Hello Asaf,
Thanks for your email about the startup grant. I just want to inform you that, we have discussed about the startup grant in our board already. However, at this moment we are working for the local registration of the chapter with concerned authority in Bangladesh and we have appointed a legal consultant for that matter. Since the registration is still underway, our board have decided to submit proposal for the startup grant after the local registration is complete. So, positively our startup grant proposal would follow the good news (that we have completed local registration!).
We have also come up to a decision about the left over money that is currently with Tanvir & Nasir. Tanvir & Nasir informed our board after the WikiConference India that a part of their travel grant has not been used. So, we decided that we would use the money for activities of Wikimedia Bangladesh. However, the fund is kept with Tanvir & Nasir since we are yet to open a bank account for Wikimedia Bangladesh (which would be done after local registration). And as Tanvir informed you, we have spent 5,500 BDT in travel & food for four of our Wikimedia Bangladesh volunteers who went from Dhaka.
Certainly we are planning lot more events like first Bengali Wikipedia Unconferece, Chittagong and we would need support from all for those upcoming activities & events.
Best Regards,
Ali Haidar Khan (Tonmoy)
Treasurer
Wikimedia BangladeshOn Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 4:57 AM, Asaf Bartov <abartov@wikimedia.org> wrote:
_______________________________________________Dear colleagues in Bangladesh,(I apologize for not being able to write this in Bangla. I encourage you to translate this into Bangla if necessary!)I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, and one of my roles is to run the Wikimedia Grants program. Like other new chapters, Wikimedia Bangladesh is encouraged to apply for a "start-up" grant to help fund some activities for the first year or two of its existence. Instructions for submitting a grant are available here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index [1]However, some Wikimedia money is already in Bangladesh and is *available for your use* -- it was granted to Messrs. Nasir Khan and Tanvir Rahman to support their attendance at the WikiConference India event late last year. For technical reasons, there is an amount of money left over from those two travel grants, and instead of asking Nasir and Tanvir to wire the money back to the Foundation (wasting some of our donor funds on commissions and banking fees), we have decided to award the remaining funds to Wikimedia Bangladesh, as an _advance_ on its first start-up grant (which Wikimedia Bangladesh is yet to request).The money itself is with Nasir and Tanvir, and as soon as Wikimedia Bangladesh has its own bank account, they will deposit the remaining funds there. The total amount was 67221.5 BDT, of which 17698.5 are with Nasir and 49,523 are with Tanvir.The funds are available for any mission-aligned[2] use Wikimedia Bangladesh would like to put it to, and it is up to Wikimedia Bangladesh's board (executive committee) and members to plan and approve the specific uses.We do require a *public* report about how that money ends up getting used. We recommend starting a page on the Meta-wiki as a sub-page of Wikimedia Bangladesh's page[3], and tracking the use of the money there. Eventually, when WMBD submits a start-up grant request, we can roll this report into that start-up grant's eventual report. So far, Tanvir tells me he has spent 5,500 BDT toward the Chittagong Unconference, so please record that (including _what_, exactly, those 5500 BDT paid for) expense on this public page.I look forward to seeing more activity (the Chittagong Unconference sounds like a success!) from Wikimedia Bangladesh, and would love to help in any way I can.Please don't hesitate to contact me with any questions, about the Wikimedia Grants program or otherwise.Cheers,Asaf Bartov, WMF Grants Team[1] Incidentally, you are welcome to help make that page more accessible to fellow Bangla speakers by clicking the "Translate this page" link near the top of that page, and translating the instructions into Bangla.
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Ali Haidar Khan (tOnmOy)
Treasurer
Wikimedia Bangladesh