Dear members of the Wikimedia community,
On behalf of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, I write to
share the news that we have approved [1] the full slate of the FDC’s Round
1 2014-2015 recommendations [2] for the Annual Plan Grants. In this round,
11 Wikimedia organizations will be receiving a total of $3,817,956 in
grants. This leaves approximately $2 million for organizations likely to
apply for Annual Plan Grants in Round 2 of this year. [3]
One organization, Wikimedia CH, submitted an appeal to the Board regarding
their funding recommendation. [4] We carefully reviewed this appeal,
including their proposal, the inputs into the FDC’s proposal review
process, and the notes from the deliberation on the chapter's proposal. We
appreciate the effort that its Board and staff put into creating the
proposal and the appeal. Ultimately, however, we decided not to override
the recommendation of the FDC.
We’re conscious and appreciative of the fact that WMCH is investing a lot
in Kiwix — a valuable offline project for access to Wikipedia and one that
we know is being used in innovative ways. This project indeed required us
to evaluate the financial sustainability of all technical projects, which
is currently not explicitly guaranteed by unrestricted grants; we will
review our grant strategy to see how we can accommodate these needs. We
have asked the WMF staff to provide a recommendation on how to adapt the
grant program to help ensure continued funding of certain projects when
they are considered high-priority to our movement goals and needs. Subject
to our review, such a process may be appropriate in the future for projects
like Wikidata and Kiwix.
We congratulate all eleven organizations on their grants, and we look
forward to seeing what the year ahead will bring. We know that the
volunteers, staff, and boards of these organizations are working hard to
advance the goals of the movement. We thank them for their work in doing
so.
We continue to optimize the Annual Plan Grant/FDC process and anticipate
further improvements to the APG grant program in 2015 based on our ongoing
impact analyses of grants as well as input and feedback from the
communities.
Sincerely,
Frieda and Bishakha, on behalf of the WMF Board of Trustees
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Board_decisions/2014-2015_round1
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/FDC_portal/FDC_recommendations/2…
[3]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Appeals_to_the_Board_on_the_reco…