Thank you for this announcement, though I am sorry to hear it.
On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 12:05 PM, Sue Gardner susanpgardner@gmail.com wrote:
Here's an example: As you know, we have long wanted to create a program making grants to volunteers -- both to chapters and individual Wikimedians. Erik and I launched the chapters grantmaking process prior to Jennifer's arrival, but by ourselves we didn't have capacity to put much time into it. When she arrived, Jennifer picked it up and successfully made grants to 21 chapters. We had wanted to expand the program to include grants to individuals, which Jennifer would have done. With her leaving, three things will happen. 1) The existing chapters grants still need to be managed. 2) The launch of individual grants will be delayed. And 3) Our longer-term, big-picture thinking about grantmaking will be slower to evolve, because it won't benefit from having a person whose primary job is thinking about that kind of work.
To this example: are there other ways for long-term big-picture thinking to evolve? Not only does this seem like one of many topics suitable for brainstorming during the strategy planning of the coming 9 months, but Jennifer has recently been discussing on Meta ways to tap into community interest in being part of grant-finding and grantmaking. There is a certain tradition of the latter -- the community organized the first technology grant for essential technical work six years ago.
I expect there are community members with their own ideas and background in thinking and writing about such work - given the good example of the early chapters grants model, those interested could propose a variation suitable for individual grants, for example.
SJ