Microgrants/Microgrants 2020/Proposal/Teaching and learning OSM in Albania through LibreTech School
About your Mapping Community
Tell us a little bit about your mapping community at the moment, some examples of details to include are below, but please provide us with any information you think is relevant. Please write 100-200 words
I am a member of the OpenStreetMap Albania community with an active OSM account since 2012. You will usually find me splitting my time between contributing in mapping and community building mainly in Tirana and Elbasan area. I am the co-founder of Open Labs hackerspace (2012) where many OpenStreetMap activities have taken place with my contribution usually as a co-organiser, participant or contributor. I have also facilitated OSM presence at Open Source Conference Albania, one of the floss conferences with a significant gender balance in the organizing and volunteering team, as the initiator of the first edition and co-organizer for all the editions. Furthermore, I've been part of the team that facilitated and coordinated the work for geoportal.openlabs.cc, a website created to utilise geodata from the municipality of Tirana in collaboration with fellow OSM contributors from OSM Belgium, Albania and Kosovo. I would define my mission as an ongoing effort to grow the local OSM community in an sustainable way with an emphasis in engaging and onboarding first time contributors. This is why since January 2020, I cofounded Libre Tech School, which is also the project that will lead the efforts on implementing this grant. LTS has a clear focus: teach free libre open source technologies to that are in need of digital skills and are considered socially under-represented. We achieve this by pairing volunteer 'teachers', aka people with knowledge of free open source tech (including OSM), with 'students' who need to learn skills to close the digital division.
What do you need the grant money for?
We want to understand what you plan to buy, how much you plan to buy, and why this will help you to scale your community mapping efforts. There are two tables for you to fill in your response, and you may add more rows as needed. Some examples are in the table for your reference. You are welcome to use a different format in your response, but please make sure to include these details.
The table below has a cost breakdown of the proposal. The grant money will be spent during a 12 month period including the time needed to prepare the curricula in Albanian, promote the 'school' to gather participants, prepare and test the digital infrastructure, design the promo materials, conduct the classes online and do the reports to the grant committee. All these activities are quite intensive and require someone to take responsibility to fulfil the tasks in a professional manner and that is why there is a budget allocation for project management and coordination. Regarding the 'small gifts', they will be given in the end of each class and only to the participants that have taken place to tha majority of the classes. If there are leftovers we proposed to be used from the local OSM community.
Budget breakdown
Give your budget breakdown here. If you would like to present your budget in a tabular format, you can use this tool to convert your spreadsheet into a wikitable and paste the code below here
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Visual materials of the initiative for promo: logo and visual materials that will help to get promoted such as designs for the small gifts, images for social media, animated gifts, certificates small promo videos etc. | 600€ |
| Technical infrastructure for 12 months: BigBlueButton server for the 'classrooms' and for coordination between the LibreTech.school team and the teachers. BBB server can be used also for virtual meetups from the local OSM community that used to do meetups of OSM Albania before COVID-19 happened. | 350€ |
| Video production for at least 4 videos needed for the curricula of teaching.
Explanatory video showing (a) what is OSM, (b) why is it important, (c) how to start editing in Albanian and (d) how to get involved with the community, but with the possibility to be easily translated in other languages. |
1100€ |
| Project management and coordination for 12 months of work to overview the paperwork, promo, financial bookkeeping, reporting and coordination. | 1300€ |
| budget allocation for small gifts for participants at the 'school' (examples are OSM branded tote bags and notebooks and maybe congratulatory certificates. | 700€ |
| Photographer for documentation purposes for blog posts. Photos can be used as stock images from other OSM communities. | 210€ |
If you receive a grant, what do you aim to achieve?
It is recommended that this supports mission of the OSM Foundation and your local community. Please provide us with any information you think is relevant including the metrics you expect to achieve. Please write 100-200 words.
With this grant we aim to organise weekly classes for OpenStretMap contributors with less or without experience in editing and using OSM starting from September 2020 until May 2021 with a gap during end of year vacations and some weeks of, which will result in a total of 30 weeks of classes with a 1.5 hour lesson/week. The classes will take place on the BigBlueButton video-chat platform and will be hosted with a defined agenda. Before starting the lessons we will first develop a curricula in Albanian which will allow volunteer 'teachers' to organize online classes with under-represented groups in Albania. This consists on getting started with OpenStreetMap, basics of geo-informatics, how to get involved with the local community & where to go next. The curricula will be uploaded to libretech.school in English so that the material can be translated to other languages and used from other OSM communities. The explanatory videos are expected to have a lot of impact based on the latest trends of online video consumption. All the process will be documented from the project coordinator in a way that will make it easy to improve and replicate the program from other OSM communities.
Do you receive funding from any other sources at the moment?
If you receive funding from other organisations currently, please state how much this is, whether the donations are regular or one off, and how these funds have been raised. Please write no more than 300 words. If you have any sources of co-funding for this grant application, please provide details. Examples of this might be if you have any partners who would be willing to match grant funding if you receive it, or if your project has existing funding. Please provide as much detail as possible.
As a newly launched project, LibreTech.school, the initiative behind this project, does not receive any funding at the moment. The self-organised team plans to open a Patreon account in Q4 2020 to collect monthly donations, but based on our predictions it will take a while before Patron can cover the costs.
Is there anything you would like OSMF to support you with?
If there is anything which you would like OSMF to support you with in order to strengthen your project, please let us know. For example, this could include building relationships with OSM communities, sourcing updated imagery for mapping projects, or guidance on how to use some of the tools we have created. We want to do our best to support OSM communities, so please let us know what you need. Please write no more than 150 words.
It would be helpful to have some reach for the videos that we are creating from OSMF communication channels, since they can be a good opportunity for other communities to adopt to their language. By sharing the video, we hope to help other communities have their own version of the video with subtitles, another language for audio, and so on.
Declaration
By submitting this form to the OpenStreetMap Foundation, you certify the information contained in this application is correct, and that if you are awarded a grant, you will use it only for the purposes described above. You will provide written documentation and receipts for all of your expenses to the OSM Foundation to demonstrate this. You understand that the decisions made by the OSM Foundation Microgrants committee are final.
Redon Skikuli (LibreTech.school)
Endorsements
Community members are encouraged to endorse your project request here!
- eda_n: I endorse this project request Very nice project, nice OSM community in Albania and these BBB teaching documents /videos generated by the proposal could be soooo usefull everywhere once translated/adapted :) --Eda n (talk) 21:54, 15 May 2020 (UTC)
- I endorse this proposal. – BesfortGuri Besfort Guri 💬 20:54, 10 May 2020 (UTC)