Grants talk:Simple/Applications/AfroCROWD/2018-2019

Questions from the SAPG Committee

From Chinmayi S K

Dear AfroCROWD team,

Firstly congratulations on the excellent work you are doing. I am super happy to see the work grow stronger every year. I have one question regarding your budget that i did not find answers to in the application. There is a request for 7 scholarships for wikimania ( I recognise that two of them are being paid for by Whose Knowledge). Could you elaborate on this for me, will this scholarships go towards staff or volunteers ? If to the volunteers how would they be awarded? --Chinmayisk (talk) 21:49, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

I just want to echo Chinmayisk's question. Having > 30% of your budget for travel is a red flag. Without proper justification it makes sense to recommend reducing it significantly. Alleycat80 (talk) 23:01, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback. As you can see from the grant request, a lot of the funding is going towards awarding internal scholarships. We saw when we had the honor of being a keynote at WikiConference North America, and presented at Wikimania, Montreal, that it had a very positive effect on the AfroCROWD editors we brought with us. The proximity made it more possible, and the effect of their attendance was clear. The AfroCROWDers we were able to bring with us became very active in the conference and it gave them greater incentive to be even more active once we returned.

They spoke on a panel in the conference, lead two unconference discussions, contributed to radio program outreach, another was a librarian with whom we helped lead a librarian training online with Web Junction and the OCLC. They have also became Wikipedia coaches (what we call volunteers who help beginners start). Two of them are now on the road to leading events themselves as one has helped lead an edit-a-thon outside of the city and another is due to lead her first in June. They have even became more active in other Wikimedia community events like Wikipedia Day where they volunteered and spoke at the lightning talks. So as you can see, their participation at the conferences were an important catalyst to their deeper involvement as volunteers. Their participation added to the greater Wikimedia community, not just AfroCROWD. Being that this Wikimania will be the first in South Africa, this is exactly the kind of event that AfroCROWD was made for, and of which it should naturally be a part. This support would contribute greatly towards that. Shanluan (talk) 21:04, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Afrocrowd was created specifically to address an observation by a longstanding wikipedian who is not from our community that there were very few people from the African Diaspora and specifically Black Americans who ever attended Wikimedia conferences such as Wikimania, outside of foundation staff. The conclusion of last year’s movement Strategy sessions in Berlin was that, in order to reflect the sum of all knowledge, Wikipedia cannot just reflect the knowledge of White westerners. The movement pledged to strive towards knowledge equity and to reflect all non-western knowledge by 2030. There are many people who live in the west and in the Americas who are not white, and those include people of African descent. The problem of the marginalization of people of African descent in the Americas and Europe has been a central human and civil rights issue in the Americas for at least 3 centuries and the United Nations has gone as far as to name this the decade for people of African Descent, to raise awareness on this issue. So Afrocrowd would not be doing its job if it did not militate for the visibility of Afrodescendants at global wikipedian conferences like Wikimania.

But to compound all this, this year the conference is happening in Africa itself. If you know anything about the history of the transatlantic slave trade which populated the Americas with the ancestors of today’s Afrodescendants, you would understand that African descendants have, ever since their forcible removable from the shores of Africa, considered good relations with African nations a crucial part of the process of healing from chattel slavery. This is made plain by the fact that it is precisely among Afrodescendants in the Americas such as W.E.B. Dubois (USA), Marcus Garvey (Jamaica), Anténor Firmin (Haiti) and Bénito Sylvain (Haiti) to name a few, that panafricanism was born. These intellectuals created panafricanism in an effort to coalesce with natural allies in their ancestral homelands in order to tackle the problem of systemic racism and anti-blackness with which their countries and peoples were plagued. This is so because chattel slavery encouraged the forgetting of the knowledge their ancestors brought with them from Africa and and stripped them of their ancestral identity, names, religion, culture, spiritual beliefs etc.

So we are not asking for these scholarships on a whim or because we like free airline tickets but because we in fact believe that it will reflect poorly on this movement if in its quest to bridge the multicultural gap it does not facilitate the process of willing and active Afrodescendants piecing together the memory fragments and lost knowledge resulting from the transatlantic slave trade. If in this movement Cascadia and Catalans can actualize their utopian projections of themselves often with funding from the Foundation, then hopefully so can Afrodescendants who see PanAfricanism 2.0 as a key part of their actualization.

Now moving on to the nuts and bolts of the issue. We believe that this Wikimania has attracted more applications from Afrodescendants in our part of the world than any. However to a ONE, they ALL have been rejected for these scholarships. This includes applicants from Afrocrowd and from the Black Lunch Table. So we are asking for these scholarships to be able to send in priority, those who we know applied and got rejected. Two of them have already been able to get funding by applying to attend the Decolonizing the Internet conference by Whose Knowledge which will take place in Capetown before Wikimania. They are two amazing voices, but we believe that is not enough at such a historic gathering and one of particular importance to our community. We are asking for the 5 additional ones to be able to send Afrocrowd’s Program Manager and the remainder of the ones who applied and got rejected.

To your point about 30% of our budget going towards travel, this travel does not just involve Sherry or me from Afrocrowd headquarters but also Kai from LA and Kelly from UK and other Afrocrowders. Most of it allows for us to actually meet in person to hold administrative meetings where we discuss the future of our org. Note that we have not asked for much for the UK and LA affiliates in this grant, other than the travel. This is because we are at the very beginnings of the formalization of Afrocrowd affiliates. The African Diaspora is not confined to one country or one continent and so we do not see the requests for travel funds as out of the ordinary for an org of our nature.

I also note that it is not uncommon in the movement for user groups to ask for funds for travel to wikimania in their annual budgets. Aliceba (talk) 16:04, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

From Ido

Hey AfroCROWD team, thanks for submitting this well crafted proposal! Your work is unique in nature and you're bringing forward voices (this year, quite literally) that would not have been heard.

A few comments and questions:

• As stated above, although I can theoretically see value in sending so many people to Wikimania SA, I tend to regard the event as one have a low ROI for actually participating, save for the experience. Having this, and other events that might be more useful, be 30% of your budget is worrisome to me.

• AfroCROWD is based in NY, and soon in LA / UK. How come the only funding received is from WMF? I would encourage you to diversify funding sources. It will help you both in (perhaps) adding staff and operations, and in lining up allies for this project.

Are you saying that we should not be eligible at this stage to get baseline funding to the tunes of less than $60,000 from the foundation? I can see your point if we were asking for $1 million but I don’t follow your logic when it comes to the budget we presented. This does not mean that we don’t foresee ourselves fundraising from other sources in the future. But I don’t think marginalized communities in the US and the UK are less deserving of foundation funding than communities in the global south --which a good proportion of us descend from anyway. Part of the marginalization that we face in the US and the UK is precisely a problem of access to resources, which in turn translates into the multicultural gap on Wikipedia in both content and editors. Aliceba (talk) 16:09, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

• Do you track analytics around the newsletter? specifically, open rate?

Interesting question. The answer is that we do. The newsletter is read by hundreds of people every month. We have also landed partnerships through this outreach, not just attendees.

Overall, we send targeted emails of between 1,766 unique email addresses to an average of 2,409 depending on the campaign, with an average open rate of about 13% and a high of 21.35%.

This means the newsletter has grown from 233 targeted recipients and 35 opens in the first newsletter we did of this type in September, 2015, to our most recent newsletter in May, 2018 with 1,769 targeted recipients and 278 opens (to date, may grow by end of week as it just went out).

According to a recent study by Constant Contact our average open percentage is roughly on par with training industry campaigns, and ahead of technology related or public relations and marketing industry email campaigns (Constant Contact industry estimates as of 2017) . Please note that I didn't include non-newsletter email blasts or updates that are sent after the main newsletter goes / reminders. Shanluan (talk) 15:04, 17 May 2018 (UTC).

• Metrics for this grant seem lower than before. I might be mistaken - is my observation correct? and if so, why is that?

Alleycat80 (talk) 23:16, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

We only had 2 editathons for the first part of the year, but that went up quite a bit in the second half.The two editathons in the first part of the year did not yield many on-wiki metrics for a variety of reasons. The first was held at the BLERD conference, and as often happens at conferences, participants had enough attention span for the training but not for the editing part. we do not regret participating because we made many contacts at local universities and potential future partners on that day. The second editathon held in the first part of the year was the Street Culture editathon which attracted mostly about two dozen middle school students and their teachers. In order to keep them motivated we had them contribute edits as groups under their teacher’s accounts and, as often happens with teens, one or two groups did not have the attention span to actually press save on their edits. However we are proud to have introduced youth from marginalized parts of the city to Wikipedia on that day and shown them that street culture is also welcome on Wikipedia, when properly drafted and referenced.

By the end of the year, we will have met our goals. We focused this year on awareness and outreach and less on just editathons. We were also more experimental, stretching how we do things to include oral history, group work and programs that include panel discussions, children and conferences on important topics. The result has been good. We grew our audience, and partnerships, and have expanded within the movement. Shanluan (talk) 15:10, 17 May 2018 (UTC) and Aliceba (talk) 16:06, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

We explained in our grant application for this cycle that we would hold less editathons this year than in past cycles. Until this cycle we held one editathon or more a month. We knew that we could not attend to other tasks such as laying the groundwork to welcome UK and LA Afrocrowders, creating and cultivating ties with African Wikimedians, and most importantly, shooting and creating lesson plans for our training video which we expect to release by the end of the year.

I think Sherry explained that we will meet our goals for on-wiki metrics by the end of the cycle.

A member of the committee asks below why we had so many partnerships. That is because if you look past on-wiki metrics, the abundance in partnerships is a metric of the degree to which we take outreach and networking with important cultural groups and institutions in our target group to heart. We think it is important to spread the word about how to edit Wikipedia and why it is important to do so among Afrodescendants, in hopes of helping bridge the multicultural gap on Wikipedia and in the Wikimedia movement and in accordance to the movement’s strategic goals regarding knowledge equity by 2030. Aliceba (talk) 16:12, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

From Philip

Hi AfroCROWD, I'm very glad you decided to submit a proposal and really like your approach for supporting the African Diaspora! Adding to the questions my colleagues already asked:

• General
  • Why is the fiscal sponsorship of NYC necessary?

Afrocrowd decided to not continue functioning as a program of WIkimedia NYC because although the latter is probably one of the chapters with the largest global footprints by the very nature of the richness of the population of NYC, we are growing beyond the chapter, much like Art + Feminism grew beyond the WMNYC and WMDC chapters. We also wanted Afrocrowd to be self-determining, as we are devoted to the empowerment of our target group and we believe that we should outline our own strategic vision as a self-determining group. WMNYC volunteers will continue to support our NYC events and I will remain on the board of WNYC. Our events will also count towards WMNYC metrics since they have and continue to support us and the the synergies and ties between the two orgs endure.Aliceba (talk) 16:16, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

• Staff
  • The metrics you aim for by June sound reasonable despite being pretty vague, but I don't see any metrics for the whole year. If you're not focusing on articles created/edited at your events (the low number at least suggests that), why not pick a different metric that measures your activities better?
  • Translation kits: Is that something where you are paying contractors to translate and subtitle videos? Have you thought about crowdsourcing this instead?

I don’t think a training video can be very effective with subtitles. There is a good chance that a trainee may lose interest if they have to read subtitles, especially on a topic like editing Wikipedia. I know I would. So optimally, in order to be effective, we will have to either do a mixture of voice over and whole new video shoots in the target languages. That does not mean that we cannot also seek out crowdsourced subtitling while waiting for the final productions. But we do not believe that subtitling alone will be satisfactory as a final product. Aliceba (talk) 16:18, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

• Conferences
  • What exactly is your aim when attending these conferences? As Ido and Chinmayi have mentioned, Wikimania tends to be a conference where the interests of attendees are very diverse, making it difficult to come away with tangible results. At the same time, you state that you want to send "one or two" people to Wiki Indaba (when your budget reckons that two are going), which considering the focus of your work, would make more sense to intensify your work with attendees of that conference.

Conferences have been the birthplace of a lot of great partnerships for us. It is also a setting that has allowed us to be a deeper part of the movement and motivate our volunteers who have become more involved this year after going to Wikimania Montreal for example. We connected to Sweden's organizers at the Diversity Conference which spawned our involvement in helping to organize with them for the WikiGap campaign at the United Nations which resulted in a great event, great awareness of the movement among UN members and many articles. We developed partners from that same conference for other edit-a-thons as well, including connecting with other editors on translation based work. At Wikimania we connected to the organizer for Wikitongues which has grown into a key partnership for several of our programs.

During Wiki Diversity we I connected with a Bias specialist who happened to be my roommate who during Wikipedia Day in New York we brought back as a key speaker for the Wikipedia Day conference in New York. Indaba has proved to be a very important connecting point as well, and I agree, it would be wonderful to get more Afrocrowders to be able to participate somehow. Indaba connected us to organizers from several African countries, especially Ghana where it took place and we me Felix for the first time. With Felix we partnered to have a video link at two of our events that year, and a virtual editathon in which, while not a perfect connection for our first time, we also had a connection via Google Hangouts, which inspired participation by Afrocrowders, and I have heard more feedback from others, including someone at the foundation and elsewhere in the world, that just knowing that this virtual editathon and partnership happened was inspiring. One person was a librarian who decided to become active in Afrocrowd because of that event which lead to her working with us to lead and OCLC training session with Web Junction and become a Wiki coach.

We also deepened this connection at Wikimedia conference, Berlin recently and are working on an international Month of African Cinema. The conference also brought us Kelly and Kai. The list of advantages to these in person events at the conferences goes on and on. Through these events, we have also been able to give back to the movement through helping in strategy development, starting collaborative projects, making helpful presentations and serving as keynote speakers. I am not sure what someone meant by low ROI, because the bursts of innovation and creativity, partnerships and expanded opportunities and possibilities they have brought (and I assume not just for us) have been expansive and very important to what we have accomplished within the movement. Shanluan (talk) 20:18, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Please see my long answer to Chinmayi S K above on this topic. Sherry will also add her two cents here shortly. Aliceba (talk) 16:54, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

• • Does your budget also already include scholarships for next year's Wikimania? Would it lower costs if you could plan these kind of trips long-term, instead of waiting for the budget until June?

We are happy to add scholarships for next year's Wikimania to this year’s budget. I am not exactly sure how this will lower costs but it would certainly help in terms of advance planning. Please advise and will we add a line item for that in the budget. Aliceba (talk) 16:21, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

• Partnerships
  • Are the lists of partnerships with institutions you actually work with right now or you would like to work with them in the future?

This is a combination of existing and future partnerships. Most of these partners solicit us as opposed to the other way around. This is a result of the outreach work we do. Most of these partners seek to partner with us about once a year on an editathon or by inviting us to speak on a panel. We can’t help it if we’re popular :-P and this is how we know our outreach is working! Aliceba (talk) 16:27, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

• • The number of partnerships you are working with/aiming for is very high considering your staff and volunteer resources. Especially with other Wikimedia organisations, do you think that you can handle this number of co-operations and commit enough resources to make this worthwhile for both sides?

Plainly speaking, yes. Please see my above answer. We have listed all those who have solicited us and some projected collaborations may not materialize but we are certainly going to take a stab at working with most. Aliceba (talk) 16:28, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Please don't hesitate to ask for clarification if one of the questions seems confusing :-) Best, Philip Kopetzky (talk) 20:35, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

@Aliceba and Shanluan: Thanks for your detailed answers, they do help in understand what you do/are planning to do a lot better. Sorry for not getting back to you sooner on adding an item for next year's Wikimania, but those budgetary aspects are best discussed with Delphine and Winifred. We can revisit this topic at this year's Wikimania or later on, when it's clear as to how this year worked out. I was hoping to spend more time on your proposal, but unfortunately there were a few other proposals that needed reviewing, sorry for that too. :-( Best, Philip Kopetzky (talk) 21:14, 22 May 2018 (UTC)

Request for objectives in your program section

Hello, AfroCROWD team! Thank you for putting together this fine application in a short period of time. We greatly appreciate the work you have done to explain your activities. This is the first APG you have done on your own, and there is some additional information that we need to move forward with a decision.

I see that you have included your grants metrics in the metrics worksheet as requested. Thank you for that. I see also that you have included specific goals and milestones in the detailed strategic plan in the first section, and that is very useful to understanding what you plan to do and when. This part of the application also gives useful context to the strategy behind your work.

You have also included four "program areas" here. These are very interesting, as I think they highlight some of the ways that your work is evolving in the current year and will continue to evolve next year. It was useful for me to get a clear picture of how you understand your work falling into these four different areas. Yet, there are no goals objectives included in these program descriptions, and so it is not possible for me to understand what you are aiming to achieve through each program area and how you will know if you are achieving it.

My request is that you add a specific objective to each of the program areas, which can include any relevant targets for each program area. The objective statement should tell us what you plan to achieve and how you will know if you are achieving it.

Do you think you could add that information to each program area in the next day or two?

Hi Winifred, thank you for your fantastic feedback. We will be adding goals to these sections. Do you see a difference between goals and objectives here? Thanks Shanluan (talk) 19:49, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Yikes! My mistake, Sherry, I should have used objectives in both cases above. Correction in strikethrough. Dana from the learning team is going to help us out with this today :) Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 21:03, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Many thanks! Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 14:59, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Question about your budget

Hello again, AfroCROWD colleagues! I also have a question about your budget.

I do encourage you to respond to the committee members here about your need for Wikimania Scholarships, but from my point of view the rationale for that is already clear. I did, however, want to ask about the scholarships budgeted fro Wiki Indaba and WikiConference North America.

Usually, scholarships for participants are provided for these events through the Event Grant the organizers receive, and so it is not necessary for participants to budget for these in their APGs. Is there a reason why you don't think scholarships will be provided for these participants in the coming year?

Alas, we did not get one of those for Indaba last year, although one of us applied, and we are working on getting a message to the organizers of Indaba at the foundation why our presence there is important, but until then, we want to cover our bases and ask to “pay our own way”. We realize this is absurd, because either way, the funds will come from the foundation. We do think that African descendants in the movement should not be left out of African Wikimedian gatherings, especially in light of the fact that copious numbers of white westerners attend that conference. As of now it does not appear to us like the otherwise evident historical connection between Africans and African descendants are either known or valued by the decision makers at the foundation who give the final okay for scholarships to Indaba. So until the conference itself gets decolonized, we are trying to start a dialogue on why our attendance is important and asking for our own funding to go. By doing that, we are in theory not taking away from the budget dedicated to continental Africans, who we realize get few resources from the Foundation as is, compared to other continents. We discussed our desire to go there going forward with Katherine in Berlin and she seemed receptive and promised to help us get the message across that our presence there is logical and indeed valuable. We have also cleared this with key African Wikimedians who support our presence there.Aliceba (talk) 18:12, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Finally, please remove the $500 contingency from your budget, since I will add a mandatory 10% contingency to your overall grant and I do not wish to double count this. Please also take a moment to resolve the few questions I left in the budget document using the comments feature. These are just to help me get enough clarity to approve your budget as is when the decision about your grant is made.

Done. Aliceba (talk) 18:00, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Best,

Winifred

Your point is well-heard on the Indaba conferences. If we can end up getting you the funding through the proper channels then we can find a way to reuse or repurpose the funds. Thanks for addressing the point on the contingency. Now you have a great big contingency which may help us to address future cash flow issues like the one you are experience around Wikimania right now, should they arise :) Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 21:13, 17 May 2018 (UTC)

Simple APG committee recommendation

Committee recommendations

Funding recommendations: AfroCROWD is a new applicant to Simple APG, although this project has received funding in the past as part of Wikimedia New York City’s APG. For the upcoming grant period, WMNYC will act as AfroCROWD’s fiscal sponsor. AfroCROWD is requesting 59,274 USD for 12 months, and 17,327 USD of this funding consists of scholarships to Wikimania and other events. We recommend funding AfroCROWD in the amount of 59,274 USD for 12 months + a 10% contingency to respond to unforeseen risks and opportunities, or a total of 65,200 USD. This amount includes funding for their part-time contractor, as well as the requested scholarships. AfroCROWD has offered extensive explanations about why more scholarship funding is needed for their communities on the discussion page of this grant. Under these circumstances, we recommend providing funding for these scholarships, although this amount of scholarship funding is unusual for an organization in Simple APG. AfroCROWD’s work focusing on participation and content in the Afro-descent communities in the US & UK is unique in our movement, and is closely aligned with the movement strategic direction’s focus on knowledge equity. They have presented a detailed and ambitious plan, and based on past results we believe they will be able to achieve their goals during the upcoming grant period. AfroCROWD is working with an impressive eight language communities, tackling content gaps on large Wikipedias like English and French, and working to improve smaller language projects like Haitian and Igbo Wikipedias. AfroCROWD’s list of prestigious partners is impressive and continues to grow as their work gains momentum in the New York area and beyond. These include partnerships with large educational and GLAM institutions as well as grassroots cultural organizations that are highly relevant to their work. They also partner with an impressive number of organizations within the Wikimedia Movement, including chapters like Wikimedia Uruguay and Wikimedia Canada and thematic groups like Art+Feminism and Wikitongues. We appreciate that AfroCROWD will continue to build on their presence both within the movement and externally in the coming year, and also that they will be developing materials such as their suite of tutorial videos that can be used by communities all over the world. AfroCROWD’s work in the area of oral history and audio content is fascinating, and they are continuing to find ways to expand this in the upcoming year. We are excited to learn about the record-a-thon planned in collaboration with Wikitongues, as well as the continuation of their work with the oral history internship in collaboration with Columbia University. AfroCROWD is a leader in this area, which is likely to become more and more relevant as the movement explores how more types of knowledge can be included on Wikimedia projects. We believe that organizing the administrative meeting at Wikipedia Day will be helpful in creating a place for the lead organizers to connect and focus on their plans, and we were glad to see this included in the budget. We already note that AfroCROWD has been improving their capacity in several important areas over the past year, including improving reporting, developing a coherent and actionable strategic plan, continuing the successful management of their contract person, and expanding their programs to the UK and to Los Angeles. We look forward to learning more about how the distributed leadership team works together to implement this work over the next year. This will be an interesting organizational model to explore. It is difficult to capture the value of AfroCROWD’s work using the mandatory grants metrics, and this has been an ongoing challenge that is common to organizations that are targeting a diversity gap. We need the AfroCROWD team’s expertise and partnership to work on finding better ways to measure this work. We appreciate that AfroCROWD is willing and eager to test out new tools, and we appreciate AfroCROWD’s emphasis on storytelling in past reports, which helps to bring their work to life and show why it is important and needed, even in the absence of relevant metrics. We notice that AfroCROWD is intending to grow their budget significantly as they become an independent user group, and we understand why that makes sense. Nevertheless, if AfroCROWD chooses to grow beyond this level, they will need to think about how to formalize and build their organization’s capacity to handle a larger budget and to keep up with their project’s growing scope and depth.

Strengths identified by the committee: See recommendations above.

Concerns identified by the committee: See recommendations above.

On behalf of the committee -- Chinmayisk (talk) 05:41, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

Afrocrowd would like to thank the SAPG team and the committee for having taken the time to examine our application and for granting our requested budget. We look forward to the new grant cycle and appreciate your continued support. Aliceba (talk) 16:45, 23 May 2018 (UTC) Thank you. Shanluan (talk) 17:19, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

Due to the size of this grant request, WMF may take a few days or as long as a week to post the final decision. Thank you for your patience! talk 18:48, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

WMF decision

Approved. 59,274 USD for 12 months + a 10% contingency to respond to unforeseen risks and opportunities, or a total of 65,200 USD. Congratulations! Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 19:43, 25 May 2018 (UTC)