In regards to the original problem brought up by Gerard, FDC is more or less on its maximum I think.
Its members never did such (or similar) job(s) before FDC (the closest would be credit checks, but that is like and IEG grant review - it is pretty far from such a comprehensive grant - technically a full "business plan" - review)
Despite the little to zero initial experience of its members, all-volunteer setup and the ever changing circumstances (global goals, focus points, etc.) and how in general awful it sounds if you say it out lout that an all-amateur (in the good sense) and inexperienced group of people are handling out USD 6 million every year in their free time and for free, it works pretty well.
Not perfect but you can not demand or expect perfection from such a setup.
That is why there is a whole process now to correct the mistakes that arise from this "non-professional system", including a dedicated ombudsperson for the case(s).
I think this is fair enough, the quality of the reviews are visibly improving from year to year and for the first time there is a real possibility to fix the mistakes and errors made, like the "incoherentness" of reviews.
Things from this point could be better only through radical changes to the system imo.
Balazs
2014-11-25 9:41 GMT, Ilario Valdelli valdelli@gmail.com:
In my opinion the work of the FDC cannot be limited to compare three years, to evaluate three budgets and to evaluate three impacts.
I would say that it's *out of context*.
I have had this feeling when I have read that the FDC consider that Amical is the best example to follow.
How "to follow"? Amical operates in a different context than other chapters. The question that a good example can be *cloned* is surrealistic.
Ok, nothing to say but: a) Amical operates in small community where the language is a strong glue within the community b) Amical has a strong inter-relation Wikimedia projects = organization c) Amical has no big internal conflicts generated by external or internal questions (may be the opposite) d) the territory where Amical operates is relatively small
A good example to compare Amical is with Wikimedia Israel.
I would not speak in the specific case of WM DE but I suggest to look in the history of the German projects and in the German chapter and to check how many external decisions have had an impact in the German community to generate a bias. I don't think that these decisions have been a good solution to improve the community participation to the projects.
What I see is that the numbers of editors is decreasing a lot in the biggest projects.
It may be caused by a wrong strategy where is privileged the diversity and the Global South but without paying attention that the historical communities and to the "usual" editors. May be I am wrong but there are more online projects becoming attractive for the "potential" editors and the change of the target is not producing a real impact.
So it's not a question of comparison of three budget.
If the problem is critical the solution to limit the decreasing is not beneficial.
regards
Il 24/Nov/2014 19:14 "Sydney Poore" sydney.poore@gmail.com ha scritto:
Hi Patrik,
During this round of the FDC evaluating the requests, the majority of the organizations that we were looking at had submitted requests to the FDC for the past 3 years. While we have seen improvement around strategic planning, budget planning and evaluation, there is still a great amount of room for improvement from everyone in the wikimedia movement (including the WMF.)
If you read the recommendations, FDC is primarily asking the largest organizations to re-evaluate their current capacity to deliver impact to the movement in line with the funds that they are using. In many instances it involves looking at the organizations overall capacity to develop and execute a strategic plan. Because the FDC is making recommendations about unrestricted funds, rather than focusing on a specific project or program, often the reductions in funds is linked to concerns about an organizations capacity to grow (eg., hire and manage more staff, do more complicated projects.)
Warm regards,
Sydney Poore User:FloNight Member FDC
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe