Hi all!
I just published some of my findings from the very encouraging conversations I had during WikiIndaba. As you probably know, Wiki Loves Monuments has been especially successful in some parts of the world. The international team expressed the desire to explore the opportunities and challenges that Wiki Loves Monuments faces in (sub-Saharan) Africa, and how we could further develop the concept to make it both more accessible and more impactful.
For this purpose, I attended WikiIndaba, the Wikimedia Conference for organizers of Wikimedia activities across Africa. This is the best group to learn how we can improve our concept and methods to suit the needs of African organizers. A session to introduce WLM and explore the challenges and opportunities with national organizers was accepted, but was last minute merged with the session dedicated to the future on Wiki Loves Africa.
Most of the people I talked with either organized Wiki Loves Monuments in the past, or expressed an interest to do so in the future, if there would be no obstacles. The conversations focused mostly on challenges and how to address those, and I skipped for these purposes the positive feedback we received (an effective way to build community capacity, a nice way to get people involved in the community, returning new contributors, pride of the result achieved, a good entrance to start conversations with partners, etc).
In this report, I'll aggregate with a focus on future continuation. None of the points is generalizable for the countries - Africa is an incredibly diverse continent, and it would not be helpful to assume that all problems described are equally (if at all) relevant to all countries. I tried to cluster the information somewhat, and provide context where possible.
This is intended as input for a conversation, which would be a next step. Your thoughts on these issues, and especially other challenges you think may be missing from this overview, would be most welcome!
Lodewijk
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Finance/Grant: Organizers were challenged by the grant practices. One grantee described how they were granted funds, but due to the timing of the approval process (near the end of September), they were only able to execute it in a limited fashion. This reduced their effectiveness significantly. Approval speed (and execution speed) was reported in general as suboptimal. Some reported that grant committees would add 'suggestions' to change their activity. Organizers felt pressured to follow them, even though they didn't feel it helped the cause. User Groups can also only request 3 grants at the same time. This limits the larger UG's in their activities, and can mean that they have to skip WLM because of it, or request it in an untimely manner. A smoother and guaranteed pipeline would be helpful. A follow-up conversation with WMF Rapid Grants was scheduled in the weeks after Wiki Indaba, and resulted in a number of action items for future collaboration.
Collaborations: Many wanted to increase local collaborations, but several countries reported that they did not get the kind of appreciation as you'd hope due to not being incorportated. They feel that more international support (letters of support, introductions, etc) could be beneficial. This is even more relevant for sponsorships.
International bodies/networks: Especially when contacting the government, some support from UNESCO-like organizations could be helpful. We should look into how to build those relationships in a consistent manner.
Quality: National organizers felt that the quality of their images was not able to compete with European images. That is discouraging to photographers and organizers alike.
Transportation: People need to travel to monuments to photograph them. People need to travel to ceremonies to accept their award. Not everyone can afford that. Several countries described that they organized tours to bring photographers to the monuments, with the expectation that they then upload the images. Movement is not a free resource, and people need to be at the monument to photograph it. This did bring several challenges though, in order to perfect the pipeline (how do they actually upload the images).
Definitions: We may be dealing with different concepts of what constitutes 'heritage'. Some are because of practical concerns (copyright, official status), some are more conceptual. The concept is all too often tied to the colonial history.
Diverse African Heritage: Freedom of Panorama is a blocker. A significant number of African countries faces a limitation of heritage that can be photographed due to copyright restrictions. Organizing Wiki Loves Monuments can both be a motivation for us why we want to reduce those restrictions, but it can also be a PR-tool in persuading policy makers. Copyright restrictions lead to a distorted depiction of African heritage. Also the monument lists are often restricted to more or less the colonial era. Diversifying the lists is essential to engage the audience. Ancient monuments are sometimes kept off the lists (or mentioned without location) to preserve them through obscurity.
List quality: the quality (incl. richness) is not great in several countries. That means a lot of manual work in improving the lists. Cleanup, improvements, adding information and fixing mistakes, hard to deal with in our framework: we like to think of the official lists as an authoritative source. The standards are different compared to some European countries.
Scope size: When the list is too short, the heritage is not 'close' enough, and the list may be completed rapidly because the bar for a monument is really high. They are likely already photographed. How to expand the scope?
Informal lists: Besides the formal lists, there are sometimes also unofficial lists by other organizations or without legal standing (official status comes with expectations/responsibilities for the government). These could perhaps be included in the scope.
List updates: Lists are not always updated (this is a general problem across WLM). This becomes especially challenging when the government list is not 'officially published' all the time. How can we make updating scale?
Wikidata: Getting the data into Wikidata was generally received as a positive thing, but also as something hard to comprehend/execute. Wikidata does offer a framework for future localization.
List: Do we actually need a list?
Mobile: Uploading via phone or a reliable app could be improved. This would have to include the whole pipeline a participant has to go through: finding the monument, uploading, identifying etc. The current upload process is just too complicated, and the forced desktop process discourages part of the audience.
People: Many activities are being organized, and it is not always easy to find people who can organize a competition like this without support.
Technical support: A few times it was brought up that there are little technical tasks that block teams from moving forward (running queries on Wikidata, converting lists, setting up pages). Some support could help volunteers with less technical expertise participate in the organization better.
Communication: Promotion of the competition is more of a challenge. Social Media may be an additional approach to the banner, but requires investments of effort. Journalists expect to be compensated for their coverage. This all has some effort and budget implications.
Documentation: We need better documentation on how to organize. This includes how to make a communication plan, decision trees what to include in your competition, a menu of different options, etc.
Confusion: Some countries didn't participate because of a misunderstanding of the concept: who participates, and which photos can participate. Clearer and more communication could help.
Follow-up: People are excited after participating in something like Wiki Loves Monuments. How to keep them engaged? Even three events per year (lot of work!) may not be sufficient. We need some clearer pipeline for them to enter, better mechanisms.
I spoke at least with volunteers from the following countries: Uganda, Nigeria, Tunisia, Morocco, South Africa, Namibia, Cameroon, Algeria