Grants talk:Project/Rapid/OFWA/Summer Open School

Hi Flixtey and Andrews Lartey. Thank you for this grant request and your efforts to organize Summer Open School. It's an interesting idea to engage more students in the open knowledge movement! We have a few questions before we can more forward:

1. It seems like you are hoping to cover a lot of material in a very short time! Participants will really need to focus on one area if they want to dig in at all and build elementary skills.
2. How will you select the participants?
3. This event is broader than just the Wikimedia movement and it would make sense that the other partners also share in the cost of organizing the event. It's great that Creative Commons has contributed some funds for printing. Have you reached out to them to also support in other areas? What about Mozilla?
4. It would be helpful to have more information about your measures of success in the impact section. What do you hope participants will do as "ambassadors" at their schools -- Hold information sessions? Do trainings? Just talk about their experience with their classmates? Recruiting 50% of participants as contributors to Wikipedia and retain at least 5 as active editors, will take a lot of follow-up. In two days, they will receive exposure to the different projects and a little bit of hands-on time to explore, but they will not have enough time to build any real skills. This would come in follow-up sessions. What are your plans for engaging these students throughout the year in the different areas of interest?

Looking forward to your responses. Thanks, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 17:13, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi Alex Wang (WMF),

Thanks for your comments and kindly find our response below:

1. We will have a general core training for participants which will give them a brief overview of most of the Open Resource. The program further ensures that each participant undergoes just 2 specific trainings which is Wikipedia and Creative Commons. This will be achieved through rotational breakout sessions where participants in say peer group will attend the Wikipedia session on the first day and a Creative Commons session on the second day.
2. We created tickets on eventbrite for prospective participants to apply for spots towards the event. Participants have been selected based on their current status as students and ability to make contributions after the event. s at covering majority of the tertiary institutions which have not been covered yet. In view of this preference was been given to institutions without any activity or interventions yet.
3. The 2 day training will give participants a general overview on the open movement and several Wikimedia Projects being currently run in Ghana. However, the focus of the event as you may see from the program here, is highly focused on our major sponsors, Wikipedia and Creative Commons. PIVX will be giving out a complimentary cryptocurrency wallet of about $300 to participants to stir up the atmosphere and also their little contribution towards the program.
4. Our major measure of success is the awareness being created to these students as it solves one of underlying issues of our movement in Africa. For us bringing people into one location to learn about our movement and going back as even just (light) ambassadors is a win, as that may ripple through their respective institutions. Below are some concrete measures of success:

• Each participant (Ambassador) sharing their new impressions (changed misconceptions) about Wikipedia will increase usage and awareness
• Our minimum of 5 active editors will become community champions and lead initiatives on their campuses (setting up WikiClubs, organizing editathons, etc.)
• At least 50% of participants blog or organize an info session about WIkipedia and what was learnt at the Summer Open School.
• Create a buzz on social media during the training days, using hashtags.

We don’t expect ambassadors to go back and organize major workshops or editathons, but we expect to see them organize info sessions and share their experiences. They will also be a tool or inside-men to prepare the foundation for achieving our agenda of a WikiClub per each tertiary institution. Recruiting at least 50% (25) of the intended participants might seem huge but feasible to us. About 3 weeks ago we organized a one day event that saw about 12 participants and all have remained editors, with one participant producing about 10 articles. We know it's plausible based on our mode of training. So we know this is attainable looking at the number of just 5 active editors as against 50 participants. A whatsapp group will also be created to continue discussions of running smaller events on campuses of which, we will be there to support. Also participants will be encouraged to form clubs as that can be an effective way to gain more contributors and contributions.--Flixtey (talk) 19:21, 26 September 2017 (UTC)

Hi Flixtey. Thanks for your extensive replies -- they all make sense. The only other feedback is that I would caution against having such short editing training sessions. I'm not sure what your training model is, but I'd be curious to hear how the one-hour sessions work. Looking forward to hearing how the event goes and what kind of buzz and engagement it creates! Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:19, 27 September 2017 (UTC)