Grants talk:PEG/Aliceba/Outreach to Afrodescendant community in US

Comments from London

It is good to see an initiative like this coming forward, however I would appreciate seeing how it fits in with other ongoing activity in this area. To this end I have come up with some queries.Fabian Tompsett (WMUK) (talk) 13:55, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Two buses

We have a saying here, you wait for ages and then two buses come along at once:

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 7th February
Brooklyn Public Library 7th & 8th February

However, I can't help noticing that the second event does not seem to have been promoted yet (no mention on the BPL website that I could find), and I wonder why this initiative does not link up with the New York Chapter on the Saturday, and then develop the BPL the day after? The Schomberg Institute event has been on Wikipedia since 10 November 2014‎. It is a shame that apparently Aliceba was not able to make the December Meetup.

AFROcroWd

It is not clear what AFROcroWd is. What discussion about this proposal has there been on Wikimedia Wikis?

Black WikiHistory Month

This Wikipedia:Black WikiHistory Month page was started just before this proposal, so you may have missed it. How does your proposal aim to work with this initiative?

Populations of African descent outside of the United States

You mention populations of African descent outside of the United States. What steps have you taken to involve Wikimedians from these groups in your discussions

Wikiprojects, for example Wikipedia:WikiProject Haiti etc.

Wikimedia chapters: e.g. Wikimedia Ghana, Wikimedia South Africa, Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Community User Group Côte d'Ivoire

Other potential grant proposal

How do you view other potential grant proposal such as The Africa Project?

participation

How would you like other WIkimedians to be involved in your proposal?

Response from Milos

Fabian, thank you for the comments. Here are my responses and Alice will give her own. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

First of all, please take a look at my wikimedia-l post for general background. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The last information which Alice and I had about The Schomberg Institute event (~late December) is that it's going to happen "in January or February". The first Wikipedia page still says January. I see now that there is a separate page, created on January 5th. At that time we were already in planning the events for the next few months (we had to solve numerous issues, including the fact that instead of applying [or even not] for a grant just for February, we had to create the program until June because of gender gap focus during the next few months), as well as we didn't get information about the precise date. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, two events are just partially overlapping. The event in BPL starts at 10AM and ends at 12:30. That makes possible that at least some people participate in both events. (Google maps says ~30 mins from Brooklyn to Harlem, which doesn't sound like a big problem for such arrangement.) Thus, we should talk about that, as well. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

We already contacted WM NYC, WM DC and US-based user groups. WM DC expressed their interest in holding a satellite event. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

AFROcroWd is Alice's (and my) initiative, named few weeks ago, with the aim to trigger creation of Wikimedia user group for Americans of African descent. At the moment, we are in the process of setting up the website. Facebook page has a bit more information. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It is not yet on BPL's site as we are doing this on short notice. We even wanted to start in January by ourselves, but it turned out not to be achievable. Regular path of asking BPL for space is two months in advance. They gave us the venue on notice less than one month before the event. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for letting us know for Wikipedia:Black WikiHistory Month. I will add that into my lectures: We'll make a small research and then create the list of articles which could be improved and/or created during that event. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

In relation to the non-US black population, this is, of course interesting. Alice is from Haiti and, with the exception of Afro-Americans, the most of the Black Americans have strong ties with the countries of their origin. We already have the plan related to that. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The cooperation with the non-US chapters is interesting for sure (as the ultimate goal of this initiative is to create an affiliate organization, which would participate inside of the global movement, not just in US). But in this point of time, it's too early for that. In my opinion (though, I could be wrong), the primary goal of this initiative should be to create good connections with US-based chapters. I suppose that newly formed user group (if everything goes fine, during the second half of the year) will start communication with other chapters. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's similar with The Africa Project. And again, it's not about me to talk about that. I suppose that the future user group would take more active role in that initiative. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The most important role of the Wikimedians local to New York City would be to participate actively into the event. As I am the sole lecturer, I would be glad if they want to lead workshops instead of me (as it would mean that I did my job :) ). In relation to work on Wikipedia, we'd need technical support because of likely few dozens of new accounts from the same IP address. Also, like you pointed to a couple of ideas, we are completely open to every constructive contribution. There are some things which we missed for sure, as well as there are some good ideas inside of the movement. --Millosh (talk) 17:04, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Response from Alice

The events have been on the Brooklyn Public Library website since yesterday:

http://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/afrocrowd-presents-intro-central-library-info-comm-020715

http://www.bklynlibrary.org/calendar/afrocrowd-presents-intro-central-library-info-comm-020815

More later. --Aliceba (talk) 17:22, 21 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding promotion: As a result of our having promoted the event within our various target communities, we have RSVP's already for 20% of the Brooklyn Public Library Info Commons capacity for both days. Also, several of the communities we have been targeting have already spread the word within their groups. See also our Facebook invite which was created about a week ago: https://www.facebook.com/events/1595778877309598/. Note also that our Facebook page has about 95 Likes, again as a result of your ongoing promotion.

Regarding relationship to continental Africa: The title of the proposal explains that we are starting our initial outreach to people of African descent in the United States. As Milos has explained in the l list, it is because of the relative absence of US Blacks at Wikimania over the years compared to Africans from the continent. We count an organization of Africans in the United States as one of our outreach partners and we have mentioned in the proposal that we define our our target group as: "African, African-American, Afro-Latino, Biracial, Black, Black-American, Caribbean, Garifuna, Haitian or West Indian." Lastly we have listed the Yoruba and Igbo wiktionaries as potentially growing from our production due to the relatively large numbers of Nigerian-Americans among the African population in the United States. We have also said this in the impact section of our proposal:

"The workshops will take into account that many Afrodescendant groups in the United States might find that access to Wikipedia’s multilingual crowdsourcing platform can help them transfer free knowledge to populations of African descent outside of the United States that they are connected to through origin or direct familial bonds. Multilingual Afrodescendants may also want to use such platforms to develop and maintain online bodies of relevant knowledge in native languages such as Garifuna, Haitian Kreyòl, Igbo, Bozal Spanish, Twi or Yoruba, thereby contributing to the survival of -and increasing their proficiency in-- those languages while also feeling more culturally grounded.""

Also note that our second target city will likely be DC, home to a relatively large population of Ethiopians, Ghanaians and Africans generally.

Note that this proposal covers now through June in which we have chosen to focus on New York where I live but since this initiative is about increasing the over-all participation of people of African descent in the Wikimedia movement, our goal is global in the long term.

--Aliceba (talk) 08:13, 22 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding populations of African descent outside the United States: I have covered continental Africans above. All that applies to continental Africans applies to Afrodescendants of the Americas including Afro-Latinos, Caribbeans, Haitians, West-Indians, all of which are heavily represented among blacks in Brooklyn. As a native of Haiti who speaks, read and writes Haitian Creole and French and who created the only aggregator of blogs by Haitians wherever they live (www.haitianbloggers.com) I have been dedicated to amplifying Haitian online expression for the past 10 years. We have three Haitian organizations among our outreach partners and two Afro-Latino organizations. Both the Haitian and Afro-Latinos who have RSVP'd have expressed interest in beefing up the Haitian Creole and Spanish wikipedias/wiktionaries respectively. One of the Haitian orgs we are working with is premised on the preservation of Haitian Creole. We believe that Haitian Wikipedia [[1]], Haitian Creole Wiktionary[[2]] and Spanish Wikipedia[[3]] will likely be enriched because of our project.

My including a presentation about Wikipedia to the Caribbean Studies Association Conference in May, a conference which attracts Afro-Caribbean scholars of the United States, the Caribbean and elsewhere is also part of reaching out to and involving ppl of African descent not living in the US.

This leaves out Africans and Afrodescendants in Europe. In a later phase of the project not covered by this initial grant, they should be tapped into. I am a member of the French org http://www.internetsansfrontieres.org/ (i.e. Internet Without Borders) which is lead by a Franco-Cameroonian and can help us gain ground among Blacks in France as well as continental Francophone Africans along with the collaboration of French Wikimedia. As to Africans and Afrodescendants in Britain, the lack of a language barrier as well as the large wikimedia org in Britain should allow us to branch out there with relative ease vs other countries. We will need to create deeper links to Dutch and papamiento-speaking Afrodescendant of Holland and the Caribbean, including at the Caribbean Studies Association conference, and to black populations elsewhere in Europe. --Aliceba (talk) 08:58, 22 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the Africa Project : The Africa Project https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Africa_Project is a proposal for the paid translation by continental African students of 5,000 English wikipedia articles into continental African languages. We are in full support of this project and of the main idea behind it and would even like to see this idea spread to the Haitian wikipedia as well: beef up the wikipedias in languages spoken by people of African descent through improvement and translation of English wikipedia articles. We believe that part of our final edit-a-thon in June may well follow that theme for two of the subgroups (Haitian and Yoruba)-- although each subgroup will ultimately decide what its priorities are at that edit-a-thon. The Africa project is complementary to ours but not duplicative and we will reach out to its author for collaboration and coordination. We say that it is complimentary and not duplicative because this proposal is for five months of work in NY for the next five months. The Africa project proposal is for work by continental African-based university students. --Aliceba (talk) 09:20, 22 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]