Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round2/The Centre for Internet and Society/Proposal form
Thank you for this proposal form
Hello, Visdaviva.Thank you for submitting this complete proposal form on time. If we have any urgent needs for clarification, we'll contact you right away. Otherwise, you can expect questions from FDC staff in the next week or so. Note that we had to update the number format in your proposal, as it makes analysis of the financial details in your proposal a bit easier. We hope you are OK with that minor change, but let us know if you have any concerns.
Are you able to provide us with a shorter, 200-word summary for the overview section? While we like what you've written, we need something a little shorter to facilitate community review. You can just provide that here on the talk page rather than changing the proposal for itself.
Finally, as usual, we ask that you do not make any changes to the proposal form now that the deadline has passed, without first contacting FDC staff. If a change is needed, you can put in a request here on this discussion page.
Best, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 01:29, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
- Dear Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer), thank you for the quick revert! Here is the shorter summary. Please let me know if this is ok.
- One of the key mandates of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is to work towards catalysing the growth of the free and open knowledge movement in South-Asia and in Indic languages. CIS has been a steward of the Wikimedia movement in India since December 2008. From September 2012, CIS-A2K has been actively involved in growing the Wikimedia movement in India through a grant received from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for the period September 2012 to June 2014 and through the FDC Grant received for the period July 2014 to June 2015. Based on the 29-month experience of working with various Indic Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K has developed its Work Plan for July 2015 to June 2016. This work plan consists of 18 programs across 6 verticals. These are:
During the next year CIS-A2K would like to contribute to the qualitative and quantitative growth of 12 Wikimedia projects across 9 Indian languages and associated communities, in addition to providing need based support to other Indic communities. --Visdaviva (talk) 07:33, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
- Thanks for this, Visdaviva. This will work great. We may reformat the lists with links to make it take up a little less space on the page when we create the summary template later today. We'll see how it looks :) We really appreciate your doing this right away, as it helps us facilitate the review process. Cheers, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 17:23, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
Overspending in this year
Your anticipated expenses exceed your anticipated income in the current year by 15%, and by more than $100,000US. This dollar amount is larger than the budgets of most chapters and affiliates. How are you planning to find the money to balance your books this year? Risker (talk) 02:28, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
- Dear Risker thank you for engaging with our plans and the proposal. Yes, you are right, our anticipated income is less than anticipated expenditure. We will meet this deficit from the last year's unspent grant monies. --Visdaviva (talk) 11:32, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
Odia Wikipedia
I am finding the data provided to be confusing. Am I correct in understanding that the number of editors, number of active editors and number of articles have all decreased from January 2014 to January 2015? I cannot help but suspect that the data in the columns have been reversed. Risker (talk) 03:50, 14 April 2015 (UTC)
Telugu Wikipedia
Considerable objections and questions were raised regarding the Telugu wikipedia plan here. If need be, these comments can be translated into English --వైజాసత్య (talk) 01:41, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
- Thank you వైజాసత్య garu for engaging with our Telugu Wikipedia plans. It was a productive discussion, which gave an opportunity for CIS-A2K to explain various queries the Telugu community members had. We will continue to engage with the Telugu Wikimedia community and will respond to some more questions there. Please feel free to summarize the discussion here, in English, for the benefit of the larger Wikimedia community.--Visdaviva (talk) 11:35, 24 April 2015 (UTC)
Demographics
I am very excited to see a proposal that will help to address current trends in demographics. The Pew Center tell us that by 2050: "India replaces China as the world’s most populous country: India’s population is expected to increase by 400 million by 2050. Its projected population of 1.6 billion will be almost equal to the populations of the U.S. and China combined. China is projected to add only 25 million residents." Expanding our offerings in languages of South Asia, especially Indian languages is key. VanEman (talk) 01:46, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
Questions from FDC staff
Thank you for submitting this proposal. We are grateful for your work and the plan you have developed. We ask these questions to help build our and the FDC’s understanding of your proposal, plan, and context. Thank you for your responses! KLove (WMF) (talk) 05:40, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
Questions about your finances
We are requesting some additional information from you about your finances, to get a better picture of your A2K-specific spending, as well as your overall financial situation. We understand that the financial data in your proposal is complicated because we need to understand your A2K-specific financials as well as your organization’s financials overall. Thanks for your patience with these clarifications. We are happy to accept this data in any format that works well for you (e.g. you can share a spreadsheet, or post it here on the discussion page).
First, we would like you to provide your projected and actual amounts of spending against your current grant, similar to the information requested in Table 3, but for your A2K work specifically.
Next, it would be very helpful for us to have some additional information about your financials for the past several years, to understand your organization’s financial history a little better. We appreciate that you have provided your annual reports and audited statements to the movement on a regular basis. That said, it was difficult to understand all of your financial data from the reports.
For FY 2014-15 (budget), FY 2013-14 (report), FY 2012-13 (report):
- Total operating expenses (overall, and A2K)
- Total program expenses (overall, and A2K)
- Total staff expenses (overall, and A2K)
- Total revenues (overall, and A2K)
- Total operating reserves
Clarifications
- While you specifically refer to 18 programs across 6 axes, we only count 17 programs in this proposal. Would you please help us understand if we are missing something?
- In the targets for Odia Wikisource, we see a table with expected targets for December 2014. We presume it is for December 2015? If this is the case, will you kindly correct the table using strikethrough?
Questions about your programs and approaches
- For A2K, at least 17 programs are planned and these programs include many smaller projects. Please tell us more about your capacity to implement, monitor, and evaluate this large number of activities. How are you ensuring that you have the capacity to support your staff as needed?
- Which programs are top priorities for A2K this year? In which programs will staff invest the most time?
- How are volunteers involved in prioritizing A2K work? As your program activities continue to expand, how do you monitor your interactions with the community and ensure ongoing dialogue?
- We would like to know more about your needs assessments. Are you able to link to these assessments or descriptions of their methodologies? For example, how are your needs assessments distinct from other forms of community consultation?
- If you have been doing any work to assess specific content gaps on any of these projects, we would be interested in learning more.
- We would like to understand the context for your work with very small or dormant projects like Santali Wikipedia, Tulu Wikipedia and Hindi Wikisource. Given that the communities are very small, why do you think there is potential for success in jumpstarting these communities into viable editing communities? Why is this work valuable to the movement overall?
- Please tell us more about your vision for what a healthy wikimedia community is.
- Through your training-the-trainers work, are you intending to achieve any long term results, learning, or changes in attitude that you intend to track after the course? We would like to better understand how you will know if this work is successful.
- You intend to do awareness raising in many Indic language Wikipedias. What do you hope will be the long term gains after awareness is raised?
- You plan to create video tutorials and manuals in different Indic languages. Please tell us more about why you believe approaches materials like these turn viewers into editors, and tell us more about how they have been used by communities in the past.
Thank you for your responses. Warm regards, KLove (WMF) (talk) 05:40, 16 April 2015 (UTC)
OTRS System and OTRS personal compensation
I think, Wikimedia can invest to OTRS administrators and new OTRS System. Now the system have more documents just next in turn without movement! Wery difficult question and need more time for reseach and analysis. And not enough administrators in russian Wikipedia: Ru OTRS. Please help improve it and speed up Wikipedia illustration development! Thank you for your attention. Niklitov (talk) 08:24, 17 April 2015 (UTC)
English-language Wikipedia
17 or 18 programs is a lot to read through, but in my brief look I did not see anything relating to directly improving the English-language Wikipedia. Am I correct in assuming that all of your efforts are focused on improving the various Indic language Wikis, and your use of English Wikipedia is limited to translating its content to other languages? Wbm1058 (talk) 14:04, 17 April 2015 (UTC)
What are these all about?
All I see is a huge pile of Indian articles to be created. Where are proposals for the rest of the world? 80.70.236.82 11:27, 18 April 2015 (UTC)
Train-the-Trainer program and follow-up
Hi all! Thanks for your proposal. I've noticed there is a strong emphasis in TTT activities, which seems a good idea considering it is a good way to increase the impact in a country with the size of India. However, I don't see if there is any way to follow the impact of those workshops and verify how effective they have been. Do you have any list of the activities done by those volunteers that attended the TTT program and the impact of those activities? What do you expect the participants of the TTT activities can do after? Also, was there any survey to the participants in the workshops so you can understand if it was helpful for them? Thanks for your answer. --Osmar Valdebenito, B1mbo (talk) 04:53, 20 April 2015 (UTC)
Choice of focus languages
I would like to understand the rationale behind the selection of the Kannada, Konkani, Odia, Marathi and Telugu languages. Although all of these languages have millions of speakers and three of them are in the Top Ten of most spoken languages in India, I would like to understand why you choose them over other languages. Also, why you have focused on Konkani Wikipedia as one of the core languages, considering its Wikipedia is still in the Incubator? --Osmar Valdebenito, B1mbo (talk) 05:05, 20 April 2015 (UTC)