Grants talk:Project/Wiki In Africa/Wiki Loves Women 2018/Midpoint

Midpoint report submission date extended to 3 December 2018

Latest comment: 6 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Hello! As communicated over email, the project midpoint report will be expected by 3 December 2018. Thank you for communicating this swiftly. As always, if there are any further updates about your project, please contact projectgrants wikimedia.org. Best, Morgan Jue (WMF) (talk) 01:24, 17 November 2018 (UTC)Reply

Report accepted

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Dear Anthere and Islahaddow,

Thank you for submitting this Midpoint Report. I am approving it now, with the following comments:

I enjoyed reading this report. It was very easy to ready, well-organized and full of interesting details. Thanks for all your work on this.
I would love to know more about this: "Establishing multi-layered communications systems and task management using tools such as Trello and Google Drive." It's always challenging for core organizing teams to track multiple teams, and I've seen people try various systems with various success. Do you like your system so far? If so, perhaps you could make a learning pattern about it in your Final Report?
Under Midpoint Outcomes, the links for these two lines are broken: "1st online global drive held - Occupations Drive" and "Wiki Loves Women Event Toolkit started"
- When I click both, it says, "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name." The links in the section above work, so I've been able to see both pages. I would just fix the links myself, but I'm not totally sure why they aren't working.
On that topic, I'm so excited to see the toolkit coming together. I am looking forward to seeing it develop further. No doubt you are already thinking about this, but I very much hope you can get a handful of people to participate in user testing once it's ready for it, to make sure it is possible for someone to easily navigate and make use of the resources you have there. I went to a presentation recently about how WMF research staff go about user testing new spaces, and if it is of value to you, I can share some of what I learned (you are more technically oriented than me, I think, so my introductory understanding might be old hat to you, though).
Such an interesting idea to create a playlist on YouTube. I'm planning to watch it tonight!
I would love to know more about the Mind the Gender Gap in Africa Facebook group. Could you share more about how its working?
"most time is spent in a mentor session, with explanations of the more confusing elements that the teams are grappling with" -- Glad to hear that you are offering this support, and thank you for listing where you see patterns in the points of confusion.
- You probably know that Asaf offers a very good introductory training on Wikidata and has various learning resources he has developed. I encourage you to reach out to him about this, if you have not already done so, to the extent that training materials will help with your challenges. It sounds like part of it is just about getting events set up to offer training, not getting the right curriculum, though.
- Do you have the support you need with the Dashboard?
It's terrific how thoroughly and meticulously you are organizing all of your materials. I'm sure this helps makes it much more possible for multiple groups to track the various resources available to them.
Great that your are providing gender neutral vocabulary for labeling in Wikidata, via the Occupations page.
"The settling-in period took longer for one team to gel. Once we realised that tasks were falling behind, we raised the issue and it seems that a frank discussion and request for team-determined solutions was all it took to get the team on course. We wait to see that this change has been more positibe."
- Glad to hear this!
"we are late on the number of events that should have occured by now. Under our initial estimation, we believed that 10 events should have already been held. We are currently at 7." No problem, from the Foundation side of things, for what it's worth.
Interesting about Senegal! We can talk more about that later.

Our grants administrator will be in touch with you about your second disbursement.

Thank you for all your work on this project!

Warm regards,

Marti (WMF) (talk) 00:35, 16 March 2019 (UTC)Reply

Hello Marti

Some feedback on your comments

I would love to know more about this: "Establishing multi-layered communications systems and task management using tools such as Trello and Google Drive." It's always challenging for core organizing teams to track multiple teams, and I've seen people try various systems with various success. Do you like your system so far? If so, perhaps you could make a learning pattern about it in your Final Report?

I went through different options since we started. The shared google drive works so far. This is usually what we do for our projects and this works pretty well. In the past, we have also tried to use dropbox (and still do in some cases), but we encountered various issues with it. First people were not always familiar with dropbox and it was hard to get them adopt it. Second we had issues of poor synchronization (sometimes, stuff would not synchronize and we could not figure out why). Third, it became confusing what was on google drive and what was on dropbox. And fourth, the space available for free on dropbox is limited. So we now only keep dropbox to share big files, such as videos.

We also originally thought of using etherpad for note taking during meeting. And it actually turned out that it was not super practical because there is confusion between facts and discussions (and some of the newest could apparently not get their heads around that) and mostly, one can not notify someone and raise attention on a specific point. So we moved to a unique google doc on which all meeting notes are reported.

Trello was more a first time experiment in our projects. I used it in the past for other activities, and we are vaguely using it for Les sans pagEs Med. So I thought it was worth giving it a try for WLW. I think most of the team members did not know anything about that tool to start with (I had to invite many of them to create an account, so I am sure they were new to it). At first, there was a lot of paddling... but the teams got involved. Then at some point, it felt like no one was going to it and it was basically useless. So I slowed down updating it. TILL the moment when Erina told me that I needed to update the Trello ! And I realized her team was truly using it and finding it useful. Yeah ! So I am actively back on it !

Now, it is a mixed bag. Ug team seems to find it useful to have all info centralized there, and I think it is really useful for checklists as it allows to avoid forgetting about things. The Tz team is another story... only one member is going to it from time to time and does not seem to have yet really understood how to use it. But I think the issue is not so much Trello but a general disorganization of the Tz team and serious lack of motivation to do admin stuff. In short... I rather consider it a good experience and useful.

The third tool I strongly supported learning about and using is MailChimp (along with the creation of contact database), in particular to reach out and inform about events. At least one Ug team already knew about mailchimp and put effort in this and now they are sending awesome invitations. I am not aware Tz team adopted it yet :(

Initially, I proposed the team to use Slack for general communication between us. This is not the first time I suggest it (it was already suggested in former projects). Suffice it to say that it is a complete fail :) It simply... does not work. I am not quite sure why... but it looks like it is too complicated. To be fair... there are many messaging tools available on the market (messenger, telegram, what's app, slack etc.) and too many kills it... In the end, we finally adopted What's App because this is where they are...

I recently discovered that the Ug team is using by default What's App to communicate about their events. During events, they invite participants to join the a what's app channel and that seems to work. It is interesting because this is something I would never do in France... Anthere (talk)

Under Midpoint Outcomes, the links for these two lines are broken: "1st online global drive held - Occupations Drive" and "Wiki Loves Women Event Toolkit started" When I click both, it says, "Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name." The links in the section above work, so I've been able to see both pages. I would just fix the links myself, but I'm not totally sure why they aren't working.

Fixed. It lacked the w:en at the front. MediaWiki was bright enough to recognize it had to go to the English WP, but not bright enough to reconciliate the url entirely... Anthere (talk)

On that topic, I'm so excited to see the toolkit coming together. I am looking forward to seeing it develop further. No doubt you are already thinking about this, but I very much hope you can get a handful of people to participate in user testing once it's ready for it, to make sure it is possible for someone to easily navigate and make use of the resources you have there. I went to a presentation recently about how WMF research staff go about user testing new spaces, and if it is of value to you, I can share some of what I learned (you are more technically oriented than me, I think, so my introductory understanding might be old hat to you, though).

At least I am interested by this Marti. I will not know if I know about it until I have seen or heard :) Please send along. Anthere (talk)

As for the toolkit... we are late. There are reasons behind this... whilst I was doing context study... I found out that there is a fair number of kits around. Do not want to duplicate but rather to complement. My thinking on this is that many of the existing kits or checklist stays fairly general in nature. I have been talking to the teams about what they found most useful in what we brought along with us and what would still be missing. Usually, that's more about very specific elements to get them more efficient more quickly or with less effort (example, they need templates for participation certificate; or they need a template powerpoint presentation). Trying to build on that...

Such an interesting idea to create a playlist on YouTube. I'm planning to watch it tonight!

We try to update the list regularly when we see interesting things. But we badly need to promote that channel :))) Anthere (talk)

I would love to know more about the Mind the Gender Gap in Africa Facebook group. Could you share more about how its working?

I run it alone mostly... I advertised it little... I think I am scared to see it become like the WLA facebook group where many people I have never heard about have been accepted and it now feels like a public hallway. I prefer to keep this group small and cozy and safe. Myself or others are sharing links of stuff that might be interesting related to gender gap and Africa and wikimedia. I post most of the links but it sometimes happen than others also post some. The other gender/women facebook groups seem to have died and conversations moved to other channels. I think I will keep this group as a low profile quiet place slowly expanding it in the future... Anthere (talk)

"most time is spent in a mentor session, with explanations of the more confusing elements that the teams are grappling with" -- Glad to hear that you are offering this support, and thank you for listing where you see patterns in the points of confusion.

we try. Regular patterns that comes over and over again, project after project, are

the utter confusion of new comers with categories on commons... (and then putting event photos with real content photos...) or the tendency to simply put pictures on Facebook (rather than commons...). Each time to be re-explained... would be great to identify a clear cutting explanation of how to do that. I wonder if I may not end recording someone explaining it...
the difficulties to adopt the dashboard (but once adopted... yeah !). Requires quite a bit of hand holding, and rehearsal.
the difficulties of the team to get participations to actually CREATE and EDIT content during edit-a-thons (as opposed to being simply trained). This is an issue we try to tackle with les sans pagEs, but it requires constant attention to get people to edit rather than fumble around.
weird notions of copyright... that bump into arguments given by partnering institutions and ngo (in short, not knowledgeable enough on intellectual property rights)
willingness to organize events, but utter resistance to do any admin tasks related to events. Collecting receipts, recording expenses, noting who got how much and to pay for what... I have tried so many different approaches to simplify that as much as I could... yet not succeeding to raise interest in that necessary task. This is quite a bit frustrating to me because I am fairly sure that in the majority of cases, there is no abuse whatsoever, but only good people willing to make the world a better place (and oftenly actually making a difference). But still can not get a reporting and documentation I would consider enough to fairly report on how donors money is spent.

You probably know that Asaf offers a very good introductory training on Wikidata and has various learning resources he has developed. I encourage you to reach out to him about this, if you have not already done so, to the extent that training materials will help with your challenges. It sounds like part of it is just about getting events set up to offer training, not getting the right curriculum, though.

I know about Asaf awesome introductions. I also found some really good stuff around related to Wikidata.

Do you have the support you need with the Dashboard?

Yes, I think I do. But following closely the work done on Event Metrics nevertheless.

It's terrific how thoroughly and meticulously you are organizing all of your materials. I'm sure this helps makes it much more possible for multiple groups to track the various resources available to them.

I hope as well

Great that your are providing gender neutral vocabulary for labeling in Wikidata, via the Occupations page.

There are two associated good news.

First, Sam from Nigeria is doing a great and super active job. He is a precious asset, willing to lead projects himself. He was the one who set up the Afro Cine Months.
Second, the Denelezh tool is back up and working ! Very good tool to dig into our data.

"The settling-in period took longer for one team to gel. Once we realised that tasks were falling behind, we raised the issue and it seems that a frank discussion and request for team-determined solutions was all it took to get the team on course.

We wait to see that this change has been more positibe." - Glad to hear this!

Looks like the good pattern did not last...

"we are late on the number of events that should have occured by now. Under our initial estimation, we believed that 10 events should have already been held. We are currently at 7." No problem, from the Foundation side of things, for what it's worth.

Good :)

Interesting about Senegal! We can talk more about that later.

Lot's of stuff moving in Senegal, Benin and Guinée at the moment... Anthere (talk)

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