Grants:PEG/Open Labs and Youth Center Borderless/OSCAL

OSCAL is the annual conference about open source technologies, open culture and open knowledge that is being organized for the second year in Albania. Our mission is educating Albanian youth, and not only, on Free and Open Source Software, its ideology and the great community behind it. Among other projects, we also promote Wikipedia and the great community behind it.

OSCAL is a two days conference promoting open source technologies, though the main activities will be focused on everything open source. Among other great speakers we have Kiril Simeonovski from Wikimedia Macedonia, as well as Ismet Azizi, one of a few administrators of the albanian wikipedia. For further information, the following link will provide you with any details regarding OSCAL's speakers: http://oscal.openlabs.cc/speakers/ and OSCAL's agenda: http://oscal.openlabs.cc/agenda/#day1

With over 15 influential speakers from Berlin, Skopje, Vienna, Athens, Thessalonniki, Zürich, Zagreb, Bern, Ohrid and more than 8 from Kosova, the presence at OSCAL will be highly diversified, turning OSCAL into a flagship regional conference about everything open source.

Part of the talks at OSCAL will be Gender Gap issues, Education program, GLAM-wiki and competitions about wikipedia articles in the Albanian language with the aim of increasing the number of articles in Albanian and also increase the number of Wikimedians in our country. Apart from the Albanian Wikipedia, we will also put the articles related to Albania on the English Wikipedia.

• Through an editathon during the conference we aim to increase participation in the Albanian Wikipedia from the participants.
• Onboarding and educating new/existing editors through workshop, presentations, info-booth. All these activities during the weekend will maximase the exposure of the Wikipedia project in the local community.

Using Wiki Metrics, we'll measure:

• Number of newly registered users: 20
• Number of individuals involved: 50
• Number of new images/media added to Wikimedia article pages: 20
• Number of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects: 15

Open Labs members have organized more than 80 activities with average attendance of 15 people during two years on a low budget style. We are an active community with a good knowledge about the MediaWiki platform. Our community has started promoting Wikipedia in an organized way since November 2013, an experience that gives us confidence to continue the project in a more dynamic way.

One similiar successful project is Wikipedia Weekend, which was organized by Open Labs during the first weekend of November. We had speakers from abroad such as Thomas Levine, and Sanja Pavlovic from Wikimedia Serbia and others from Kosova, Macedonia. The following link reveals more details: http://wikiakademia.openlabs.cc/blog/wikipedia-weekend-ne-tirane-2014/

Project budget table

Total cost of project

14,794.52 EUR

Total amount requested from the Project and Event Grants program

710 EUR

Additional sources of revenue that may fund part of this project, and amounts funded

• Mozilla 3000 USD
• Raiffeisen Bank 3000 USD
• Norwegian Embassy 2500 EUR
• Google 1500 USD
• O'Reilly free books for participants with the cost of over 1000 EUR
• FSFE, Fedora, LibreOffice, CartoDB, proto.io, sitepoint, GIZ all these have paid the round trip for some of the speakers who represent each one of them.

There are no non-financial requirements from the organizers.

You are responsible for notifying relevant communities of your proposal, so that they can help you! Depending on your project, notification may be most appropriate on a village pump, talk page, mailing list. Please paste a link below to where the relevant communities have been notified of this proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions. Need notification tips?

• Open Labs mailing list
  • https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/open-labs-albania

• Social Media (Twitter, Facebook)
  • https://twitter.com/OpenLabsAL
  • https://www.facebook.com/openlabsAlbania

Do you think this project should be selected for a Project and Event Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project in the list below. Other feedback, questions or concerns from community members are also highly valued, but please post them on the talk page of this proposal.

• As a member of the local community and an active Wikipedian in Albanian language I fully support this project. I will also get involved as a volunteer supporting the organizing team promoting Wikipedia. Leeturtle (talk) 22:53, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
• Having helped with the grassroots efforts for kickstarting the local Wikipedia Community, I am happy to back this initiative which showcases perfectly the extensive amount of work put into volunteers of the local community in the past 2 years. It's a great opportunity which also I personally greatly support.Elioqoshi94 (talk) 07:34, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

• The organizer of OSCAL, Open Labs is the only community which promotes Wikipedia in Albania and that has a project "WikiAkademia" only for this reason. Is the only community that gathers together wikpedians from all over Albania. All activities till now are organized and developed without any grant. As an active Wikipedian i fully support this project and i am exited about meeting Wikipedia Administrator and other Wikipedias from abroad that will be part of the conference. Margott (talk) 07:43, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
• I strongly support the project as it has the potential of promoting our movement and its values in Albania. I will also participate in the conference as speaker and meet with the members of the community in order to deepen our future collaboration.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 08:32, 5 May 2015 (UTC)
• I am also a speaker at OSCAL, although this time with a non-Wikipedia topic. I was excited to see that there would a competition running during the event, and I certainly hope to win that t-shirt ;). Jokes aside, the conference is a good opportunity to extend Wikipedia editing reach to a new audience that is primed for contribution to open projects. As a traveler, first thing I do in a new city it to check out Wikipedia and OSM to gauge the pulse of the FLOSS community. It's also fun to leave behind information for other people that will follow. During OSCAL I hope to discuss future joint projects related to Wikimedia and OSM so we can increase the presence of Albania-related knowledge in these communities. This grant proposal has my full endorsement. --Arianit (talk) 11:10, 5 May 2015 (UTC)--