Today we’re announcing the second round of Individual Engagement Grantees.[1]

These grants from the Wikimedia Foundation support individuals and small teams of Wikimedians to experiment with new ideas aimed at having online impact on Wikimedia projects. We’ve learned a lot from the first round of IEG grantees over the past 6 months, and look forward to seeing what this next group will accomplish.[2]

Seven projects have been recommended by the Individual Engagement Grants Committee, a group of volunteers from across the Wikimedia movement who reviewed a set of more than twenty proposals, and approved by the Wikimedia Foundation for this round.[3][4] These selections represent a broad range of projects focusing on activities from outreach to tool-building and are all aimed at connecting and supporting our community. 

Grantees are trying out new ways of engaging with women and young Wikipedians, fostering participation in Africa, and supporting cartographers, researchers and developers to better engage with projects like Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and Wikipedia.

The seven selected projects are:

Wikimaps Atlas

Led by Arun Ganesh and Hugo Lopez, funded at $12,500.[5]  Hugo and Arun will be building a system to automate the creation of maps in standardized cartographic style using the latest open geographic data.  With new workflows and scripts, they aim to make it easier for Wikimedia’s cartographers to generate and update maps for use in Commons, Wikipedia, and beyond.

Mbazzi Village writes Wikipedia

Led by Paul Kikuba with collaboration from Dan Frendin, funded at $2880.[6]  This project is a collaboration between Mbazzi villagers, Wikimedia Sweden, and the Wikimedia Foundation to build a Wikipedia center in Uganda where volunteers can to contribute to Luganda Wikipedia, particularly focusing on articles related to sustainable development.

What is about - C'est quoi. A series of communication tools about Wikipedia in Cameroon

Led by Marilyn Douala Bell and Iolanda Pensa with collaboration from Michael Epacka, funded at €15,000.[7]  The team in Douala, Cameroon will engage local artists to create comics, video, and other materials to raise awareness about Wikipedia and free knowledge.

Visual editor gadgets compatibility

Led by Eran Roz and Ravid Ziv, funded at $4500.[8] The team aims to map, organize, and surface lists of gadgets used in different language versions of Wikipedia to improve sharing of gadgets across language communities. They’ll also be piloting and documenting an approach for adapting the most-used gadgets for Visual Editor compatibility.  

Wikidata Toolkit

Led by Markus Krötzsch with collaboration from students and researchers at Dresden University of Technology, funded at $30,000.[9] Markus’ team will develop a demonstrator toolkit for loading, querying, and analysing data from Wikidata. The project experiments with ways to give developers, researchers, and Wikimedians easier access to use Wikidata in applications, research, and other projects.  

Women Scientists Workshop Development

Led by Emily Temple-Wood, funded at $9480.[10] Emily is piloting a model of regular, incentivized editing workshops aimed at college-aged women to encourage them to become regular contributors to Wikimedia projects and combat systemic bias with quality content. If the approach is successful, she’ll use lessons learned in order to develop a scalable kit for other groups to use.

Finally, we’ve provisionally approved a seventh project:

Generation Wikipedia

Led by Emily Temple-Wood and Jake Orlowitz, funded at $20,000 - provided that legal dependencies can be satisfied.[11] This project would pilot a week-long summer conference for young Wikipedians and Wikimedians from around the globe to connect, share skills and build leadership and community capacity among our newest generation of editors.  

The ten grantees from Cameroon, Uganda, India, Israel, France, Italy, Germany and the United States will begin their projects in the new year; most will run from January through June 2014.  They’ll be regularly sharing their progress, experience and lessons learned from their experiments throughout this period, so please feel free to visit their respective pages on Meta for project information and updates in the coming months.[4]  

Thanks to everyone who boldly created a project idea or shared feedback and suggestions in this round!  The next round of IEG proposals opens on 1 March 2014. We look forward to seeing more of your ideas and engagement in 2014.[12][13]

Sincerely,

Harold A. Hidalgo

On behalf of the Individual Engagement Grants Committee.

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1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG

2. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/08/01/ieg-learnings-call-new-proposals/

3. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Committee

4. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG#ieg-engaging

5. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Wikimaps_Atlas

6. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Mbazzi_Village_writes_Wikipedia

7. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/What_is_about_-_C%27est_quoi._A_series_of_communication_tools_about_Wikipedia._Cameroon_pilot_project

8. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Visual_editor-_gadgets_compatibility

9. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Wikidata_Toolkit

10. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Women_Scientists_Workshop_Development

11. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Generation_Wikipedia

12. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG#ieg-applying

13. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Ideas