 Welcome everyone. Today we're going to talk about the new approach to contributor growth in Africa. And my name is Dumisan Indubani. I'll be presenting with Asaf Batoff that you probably all know here. So welcome. So what is this? Well, this is an experiment. We are trying to get to a new approach on how do we actually activate and onboard new editors onto Wikipedia. Our aim is to, is to a new approach of course, not to evolve or refine existing practices. So this is, that's the big catch. This is new. We believe that we can transform editor attention in the sub Saharan Africa and potentially elsewhere. So this is not going to be, if we prove successful in this approach, this is easily transferable to other regions as well. We're about to test this. In fact, we closed off the call for applications two days ago. And we have already 300 applicants who will be vetted and selected to go into the, into the pilot. If we are successful, we would like to see this being adopted by other communities as well and translated into other languages. And we would really welcome your feedback. So we'll have, we'll leave a little bit of time to engage with you and get questions from you. So what do we know? We know that the next billion users will be coming, billion users into the internet are coming from the African region. We know there's good activity and there's good energy within the region in terms of the Wikimedia projects. We know we've been, we as Wikimedia Foundation have been investing on the, on the region in terms of resources grants and including stuff availability. But unfortunately, the region has hovered around that less than 2% of the global totals, both in terms of active editors and as well as viewership. So something is not working, even with despite the investments that we are making into the region. So we also know as well that too much programmatic activity and outreach in the region is ineffectively carried out by volunteers who do not have a similar familiarity with the platform, the policies and the culture as in other regions and particularly the European and North American region. And this leads to frustration. Organizers, newbies alike and up at loggerheads on the projects because of these problems that we have. And so we need more basic training for instance on wiki skills and the culture so that yes, people can have those discussions on the AFDs, can support their claims on the, on the projects and the, and the articles they are working on confidently. So what's the goal for this project? We are aiming to get 5000 active editors by 2030. Currently, we are sitting at around 2500 give or take of active editors. So we would like to double it when we get to 2030. Now that's active editors. Normal editors is hovering around 15,000. And we think that would also benefit from these interventions as well. How are we going to do this? And this is where I'd like to spend some time. Our, our, our suggestion or new approach is what we call the big funnel. And this can be sort of divided into four stages. And the big, the big hypothesis with this is that we need to be able to know when to invest on new editors that are coming in. We're currently spending a lot of time in awareness. We're currently spending a lot of time in supervised training and not getting the output that we need there. So in this new approach, we would be putting significant investments in creating well resourced induction funnel for editors. We would not spend a lot of time on stage one. So zero cost for the first stage of awareness, getting people to know there's this program, there's this training materials that are available for people to know how to edit, know how to, you know, hold their own when it comes to Wikimedia projects, but that there is a funnel. There is a way for people to identify where to get the resources they need to teach themselves to get themselves familiar with the project with the platform with the cultures with the community. And we do that in stage two. They get filtered into an unsupervised structured on learning platform with high quality audio visual materials in terms of training on all the courses that are available on all the issues that we know about editing on any of our media Wiki. Once they get through that stage two, that's where we start doing the investments. We are looking for people who have really taken the time to familiarize themselves with the core policies on the media on our media Wiki platform and our projects on our culture. And then we start investing on those people. We would look at stage two in terms of supervised plus human mentorship. We can start networking and putting people together. So imagine if you are running a Wikipedia train the trainer project, you wouldn't have to go to look for people who have not even had of Wikipedia. You would benefit from this funnel that says here are the people that have taken the course over the last six months. They've shown they're interested in this and if they're available, they are now have the basic core policies. And then you take those through the train the trainer program, which you have always been running over the past but now with the people who have been prepared for that participation. That then means that we can infect as we as you do that training as you do, you take them through the normal projects that we have. We can then start looking at stage four where we channel people through a leadership program. For example, administration. How do we get people into an administrative course? How do we get people into community organizing? How do we help them form affiliates if that's what they're interested in? How do we help them to become mentors to other people that are coming into the course? So that's the idea low to zero cost in terms of the beginning of the funnel, get people into self and structured but unsupervised learning high quality material that's available for them. Once they go through that, then you start heavily investing on the successful people and then we get to that 5000 active editors goal or even more depending on how successful it is. So that's the big funnel. But why this approach? And this is where I leave it to Asaf to convince you that this is a good approach. Thank you. I want to jump back to this slide and focus your attention on the left end edge of the funnel. This is this is the revolutionary change here. This is the the big experiment here is that we no longer appeal to just anyone, a general audience. We leave the general audience, given mass awareness, given some campaigns, we direct them to a self service, self paced online learning system, which will have excellent materials that I'm about to describe. But we begin focusing on investing and inviting people to events only those who have made it themselves without the promise of a t-shirt or a laptop through this learning material. Are we missing potential people who could become editors as well but for whatever reason couldn't find the time or motivation to go through that funnel. Yes, we are. We're leaving those aside in this experiment. We're trying to surface the really self motivated people who are motivated enough to make it through four modules of self paced learning and to at least those people bring into touch with the existing community, give them learning opportunities and development opportunities. That's the key part of the experiment. All the later investments are more along the lines where we're already doing with with volunteers. So why this approach. So the fact we don't have a really great structured up to date multimedia induction materials courseware is no secret right we have a whole bunch of outreach material. Kind of acknowledged excellent up to date course something that takes you by the hand and leads you to a place where you can contribute on your own. This we do not have or have not had until now and in Africa. In Africa. This is especially obstructive more than in other places right in Africa. The learning culture is such this is a generalization of course, but we are told this routinely by the community. We want you to talk to us. We want verbal instruction. We want people explaining things to us not to be pointed to long documents. This is not about illiteracy. This is about an approach and a cultural stance towards learning. And so in person face to face instruction of course would be ideal but the next best thing is high quality video materials. So that's what we propose to give. And as I mentioned the status quo is that we don't have this things are either out of date difficult to discover overwhelming poor quality. There are for example some existing videos by African Wikimedians about outreach basic things like notability. And some of those videos are still misleading misstating points of policy not good instructional material. So the goal is to really standardize on something that is excellent. And reflecting a little on what the foundation has done historically our great eagerness that has been in action since at least 2010 with the time of the first strategy program for the old timers who may remember. Our eagerness to fund as much work as possible in Africa has actually led us to fund a lot of ineffective programs on the kind of hope that yes maybe it'll start something etc. But that has had an effect of of making the situation sort of permanently struggling permanently mediocre. And we have been investing in those who showed up whoever was there willing to do a program and take our money. That's who we invested in. Rather than in rather than the approach which we are now advocating for to proactively look for the kinds of people we want to invest in rather than whoever walked in the door. So that's the I hope you see the connection to that final approach right that's this this challenge of going through those self-paced learning modules which are audio visual will help surface for us people who are less random than whoever walked in the door. And we hope that this would lead to the creation of a carter of a group of potential organizers and potential leaders who will be better equipped to do outreach themselves in person outreach. Because as Dume Sani mentioned the outreach that has been going on on the continent so far generalizing has been less than very effective. And so we hope that this approach proved successful our hypothesis is that it should work better than current practice and if it does we hope that can model an approach for the rest of the movement the materials of course would be translatable etc. So to validate our hypothesis we have created our creating high quality audio visual tutorials taught by yours truly and Dume Sani. And we will invite have invited an existing cohort of African Wikimedians from Sub-Saharan Africa in English to sign up and undergo this training not just newbies also existing editors who feel they could use better grounding in the core policies I'll cover the topics in a second. And through these live trainings which will later be adapted and cut up into digestible video segments for self study. But through these live trainings we will try to create this test cohort and observe their editing and their retention right how how many of them do stay on and edit and how much how many of their edits are reverted etc. And we'll compare these results to a baseline of what we know from today we hope that would validate our hypothesis that the materials and the approach where one big obstacle. So the contents of the training are four modules the first is preparing to participate in Wikimedia projects not even talking about actual contribution and this is focused largely on the attitudes that are necessary. What does it mean to contribute on a peer peer production knowledge website what can you expect the fact that people are pseudonymous you will not be able to just get on the phone with a person disagreeing with you right that sort of preparation is what we mean. Prepare to back up what you say prepare to be questioned prepare for setbacks some things will not go your way and you need to not rage quit when that happens. The second module will be about the diversity of ways to contribute to Wikimedia beyond writing encyclopedic articles which I hope you all know by now is not a universal hobby it's not for everyone right. And so highlighting the other ways to contribute upload a photo upload a video record pronunciations in your mother tongue fix a typo right on the talk page get an expert involved. There are so many ways literally more than 100 ways to contribute to Wikimedia and this module will try and surface them to convince people that there's lots of ways they could help if writing encyclopedic articles is not their thing with each such way. Not giving a detailed tutorial about each one of them but at least giving them kind of the next step so if this appeals to you here's a tutorial on how to record pronunciations and that's it go in good luck right. But the other the the last two modules are about Wikipedia as you see right neutrality and verifiability so that module to is also kind of the exit point for people who don't find them so don't see themselves writing encyclopedic articles and that's okay. Which means the people who will stick around for module three and four by definition have sort of self selected into know I do want to learn this I do want to write encyclopedic articles. And they would cover you know these core policies the importance of which I assume you don't need convincing of. Are we doing this just for Sub-Saharan Africa we're piloting this in Sub-Saharan Africa we believe this approach is a good generally a good approach to outreach that could work everywhere. But since our task what we what we were tasked with when we designed this was how do we double the editor base in Sub-Saharan Africa that's what we came up with. But it's there's nothing that makes it not useful outside Sub-Saharan Africa and is it just in English the pilot is just in English just targeting not even all Sub-Saharan Africa but Anglophone Sub-Saharan Africa. But if this works we fully expect it to be useful in Francophone Africa and elsewhere we deliberately did not want to just encourage translation into French because French Wikipedia has different notability rules etc it's not just oh yeah let's also make it in French. We wanted to respect it enough to do its own thing so this is it and let's take questions. Oh microphone yes please run the microphone. If you could run the microphone or you got it thank you. Okay so this is really really positive a really positive way of thank you engaging with a an area that we know has been as a region has been fairly left up to its own devices. But I do want to understand like so I think that one of the benefits of the community of Wikimedia is that there are multiple ways as you said to you know there are 101 and maybe a thousand and 250 ways of contributing to and getting yourself involved and the idea of a final means that that's the only way in. So I just wanted to understand like a for the people who are already at various levels within the movement what happens to them. And do you then only get further on if you are accredited on this course or I don't we didn't talk about badging and certification really. Thank you for that question. The idea is that this sort of treatment with high quality audio visual materials is necessary and welcome for all these other 101 ways as well. But that's just outside this pilot we were instructed to make a very lean pilot. I certainly would want to give detailed high quality audio visual instructions on how to contribute to Wiki Source. That's just not in the contents of the pilot but after the pilot if this approach proves that yes it does generate informed and and motivated volunteers. I hope that will prove the need to create it for Wiki Source as well. So no it will not be the only gate to contributing on Wikimedia nor could it be it may be the only or at least the main gate to getting funded work programmatic work through Wikimedia. I fully expect that if we can show that editors who go through the funnel are far more effective at doing outreach at doing other programs. We as grant makers will say well we would really like you to go through this funnel before you want us to let fund you to train others. Yes but but it would never be the only way that you could also yeah yeah I do want to allow a few more questions so. Okay thing once so the ones. Yeah we specifically invited existing editors yeah yeah there was a question by Mike and then in the back. Okay and please try to be brief we really have very little time left. Was just reminded that five minutes left. Yeah so Mike yes over there. Go ahead go ahead ask a question yeah. I just want to know why is only in English. I just said the pilot is in English because we all speak English and we know the English Wikipedia rules which we need to convey in this course and we don't want to just translate what we do into French because French works differently. After the pilot assuming it works in English we have every reason to expect it could also work in French we will also be doing it in French for sure yes Mike. So I wanted to ask I mean this looks really good I wanted to ask about the resources needed for people to join into this. If you're creating rich AV material does that mean people have to have a certain quality of internet access to be able to participate or are you thinking of otherwise like USB sticks to be able to distribute this. So I can imagine editing on the poor interface I can't imagine so editing on a poor connection but I can't imagine streaming on it. Yeah that that will definitely be an issue for some people those people will not be able to benefit from live instruction but each such session will be recorded and downloadable so that they could download it very very slowly and then watch it. Yeah yeah yes just the question where can I follow like the outcome of your pilot where will I find the. So this lives on meta in a page called Africa growth pilot we will also be sending the link on the Wikimania chat telegram channel shortly that would be a page to follow and we will also be publishing the results of this experiment. Once we have results on Wikimedia L on the Wikimedia general telegram chat you know we'll try to broadcast these results in general but if you want to make sure you should follow that page on meta. That's it right and we're available for other questions during the break. Yeah one last thing to say the community had a chance to also give us feedback on the four modules that we we created so it's not been created in vacuum and we've had tons of feedback that we've incorporated into the final material. Thank you.