Well, you could create a guideline that said "In the interest of
innovation, we should try and fund a diversity of projects" and then with
the community hash out what dimensions you care about for diversity in this
context, and how far from equality you are happy to go without artificial
interference, and then what interference should happen if you go outside
that boundary.
Let's say we've decided that we care about a diversity in where project
leads come from. Then you'd create a way to record from where successful
projects are from, and if there is a lack of diversity then this will be
obvious - like how it works with rotating Wikimania around different
continents:
I actually imagine that while this list would rarely be empty, the
individual items on it would be burned through very fast; it'd be like the
front page of Reddit. Most projects would be looking for small amounts of
money, so they'd either get fully funded in hours, or are shown to have a
low conversion rate and get kicked back down the queue - unless we're
holding them there because we think funding them is critical.
Also presumably we'd have an empirically derived "cut-off" conversion rate;
if after x thousand views, fewer than 0.???% of viewers donate on a
proposed project then it gets removed from the queue. If there are no
projects in the queue then we don't show any banners at all. So if people
are complaining that we show too many banners, they can instead try and
quantify how much by arguing to raise this cut-off rate by a certain amount.
*Edward Saperia*
email <edsaperia(a)gmail.com> • facebook <http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia> •
twitter <http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia> • 07796955572
133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
On 25 February 2015 at 16:24, Sydney Poore <sydney.poore(a)gmail.com> wrote:
In your scheme, items would not get moved up to be
considered if they are
not popular enough, right? From my experience working on wikimedia global
committees, it would be likely that the volume of requests would be much
larger than the capacity of the wikimedia movement to evaluate them. People
join the movement primarily to create content with a smaller part being
willing to do administrative website work. And an even smaller group being
willing to do work around evaluation. Reader come to read content.
So well populated parts of the movement would have a huge advantage over
less populated areas.
Right now a small user group has a fair chance of getting funds to do a
project that might be over shadowed by larger groups that had a constant
flow of requests coming in.
How do you propose that we make sure that funds are give out in a way that
supports more diversity not less?
Sydney
Sydney Poore
User:FloNight
Wikipedian in Residence
at Cochrane Collaboration
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 10:50 AM, Edward Saperia <edsaperia(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Of course you're very correct that there are
many projects sitting around
asking for scrutiny - the difference here is the (potential of) funding
would be default yes instead of default no, with the discussion just
around
the priority. I expect that would attract a lot
more attention very
quickly
indeed.
*Edward Saperia*
email <edsaperia(a)gmail.com> • facebook <
http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia>
•
twitter <http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia> • 07796955572
133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
On 25 February 2015 at 15:38, Sydney Poore <sydney.poore(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> I'm pretty concerned that the systematic biases in the wikimedia
movement
> would be continued if there was no organized
effort to do a
comprehensive
review of
all proposals to see where we are lacking diversity. I'm in
favor
of having more focused funding calls like the
Inspire Gender Gap
campaign.
>
> A large part of the work of the community grant committees..IEG, PEG,
> FDC...is evaluating the feasibility of the projects, the impact of
work,
> and giving feedback. This work needs the
assistance of paid staff to
make
> sure all the information needed to make
decision is available. Then
> volunteers to look at the information and give a recommendation. I'm
not
> clear on how the work flow you suggest would
get the important aspects
of
> the work accomplished.
>
> I'm not opposed to a group outside of WMF taking over this type of
work.
But there
was a huge vacuum in the movement around Learning and
Evaluation
until recently. The WMF began doing this work
for lack of anyone else
doing it well. At this point, I can't see an independent organization
being
feasible.
Instead of small Project and Event Grants, micro grants, or travel
grants,
> many organizations are asking for unrestricted funds to pay for staff,
> offices, equipment, specialized staff for software development. They
want
to have
funds to make long term plans with GLAM partner organizations.
The
> evaluation of these large grant requests is extremely time consuming.
Our
current
method of asking a group of volunteers to be available to this
type
> of work a set period of time, and having it also open for other
community
> comment seems to the best approach to make
sure every project get a
fair
look.
Today there are dozens of ideas for projects on meta waiting for people
to
> comment and offer assistance of some type. I'm in favor of doing more
to
> encourage members of the wikimedia movement
to come to meta and join in
> working on them.
>
> IdeaLab.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Ideas
>
> Sydney Poore
> User:FloNight
>
> Wikipedian in Residence
> at Cochrane Collaboration
>
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 9:37 AM, Edward Saperia <edsaperia(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > This reminds me of a slightly heretical idea I had a while ago while
> > thinking about crowdfunding and WMF fundraising...
> >
> > Currently the WMF raises money via site banners, and spends these on
> > programmes and disburses them via grants, which go to all kinds of
> projects
> > - education, outreach, development, Wikimedians in Residence, etc
etc.
> > Despite the relative openness of the
WMF as an organisation, this is
> still
> > a very centralised, top down method of handling (the disbursement of)
> these
> > funds. If we're truly going down the "everything open, everything
> community
> > driven" route, the more consistent approach would be something like
the
> > following:
> >
> > The community submit funding proposals for projects they want to do,
of
> any
> > kind. Each has a campaign page with a description of the project
(much
like
> a kickstarter page, with project milestones, background, team etc), a
> monetary target they're trying to raise, and a banner design. These
> projects compete for advertising time on the site banner via a
community
> > curated queue; When they're at the top of this queue, they're
displayed
on
the banners, which lead to their project pages;
if they hit their
fundraising target, they're taken down; if they have a low conversion
rate
> (% of views that lead to donations), they're demoted down the queue
and,
if
> persistently low, rejected entirely.
>
> The criteria for prioritisation of projects in the queue and the
vetting
> of
> > project quality is done organically by the community, who would
create
> and
> > evolve guidelines and policies. The actual handling of the queue
could
be
> done algorithmically via an openly editable
algorithm, or even done
> manually like with e.g. WP:ITN - you'd just need a widget that tells
you
> > how much a given project has raised so far and what the conversion
rate
is.
> If the community is concerned about people being shown too many
banners,
> we
> > dial down the number of people being shown banners, or raise the bar
in
> > terms of acceptable conversion rates.
> >
> > If a project raises money and is ultimately considered a failure,
then
> > hopefully the community will learn from
this and provide more
support /
be
> more careful with that kind of project in the future. However, one
hopes
> that this will also allow for bolder project
ideas to get off the
ground,
> > and also allow for a much larger amount of small funding to go to
many
> > small projects, as there is no
centralised grants body that has to
> process
> > them all.
> >
> > In order to pay for its own programmes, then, the WMF itself would
have
to
submit projects into this queue. Nobody would
have to go to any
centralised
> body for money - all funds would be raised and disbursed via this one
> channel. Operationally I suppose the WMF would provide the
infrastructure
> to actually receive and send out the money.
>
> You could even start getting clever with e.g. showing different
campaigns
> > to readers from different geographical regions, or particular
campaigns
> to
> > readers looking at articles from particular wikipedia categories,
and I
> > imagine that kind of thing would start
to evolve on its own.
> >
> > It really struck me that the discussions around the centralnotice
> > fundraising banners fell into a classic pattern; one centralised team
> doing
> > their best, but being overwhelmed by feedback from a large community.
> This
> > model puts all this attention to good use.
> >
> > *Edward Saperia*
> > Conference Director for Wikimania 2014 <
http://www.wikimanialondon.org
>
> > email <edsaperia(a)gmail.com> • facebook <
>
http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia>
> > •
> > twitter <http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia> • 07796955572
> > 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
> >
> > On 24 February 2015 at 18:54, Sage Ross <
ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 10:43 AM, Austin Hair <adhair(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > >
> > > > With more and more Wikimedians engaging in crowdfunding, I
suppose
we
> > > > can talk about whether the mailing list for Wikimedia movement
> > > > organization is the place to advertise in this way. For my part,
I
> > > > don't think a simple
(i.e., without any additional context)
"please
> > > > check out this
Indiegogo" is any different from "hey, check out
my
> > > > blog," so when the last
one came through the queue I rejected it
> > > > without much thought. It certainly wasn't done with any
prejudice.
> > > >
> > >
> > > For my part, I always like to see crowdfunding pitches from
> > > Wikimedians. There haven't been *that* many of them (maybe 8 or
10?),
> > > and so far they've all (that
I've seen) come from prolific
> > > contributors.
> > >
> > > These crowdfunding pitches generally take a lot more effort to put
> > > together than a blog post does, and they are also easy and
satisfying
> >
to act on. If I can take 3 minutes and a few dollars to
simultaneously
> > say thanks to a great contributor and
help them make even better
> > contributions, I'm grateful for that opportunity.
> >
> > -Sage
> >
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