Talk:Education/Greenhouse/teamsubmissions/GOIFON

Disclaimer

Although almost all team members include here are involved with the GOI Foundation, we however wish to clarify that this project is independent of the activities of the GOI Foundation, and is not intended to be an extension of the activities of the GOI Foundation, nor is it intended to solicit funding to promote the activities of the GOI Foundation. Global Open Initiative (talk) 10:54, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Community comments

Hello Mohammed Sadat Abdulai thanks for your application. It is good you have an ambitious project in mind for the growth of the movement and education, however I have certain concerns about this project that I think need to be addressed. Since you have no experience organizing a WEP why don't you look at just piloting it one institution and once it that works out you can build on that experiences from there and scale it up? Visiting 8 institutions in different regions across the country is not an easy task especially when you haven't even secured any partnerships or signed an MoU with any of the institutions.Even when it comes to your team most of them are not experienced editors and that roles they will be playing have little to do with ensuring these project is successful.I see you're still at the prospecting phase.Setting up a WEP in an institution is not a simple task. And from my experience looking your approach, even visiting each institution twice will not be enough to do this. Because you first have to introduce them to Wikipedia, train them and you have to find a lecturer willing to incorporate WEP in his/her curriculum before you can even proceed. This takes a lot of time, negotiations so from starters, looking at rolling out in 8 different schools in different regions may be overly ambitious. I believe if you focus on one institution for the time being and set up one that will have more impact and you can even use that as blueprint for the other institutions. Lastly a huge project of this nature lacks metrics. How are we going to measure if it's successful or not and what will even be the basis for organizing a research?

Staffing

1. I find your staff billing worrying. First of all the $30/hr rate is very high and also looking at the activities you are asking to be paid for, these are mostly activities most volunteers do for their events without charging. To charge $30/hr for 50 hours($1500) just to organize events materials to me sounds ridiculous because volunteers do these at every event at no fee. More so you won't even be the one to produce them you just need to contract someone to do it and pick them up so how do you spend 50 hours just to arrange t shirts etc and charge $30/hr for that?
2. Staff billing items A,C D and E are neither convincing or justifiable .Every volunteer organizes, edit-a-thons, workshops and write reports and sometimes blogs at the end of a project so why should you be paid to do something volunteer can do? Did you even reach out to the community to find out if people could volunteer for these roles? If you want to do podcast and others for your porject, i think they are good and will make your project seem great but is that the core mandate of this Greenhouse project?
3. Billing item E also seems dicey because this a proposed project how sure are we about the outcomes? As it stands now there is no MoU with even one of the partners so why should such a project be used to develop a manual for running WEP in Africa? Aren't there already success stories with WEP in Africa? Nigeria has tons of Wiki Clubs, they were set up are still being managed by volunteers. I was part of the team that started the Ashesi Wiki Club and WEP and it is still been managed by the volunteers. WEP is a continuous event and not a one time thing does that mean that if we need to continue with this we will still need to pay people to man it year in year out and this make your project not sustainable?

We should be mindful of the fact that the core tenet with which the movement works is volunteerism and we should be guided by this fact. If we fail with this and set a bad precedent we make wake up one day without no Wiki because most of the work of the foundation is done by volunteers at no cost.

Logistics

First of all since you say this project is not by any organization and as such an individual project, how do you seek to keep and maintain these devices you have budgetTed for after the project? Are they going to be yours or you will return to WMF? I do not see how you want to justify the fact that a project slated for 9 months with only 10 visitations needs to run trainings simultaneously and as such the need to procure two projectors. Most of the institutions you have mentioned will at least have computer lab with not less than 30 computers so I don't see why they won't have a projector.In any case can't they be rented? Again I don't see why you need 4 routers. Are you even sure about the numbers that will be attending each training? Most of the budget items grant seems high and makes the whole project looks like hiring consultant to do a project. I also find some of the places you intend to visit mentioned on another proposed grant by a team member of this project that I have raised concerns about. What is the correlation between these two projects?

Recommendations

1. I think this project looks overly ambitious and from my experience there is really little to show that it will be impactful.
2. Also the cost element is very high especially the staffing (which are mostly volunteer-based activities )
3. I will suggest the lead should at least pilot this project in one institution(preferably Madina Institute of Technology where the lead is a faculty member). The outcomes from this can be a test case and also serve as a blue print for the subsequent ones if he plans to scale it up.
4. If you need to train educators you can organize a one-off event where you can invite or the educators from various institutions to an event. Since you stated Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT is one of your partners you can hold it there or get one of your proposed institutions to host it. By so doing you can bring in more educators at one event and this is more cost effective than moving volunteers around which will have a little impact.
5. Most activities are superfluous and should be either be left out or not charged for if the lead wants to still go on with them because the projects go on without these.
6. Liase with the community or institutions because I am sure in most cases they have facilities or some devices can be rented.--Rberchie (talk) 14:45, 31 May 2019 (UTC)