 Hello everyone, today I'm going to talk to you about Wiki Loves Women Focus Group. My name is Candy and I'm an admin intern with Weekend Africa. And if you'd like to contact me, just go to Twitter, it's Candy Kochiwe or email me at ckochiwe at gmail. So firstly, I would like to talk to you about Wiki Loves Women. Wiki Loves Women is a project that was established in 2015 by Florence and Isla. So what Wiki Loves Women was established into be, it was meant to become a project that focuses on bridging to significant gaps in the Wikimedia projects. That was to kind of like focus on the initiative of having people come in and bridge the gap of content within women perspective and also have contributors come together and participate to be a part of this initiative. On another note, what Wiki Loves Women would like to achieve is an accessible fair online representation of women, especially in Africa. This is to build more content about women and understand that story's way better. Now how Wiki Loves Women initiative came about, it was supported by the Goets Institute and Wikimedia Foundation. So at a glance, I would like to share with you the statistics of what we have accomplished so far ever since 2016. So far, we have been active in 12 countries where we have had eight in person activities and eight online activities. So we have also by far had 1,922 articles that we created and also improved. And we also have 1,564 plus photos that have been uploaded that are relative to this project. And we have 78 partnering organizations and one of the most prominent ones is Wiki Loves Women in Asia. Going on to the next slide. So one of the key aspects that Wiki Loves Women wanted to achieve was to come up with a group that they will mentor and train more of to how to instill this initiative and make sure we are empowering women. So Wiki Loves Women came up with the initiative of creating a focused group program where we have women from Africa. And this initiative was launched in June 2021. It consists of around 12 members who are from different countries, backgrounds, cultures within Africa. And some of them are from the Francophone or Anglophone speaking countries. This group is not mainly just to have experts, but it's mixed and we have newbies, intermediaries, and we also have experts within the group. Hence, we are trying to merge how we have diversity and inclusion within the team and we can learn and feed off each other. Now why do we have the Wiki Loves Women Focus Group? So this was to develop a slow, manageable, collaborative, consultative, and supportive program. Now what do we mean by this? We wanted to develop a community which could learn and it's small, yet so small, but it will impact its communities as we train them. So we wanted to have a consultative and collaborative community that we can instill and focus the key areas that we want them to be very prominent or outstanding focus group members so that when they go out there into their communities, they know how to relay or train other community members in our community. So we provide knowledge, theoretical information, practical application, and program development. So within the focus group members, we instill leadership skills, we instill how they should manage and run a project. Hence, we want them to have both worlds on how to operate practically when they manage projects and we also want them to understand the theory of how to run a project. Hence, we want them to experience both worlds. On another note, to inform and support focus group members, to put skills and knowledge into action. Yes, as I mentioned, we want the focus group members to experience both worlds, not just learn what we teach them theoretically, but we want them to put this into action. Hence, we have had the focus group members apply for grants from the supported by the Wikimedia Foundation where they will be implementing the skills we have given to them, to their communities. So what we teach them and what we train them and what we also learn from them, of course, it will be also relayed into their communities where it will become a point where it is more of like a train of trainees within their communities and we want that trend to trickle down into their communities where the change doesn't stop. Build a nurturing and sustaining supportive original network. So as we are from different communities and different regions within Africa, we want to learn what how other people are coping within their communities, how are they nurturing it, what works for them, how can we copy that or learn that to also adapt to ways on how to improve ourselves, how other people are doing better things within our regions and how we can adapt that also into into our regions. So it's more like exposing ourselves to how other people in different regions react to different things differently and how we could also learn from that. Share this model with communities across Africa to grow and develop the gender equity space. So what we want from this initiative, as I said, we want to make sure women's voices are heard and we kind of like balance out the content that we have about women in Wikipedia. Hence this initiative of having a focus group, it kind of like streams down and focuses on instilling that and making sure it becomes a reality. It's not just a community, but it's a community that key focuses on empowering women, instilling them with skills, the relevant skills on how to run a project from A to Z. So with that being said, I'll move on to the next slide. So here I would like to share with you who our focus group members are. We are from different parts of the world. As you can see, this is a diverse team where we are trying to learn how other people work within that country. On the next slide, what we have done so far as the Wikilev Women's Focus Group, we usually have monthly online meetings where so far we have held a session on profiling on Wikimedia and we also share with the focus group members on how to organize an event. So we want them to understand what it takes to run an event, what's needed, the digital skills that come with it and also the leadership skills. So we are taking this key topics and breaking them down so that that digestible for the community to understand what it takes becoming a focus group member and also becoming a train of trainees within their communities. We also have one-to-one mentorship where the focus group members come into one space and they discuss how many ask questions and we learn from each other and it's not too formal. We want it to be a safe space where they could easily ask questions on what they don't understand and what they would like to learn. On this, on this slide, I would like to share with you a testimony from Moline from Zimbabwe. The membership of Lawrence, Eila and Kendi and we have gained a lot of insight into the WikiAfrica programs. We have been trained and still under training and we hope to get a lot more information and cascade this information to our communities. Moving on to the next testimony, we have it from Faith, who's from Kenya. Hello, I'm Faith Manolo and I'm from Kenya. I'm part of the WikiLabs Women's Focus Group and what this means to me is that now women's stories are going to be put out there. They no longer have to be in the channels and to me that is a very big deal because I am really on closing the gender gap on the internet. There's so much inequality in the representation of women out there and being part of this campaign means that I have a chance to close this gap and that's why this campaign is important to me. Lastly, we have a testimony from Minette. Those were the testimonials from some of the Focus Group members that we have on WikiLabs Women. Going further on, we have the She Said campaign which the Focus Group members will be a part of. This campaign is mainly focused on improving the visibility of women, creating new and improving already existing wiki code entries related to them. The She Said campaign was launched in October 2020 and it will also run this year in October 2021 where we want the Focus Group members to activate the She Said campaign within their communities. Hence, as they activate that into their communities, they are gaining traction of participants and contributors to be a part of this initiative as we bridge the gap of increasing visibility of women online with this wiki code. Why did the She Said campaign come about? This was more correcting the attribution of the content about women on Wikipedia. Hence, we wanted to balance out the stats of the visibility of women on the Wikipedia space. Hence, we integrated women's biographies on Wikipedia through wiki codes. On another note, being a model of inspiration, we wanted women to be inspired to know that their voices can also be heard online. Hence, they can also be a part of bringing this gap. So this initiative is not just for people to participate but we want more representation, people to identify themselves with these women, especially being a phrase where it's more like an underrepresented community. We wanted the She Said campaign to also be empowering and allow women to tell their true stories and the morals that they live by or their goals. And we also wanted to celebrate women and increase their voices on Wikipedia projects. So what we aim to achieve this year? As I said, we will be launching the She Said drive in October 2021, where we'll have the focus group members activate this into their communities. And we have also released our organizers event toolkit. This event toolkit will help the focus group members to understand what it takes to run a project. On another note, we have the gender equity media wiki media MOOC, where we are planning to coach courses that are aimed at providing and training access for women and gender sensitization. The main goal of the project is skills transfer and also raise awareness and action to counter the lack of representation of women generally and more especially online. Lastly, I would like to talk about an upcoming inspiring open women's podcast that we are planning to have by the end of this year, towards the end of this year actually. We'll be talking about women's stories and we are trying to involve everyone, not only confined to the Wikipedia space but women who are involved in the open source kind of platforms and how they contribute and how we can encourage women to come together so that we collaborate and we bridge the gap of women's representation online. Thank you so much for being a part of this lightning talk and if you'd like to connect with us please see our social media handles down there.