[Wikimedia-l] Updates from the WMF Grantmaking department

[Anasuya Sengupta]

Dear friends and colleagues,

This message is to announce that the names of the Wikimedia Foundation’s
grants programs are being changed to better reflect the purpose and
function they serve, while the names of the volunteer-driven committees
that serve these programs remain unchanged. We hope this will help any
current and future applicants to these programs understand their purpose
better at a glance, while keeping the continuity of names (a.k.a beloved
acronyms!) that our movement is already familiar with. :-)

Last year was a significant year for Grantmaking at the Wikimedia
Foundation, particularly through our narrowing focus exercise, in which we
emphasised that the Foundation will support the growth and development of
Wikimedia communities through the main platforms of technology and grants.
We moved from being a small team primarily led by Asaf and supported by
Winifred, to being a stand-alone department at the end of the year. The
Funds Dissemination Committee and the Individual Engagement Grants were
launched, with dedication and commitment from every community member
involved.

Now that we’ve moved into the new fiscal year of 2013-14, one of the
Grantmaking department’s efforts this year will be to improve the structure
and design of our grants programs so that they're effective in supporting
different constituencies and needs of our movement. This is the focus of
the first quarter of the year for our team, including developing much
clearer communication and guidelines for good proposals and reporting,
criteria for assessment of the proposals, and building out a back-end
grantsmanagement platform. We will be keeping you posted on this, and
welcome
your comments and suggestions for improvements.

In the meantime, part of our effort is to be clearer about what our
grantsprograms are *for*, so that their functions are pretty apparent
at first
glance.[1]

1. Annual Plan Grants/Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC): The grants or
funding that the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) allocates will be
called Annual Plan Grants, since they are essentially general support
grants for the annual plans of eligible entities.  The name of the FDC -
the committee itself - stays unchanged.

2. Project and Event Grants/Grants Advisory Committee (GAC): The name of
the Wikimedia Grants Program (which made sense when it was the only
grants program
we had) is being modified to Project and Event Grants, which reflects the
purpose for which they now exist. Again, the GAC - as the advisory
committee - remains unchanged in name.

To be clear: chapters and other groups that have projects and programs that
need support for up to a year - including project management support (for
e.g. part time staff or administrative costs like payments to an accounting
firm) - can continue to apply for project grants under this program. In
fact, they may be consolidated such that these grants essentially support
most of an organisation or group's programmatic work. While some Wikimedia
entities may choose to apply to the FDC because they want full time support
for substantial operating and programmatic costs, others may wish to opt
for the agility of project grants that are simpler to apply and report for,
and can be accessed any time of the year.

3. Individual Engagement Grants/Individual Engagement Grants committee
(IEGcommittee):
This name will stay unchanged, as does the name of the IEG committee. The
program is meant to support individual Wikimedia contributors or small
teams, to lead projects with online impact. Over this next year, the
Grantmaking team would like to see more resources going to the core of our
contributing community as effectively as possible.

4. Travel and Participation Support:  This program name changes to Travel
and Participation Support, from simply Participation Support, to make clear
that these grants are for travel related to active participation in
non-Wikimedia events. We are thinking about the purpose of this program
more closely, so that we can deepen its impact, and will be working on this
with our team (and our partners like WMDE and WMCH) over the next few
months.

In addition, we are moving our Brazil catalyst program into a ‘Partnership
Grant’ model as we did with India last year. I will be sharing more details
on this in the next few weeks, but essentially, Partnership Grants will be
with significant allied organisations - particularly in the Global South -
who support our communities in expanding reach and participation. These
grant proposals will go through substantial on wiki review by the local
community (for e.g. the Brazilian PT community), and then a short review by
the global Wikimedia community. After this, the proposal  will be approved
(or not) by the Grantmaking team, primarily Asaf Bartov and Anasuya
Sengupta. This model is likely to be used sparingly, and only when the
opportunities offered by an allied organisation are significant to the
growth of a community. We hope that these allies will, after the initial
grants through this model, be familiar enough with our movement to apply
directly for annual plan grants through the FDC or project grants through
the GAC.

In order to move from setting up the appropriate structures for grants to
assessing their impact, we are also consolidating the Grantmaking Learning
and Evaluation team. The team is responsible for designing the grant
reporting processes and assessing the overall impact of grants, analysing
and supporting research on organizational development in our movement, and
monitoring the internal performance indicators of the
Grantmakingdepartment. Led by Jessie Wild (Senior Manager), it
includes Jonathan
Morgan (Learning Strategist) and Haitham Shammaa (Global South Learning
Strategist). Evan Rosen, who used to serve as the Data Analytics Manager,
has left the Foundation to pursue his interests in machine learning and
pure research. The Grantmaking Learning and Evaluation team will work in
close partnership with the Program Evaluation and Design team (Frank
Schulenburg, Jaime Anstee, Sarah Stierch), responsible for assessing the
effectiveness and impact of programmatic activities in the Wikimedia
movement, thereby supporting the Grantmaking staff and committees, as well
as program leaders across the movement.

To remind you all, the first Grantmaking Quarterly Review was held in May,
and notes from it offer significant context for our work.[2] In addition,
if you happen to be at Wikimania in Hong Kong this year, please do come
find us at the Grantmaking booth [3] or the Grantmaking lunch [4] or any of
the other events our team will be facilitating and leading. We look forward
to meeting you!

The Wikimedia movement - contributors, organisations, donors and allies -
expects and deserves to have its shared resources be as impactful as
possible. Putting responsive structures and processes in place is a key
step in ensuring that grants are effective in growing our communities and
content. We share in this responsibility together, and I look forward to
our continued conversations on how to do this as well as possible.

Warmly,

Anasuya


[1] For more information on the grants structures and processes:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start <http://www.fluxx.io/>

[2] The first Grantmaking Quarterly Review notes
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_reviews/Grantmaking,_2013-05-15

[3] The Grantmaking booth at Wikimania:
http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grantmaking_booth

[4] The Grantmaking lunch at Wikimania
http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grantmaking_meetup


-- 
***Anasuya Sengupta
Senior Director of Grantmaking
Wikimedia Foundation*
*
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