impact given the size of identified articles that will be edited. It perfectly fits with the strategic direction of Wikimedia and has excellent potential to make adequate progress in that direction. It integrates and highlights the areas where Wikimedia’s strategic direction fits with the UN SDG’s within the relevant context, by making use of ICT. Most projects of this scale often come up with vague online targets, but I’m delighted to see they have a specific objective of contributing to 10,000 articles over a period of one year. Though this seems to be an ambitious target to achieve, with the volunteer base they have and seeing their past work, I am confident that they’ll be able to reach this target. Even if not 100%, probably close to it. I appreciate May putting much effort to design this project, but I would recommend to scale down the project's activities, as they seem a bit ambitious, considering the fact she is the only one working full time on this project. Another WiR position so not especially innovative, however organizing edit-a-thons at larger scale (250+ people vs 30 people) is an interesting model. Beyond number of articles, little to no specific goals/measures are provided; would be nice to see success defined outside of this, perhaps with more of a focus on long-term participation and engagement. The approach of building such a huge network of thousands of volunteers is rather new, and somewhat risky. However, measures of success and targets are well-documented, thus I am pretty confident this project can succeed. This appears to involve iterative learning, and as such seems well-thought out and based on previously successful endeavors. The project takes a unique approach to address the issue of Gender Gap on Wikipedia. Though it is a bit unclear about what May has learned from the two rapid grants that she worked on for this project, it is clear that the previous experience of working on several such activities will be put to use to minimize the potential risks. I would have suggested having one more paid personnel (at least part-time) working on this project along with May, for the administrative part, so that she can invest more time in partnerships and training. 10,000 articles in one year seems very ambitious but based on previous experiences (1,000 articles in one month with the World Food Programme) not necessarily out of reach for project. Budget seems fine but would like more info on activities given this is essentially a full-time WiR position. Nice to see significant in-kind contribution from project partners. The project can be accomplished and has a reasonable associated plan. However, there is a major concern about the budget: the requested salary seems too high for Egypt. Looking at Egyptian salaries and taking positions like "Senior Project Manager in IT", I keep getting medians around 8-12 kUSD / year, and highest percentiles around 20 kUSD / year. Of course there are taxes that can be higher for self-employed, but 43 kUSD / year is an extremely high figure for Egypt. It might be justified if this role would involve relocation to UN offices, say, in NY or Geneva but there is no evidence that such move is needed. It appears the grantee will be able to execute this grant based on the description and the supports provided. The proposer has a lot of experience working on such projects, both in the context of Wikimedia and outside the movement. Her experience working with INGOs like UN, UN Women, WWF, etc. demonstrated her ability to lead the projects. As suggested in one of my above comments, the goals seem to a slightly sharp, I would recommend not have focused on too many things, which may compromise the quality of work invested on other targets. Reasonably good community engagement, well-identified target community and good diversity targets. Honestly I would love to see more participation from volunteers in other Arabic countries so that it would not be a one-person project but a project that could rely on local organisers in other countries, however, this project can succeed without it. The community seems to support this, including numerous partners and affiliates. The project has lot of partners who have been already supporting this project. The project demonstrates support from the community members and also affiliates. I'd like to know more about the specific activities of this project - currently I think this gets lost in all the information provided about partnerships. For me the online training is particularly of interest. What form will this take? Will it be 1 online course/set of modules for 3,000 participants, or various online sessions targeted at different groups of participants? Will the training be made available under an open license and something that can be easily adapted by others? The proposal supposes that the article of women are encyclopedic only because the topic is "gender gap". This is quite critical for an encyclopedia. It is not clear how the selection of bios is done. I'm not confident in the sucess of Wikimedia-in-Residency where the host (here, the UN) does not participate in the funding of the project. My main concern is compensation for the project manager. The proposed amount of compensation is way too high for Egypt, thus I would support any reasonable market salary for such experience (which would probably bring this grant somewhere around 20-25kUSD). If May would have to relocate to more expensive NY or Geneva to work with UN, I think there should be some explanation on what would be the benefits of that. Except for the budget, I am comfortable with supporting this project. This seems to be a welcome project for funding. It was a delightful experience to read this proposal, know more about the project and realize the important work HerStory has been doing all this time. This project will empower them to engage in larger model. My suggestion would be to rethink about the number of goals you are focusing at, and scale them down a bit or maybe remove a few of them. This will help us to focus more on essential goals with substantial time being invested and also prevent burnout of people taking part in this project.

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 March 1st, 2019.

Questions? Contact us.

I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:35, 6 February 2019 (UTC)