Hello Fae,
Thank you for sharing your experience with micro-grants and offering an experimental and responsive procedure. It's definitely a good model to consider. As we enter our planning year for the strategic direction our team will be soliciting ideas from the community and looking at different approaches. I will be sure to keep your suggestion in this consideration as we move forward.
Best regards, Woubzena
Woubzena Jifar Program Officer Rapid Grants Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home User: WJifar (WMF)
On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 12:05 PM, Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
On 2 May 2018 at 17:53, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
2018-05-02 1:51 GMT+03:00 Woubzena Jifar wjifar@wikimedia.org:
- On your third point of having the 1st - 15th of the month be an open
application time, this is also an experiment. We hope that this focused, clear timeline will allow us to respond more quickly and help community members understand the state of their application more easily.
Woubzena, there used to be a time when the promise of the Rapid grants was that they would be reviewed weekly. I understand this is no longer possible, even if the wording is still present on meta. Does the new rule imply a promise from the WMF that the grants will be granted or refused withing the same calendar month?
Regards, Strainu
On being experimental and responsive, it would be cool to bring back some of the trust in grass roots volunteers, and consider funding a system of very light-weight global microgrants using an open request process on meta. Microgrants under $250, perhaps with a network of long term identified local volunteers taking responsibility for assessing that the money got spent on the right stuff, would be jolly nice. Enough to pay for bits and bobs of travel expenses, software, minor bits of hardware like accessibility or experimental kit.
The community has discussed this before, in fact the UK used to have a productive micro-grant procedure, which I think has been abandoned for staff managed grants. In terms of trust, I recall going to Amsterdam to coordinate a GLAM related event with a cash wad of a dozen people's expenses in my pocket. It felt very informal, but a great demonstration of trust that volunteers could sort out their own checks and balances. My main headache was ensuring that everyone got the money as quickly as possible, so it was out of my wallet!
Any thoughts on lobbying for a tiny global budget to spend on a 100% volunteer social and open simpleminded process, outside of any Affiliates structure, with zero employee time needed to run it?
Fae
faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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