 ఈరినాకి, అిరికికికిసికిటికి, దపనాక౾కికిక౿ సిని.  bashu hamy Pushniru Jof graphi la Shyus o  stand re i n te  bashu hamy Ruby D Brown from Open Foundation West Africa and we had hoped to have had Euphemia, one do, but unfortunately I think it's 4.45 am in Nigeria so she definitely would still be in bed and we had also hoped that Candy would have filled in for her because they ran the campaign in collaboration with Gimilabatwana but Candy came down with a flu yesterday so she isn't even here at the conference for today but then here we are that doesn't of course downplay the amount of work they put in the campaign so the logos of course if I were to go around thanking everybody would be definitely more than what you see on the screen because we had a lot of community organizers from Africa and then from diaspora so just to give us an insight about what Africana initiative is it's basically a project that was conceived through a partnership that exists between the Wikimedia Foundation the African Union and Africana Filter which is about creating content and knowledge in order to fill the content and knowledge gap that exists on the internet about Africa of course using the Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects so why Wikipedia projects or Wikimedia projects generally like most of us know when you go online to search for anything you barely go through the first page without seeing a wiki except it hasn't been documented yet so it was easy since we are vying for visibility here and then the AKI like I finally call it kicked off around three African Union holidays the Africa Youth Day November 1st, 2022 and then the what we now call Africa Environment Wikifocus campaign which of course is the environment campaign for 3rd of March, 2023 and then lastly the Africa Day on 25th of May, 2023 despite these holidays being attached today's we were on the road all the whole month in fact some campaigns had two months due to some unforeseen circumstances and then why did the African Union and the Wikimedia Foundation decide to and the Africana Filter decided to go on this journey so most times when you go online you maybe search for something around Africa you would be shocked to know that most of the stuff weren't written or put there by Africans maybe some backpacker travels to South Africa goes to the South already spends two weeks and goes back to God knows where and then puts up a blog about South Africa so we have seen this sort of projected it has projected the continent on Africans wrongly globally and there is serious misrepresentation of Africa so the AKI thought it would be nice to hand back the narrative or the pen to Africans to be able to tell their own stories so of course who is involved the Wikimedia Foundation, the African Union and the Africa No Filter so to actually do this project we had the bright idea to engage what we call implementing partners now the implementing partners I think we selected these implementing partners after an application round I think about 30 very strong organizations made their submissions but then we have a short-term goal around content creation for the project and as such we had to look out for organizations whose short-term goals align with what AKI is trying to achieve and that was how we landed Wikivibrants for the Africa Day 2022 but then they collaborated with the Wikimedia Botswana user group and then for Africa Environment Day we had a marriage between Wikimedia Africa and Wikimedia Codiva and then for the Africa Day we had AFLIA to collaborate with AFLIA but then just like I said short-term goals of the AKI they didn't really align with what AFLIA was trying to achieve through the project they had a nice idea about collating a repository for Afroglam and cultural heritage it was really nice but then for the moment it didn't really fit what we were trying to achieve maybe in the nearest future it was a nice idea I must confess so with that we had to forge ahead with OFWA on that project but then I know why we chose the implementing partners and then the implementing partners in turn did work with some local organizers we didn't have anything to do with how they chose the local organizers but then I'm very curious to know what checklist they used what boxes for them so with that I welcome AILA to let us know how they chose the local organizers for the African Environment Day campaign thanks so Slas so it's not too loud so it's a to me heckled in the background so how we decided to I don't want to speak for the other two campaigns I feel like there were different ways that they did it but what we did is we put out two calls for applications so one was to be a volunteer juror so you could become on the jury who would then my voice is going select the micro grantees and then we put a call out to communities or groups so you didn't have to be an affiliate you didn't have to be you just had to be like a group of friends or whoever with a good idea to apply and for us it was about making sure that new people had an opportunity to get involved around something very specific but also that maybe non-wikipedia as well who wanted to who were very passionate about the environment in Africa and wanted to also contribute their knowledge or their experiences so we did the micro grant call and then we had a very set criteria we had over 60 applications and we had by the end of the by the end of the choice the independent jury made there were 17 that we whittled it down to so that was probably and there was a lot of and we had a short list I think of about 25 which we could also see some which could be merged because they were very close in kind of either thematic kind of alignment or they were regionally very close so they could work together and so that was that we also made a very clear very clear decision not to have any prizes we didn't want to we didn't want people to try and game the system in order to to get money for that prize so yes they would get money to host the events but not offer prizes and because of the alignment with wiki loves Africa the team being so close we also made a very very specific decision that there wouldn't be photo walks and there wouldn't be an images thing because if they had wanted to do that they could have applied through wiki loves Africa so it was also very strategic we didn't want people to double up the effort and to confuse the issues because wiki loves Africa was a specific partner in that I hope that answers the question 17 communities who were who were part of the micro grant thank you so much Aila and you know as much as she made it look easy scrolling through 60 applications for the micro grantees I had to go through 30 to get into many partners and I lost sleep because you would have to start checking the antecedents of these organizations what sort of projects had they handled in the past and things like that so it was indeed not an easy fit thank you so much Aila and for you Ruby you handled the Africa Day campaign so what were you looking out for in local organizers thank you so much Cislas for the question I think it was very interesting projects that we did and looking at the applications that came through there were about close to 30 applications that came through and some of the things that were looking out for people who wanted to implement the campaign was the experience whether they had little or some kind of organizing campaign because it's very important to the outcome we also looked at the language diversity so we also looked at a way that we could bring in different languages and one of the things that we also seen as a challenge in the African community is when you talk to people about collaborating it's difficult yes it's a very nice thing to say but there's a problem when you say collaborate they don't understand what you're talking about and the issue even become worse when you're giving the fund to one person and you are asking the person to collaborate with this group of people and so we didn't want those kind of issues to erupt out so we try to as much as possible make sure that everyone is empowered have some kind of funding so even if we are asking three people to collaborate we make sure that we are sharing the funds to the three people and everyone can be empowered to manage their own funds and so these are some of the strategies that we we used and selected and it helped us I think it was really helpful because if we are giving it to one person say collaborate the work would be on one person and the other group might not really work and might not even bring the kind of results that we are looking at so by doing that we realize that we are able to get a community to do PG we are able to get that community to do a tree, Fanti to do Fanti, Igbo to do Igbo so that kind of diversity was seen in the campaign and I think we had a team that reviewed the applications to give people the opportunity I think we were a little bit fair and we gave a lot of people the opportunity to participate in the campaign which was really good I don't know if there are any more questions that actually answers why you probably would need a community that has experience no matter how small running an event or being part of a Pan-African campaign or regional campaign as the case may be and you know I didn't know the quality and quantity of work that we did until I sat down to start collecting the general project reports I was amazed I was amazed because why we of course themed the term Africa thingy we had Haiti our siblings in diaspora we had Afro crowd there was Haiti there was Afro crowd there was also Nasi Wikimedia from Switzerland yes so these guys brought some dynamics that I didn't see coming you know but then when we had Africa Day and Afro crowd held editing training on Wikipedia and stuff like that I was blown away Haiti came in with Wikiliter and stuff and then Nasi Wikimedia I was like wow because as much as we want Africans being in front of this there are other persons who are enthusiasts of African knowledge and they are highly welcome to join us they are highly welcome to join us someone like Florence Duvois she is always there supporting us helping to put new communities through and just like Ila mentioned about new participants we had a lot of them first time editors and with that I will just show you what success looks like on the project I didn't know we did up to this talk about 47 local organizing communities on the continent and beyond and at least 53 events were recorded across Africa and diaspora and 44 programs recorded on the dashboard so that's amazing and by the time we looked at the number of editors and participants 1467 from the three campaigns and mostly new people mostly new people you know how we talk about Africa having this young population that could be impacting Wikipedia I saw that first hand here and it was amazing it was amazing to see and then over 11 million words added across the respective campaigns 16210 references added and then we had 12530 new articles created across Wikipedia Wikicode and it was here because there were heads on with the Wikicodes and it was interesting and they had interesting number of female contributors too which sort of just things up because all of them wanted to do something on Wikicodes and it was amazing to see and then we had about 1800 articles improved and edited and by the time we were tracking the respective campaigns and all that we've noticed about 26 million over 26 million views on the newly created and improved articles and of course the Wikidata revisions were 52,000 that's okay, go ahead Wikipedia dictionary mostly and then we also saw on Wikicodes but then you know our dashboards is still a bit tricky it's a bit tricky but okay thank you very much I was told off so it depended on from space to space so with us it was because the content was specifically very about data and statistics but also about filling in the lack of information that exists it was very Wikipedia heavy Wikidata heavy but we also had quite a high upload but it was all about documentation of the events and things to commons but then the Wikilabs Africa which was aligned as weather and climate was 14,000, 13,000 images separately to this so it was all about aligning different things also ran a campaign on ESA which also then added descriptions to images to Wikidata so yeah I think it ranged mostly on the Wikipedia like she rightly said with the Wikipedia it was also very much local languages because there was so much information missing on that topic specifically and then ok just to add interestingly we noticed during the environment campaign that I think out of 55 African countries only 3 had climate change reports on Wikipedia and that changed we have now separate articles and regional countries and we hope that gets better with time but it was really amazing to see some communists like I think Wikimedia Botswana defending their article on climate change on English Wikipedia and they succeeded go ahead yeah I think that's impressive because we figured out how to do Wikipedia in the continent but Wikidata is still a problem we are not tagging the articles that we are creating and that makes discovery of the knowledge that we have about the continent on projects very difficult to demonstrate so this is good work well done thank you so much Dumi Ruby wanted to say something ok they said it all I just wanted to add that also the campaigns happen in different timelines so they were not overlapping of course not of course not so we tracked independently you understand like for what is it called Africa Day we tracked from 1st November to December around first week our second week and then from March to May to April for Africa environment that they are about and then from May to June for Africa Day and yeah they were just stop crying they were just three but then just like what you mentioned about Wikidata so for Igbo Wikimedians user group we saw the same problem which made us have a Wikidata hub separate we have Igbo Wikimedia Wikidata hub and these guys were very present on this project and it was amazing seeing how fast they were able to pick up I don't know if you know but one of our community members is a community specialist for Wikimedia commerce and Wikidata with the foundation so we had that juice and we squeezed so yeah it was I mean all these awesome numbers and you know what actually made me glad or what specifically made me was how a lot of new people were willing to learn and contribute it started in Rwanda because we had a post endeavor event and I think Rwanda Mountain Tea was very gracious to us they gave us the space, they sponsored the post endeavor event for Africa month and we had about and good tea very important very important good tea they gave us croissant and helped us move people around so when we were planning that post endeavor editing we didn't think I mean many people would show were just thinking of maybe okay 10 13 but 48 young people showed up from around Rwanda you know and Rwanda Mountain Tea God bless them they were really helpful they waited, we finished they dropped people at their closest bus stops home they were that gracious they were that gracious and we did a photo work at their factories and we were able to curate something out of it and they have an article and these guys have been doing amazing it really pains me that you know there are amazing things happening across Africa and nobody is reading who knows about the Mombasa tea market here that's the biggest the biggest so these guys have been going to Mombasa within awards so we photographed all those things and we were able to point that out on English Wikipedia and the article is there now so lots of things the African initiative really uncovered and with that we really hope that the energy goes on to perhaps next year next two years, next three years there are many African Indian holidays there are 16 of them and we have the dream to develop interesting campaigns around these because the AU archives we barely scratched it barely one has about over 65,000 items one has about 10,000 plus in total we have over 100,000 things and I don't think we used up to 3% yes they are digitized and they are not very easily accessible so interesting fact so when I was given access by the knowledge management team at the AU I told them this is nice but it's not open right and they were like what do you mean it's not open what do you mean it's not open you know the door is wide open I told them no it's not open like the way we Wikimedians love our things oh okay okay so what do we do so I pointed out at least how the filters should be on the three archives they shared with us and by the time we were running the african environment they had affected the recommendations on one yes so the other two yeah the other two exactly the other two archives I'm hoping that maybe by the time we get into the next round of the campaigns they probably would come in line Ruby saw one before that one you saw it was everywhere but now you have the archive grouped in books magazines research and what not now it's easily accessible so why we had all those as primary sources we also got secondary sources I think african environments specifically worked from secondary sources that were very very very interesting to see when we looked at the results so with that I would say thank you to the implementing partners you guys were amazing because you were amazing because it was hard work it was hard work because if I were in this alone I think I would have caved but I had you guys supporting from every angle and that sort of made me to feel encouraged and see the project to the end so thank you so much and shout out to all the local organizers once again Afro crowd they were amazing all the way from the US and the Caribbean Wikipedia they were amazing thank you and if you have further questions please or recommendations by the way because this was a pilot right this was just the first year so if you have recommendations comments or reactions or questions please feel free it was an amazing experience I have to say it was really good it's not like we haven't done regional campaigns before but it was what was very interesting about it I'm not going to say special because it was hard work but it was about bringing specifically bringing new people on but of course with that comes huge challenges and we did a lot of onboarding a lot of support from a lot of online a lot of internal support for the organizers but also for new people we did get some wonderful people within the community about how to write specifically how to write environmental articles you can't just go like you have to back it up with all of the things and there was some wonderful that was absolutely fabulous but I think what was also amazing well it wasn't amazing it was part of the plan was to put we did surveys of the organizers and we did surveys of the participants and one of the things that we included in the participant survey was things that I don't know if we've ever really interrogated before which is like how easy is it for you to continue editing as an African what are your pain points and so we had I can supply the survey if anyone's interested but it was one of the first times we found out we know the data is expensive in Africa but we don't know how much that actually impacts the return or the ability for people to actually work at home on articles and go leave the event and then continue the work and it doesn't really happen in Africa and it was it is definitely one of the absolutely the biggest thing is the cost of data also the lack of technology for people to then go home with and they just don't have that setup so when we asked them also like did you need somebody with you to keep helping you and they were like no we don't need that we just need the technology and the data so it was a very interesting exercise in finding out actually what are the real pain points we all kind of think we know but sometimes it's good just to pack it up with the evidence and thanks pleasure, interesting mention there Ayla thank you hi everyone so I want to quickly speak about our experience as an implementing partner so when we started given out the grant for local organizers to do their campaigns and their workshop and their various organizations I realized that some of them were eager for what given them they saw this as an opportunity to reach out to people talk to them about Wikipedia some even went ahead to pre-finance their workshops we even told some of them you just give us about two or three days you are going to provide with everything said no we want to do it this day this time so I was just happy that even before the project people were so eager to contribute to this campaign and I'm very happy about that thank you so much yes do me I think that I just want to say this makes me happy to hear the way that's happening because at least from my point of view we have been looking at activation of communities and organizers and editors in Africa from a point of view of someone who is not affiliated with any organization just an individual and we want to convert that person into an editor first and then into an affiliate member it doesn't always work like that and we leave we exactly we are living out a lot of professionals who would be actually working in their own organizations don't want to be affiliated they are already working in the organization and this is part of their job and I think this is covering that gap which is what we really need to get at there are people who are probably not going to be interested in doing the other stuff that we do in affiliates and in community work but have got the access to content and to archives and to all the knowledge that we need and just need that spark in terms of the technology they can use to get that into our projects and I think this really covers that gap so well done thank you all for coming and listening and contributing and thank you for the time thank you so much pleasure well done guys