Hi everyone,
As most of you know by now, the first round of the Funds Dissemination
Committee is now underway! We’ve had many entities submit proposals, and
now it’s time for the hard work of evaluating these proposals and making
recommendations on a funds allocation to begin. The FDC and FDC staff are
both in the process of doing just this. The staff, in particular, will be
completing the Staff Proposal Assessment forms over the next few weeks, and
the FDC will be meeting at the end of the month (October 28-31) to discuss
and deliberate on these proposals. The deadline for the FDC recommendations
to the Board is November 15.
We hope that you will all be involved with this process as well between now
and October 22nd (over the next two weeks). *The proposals are open for
community commentary, and we ask you to read and review the proposals and
provide questions, comments, and other feedback on the respective proposal
talk pages*. While the deadline was October 1, we found that with this
being the first ever time we were doing this process, we had requests for
an extension of the deadline (WMFR) as well as partially completed
proposals (WMAT and WMAU, as well as WMIT and WMPH). We asked all these
entities to either withdraw or explain the delays on the Discussion page of
their proposal hubs. We are being flexible about the deadline for this
first time, as it is a learning process for all of us. We believe that
*deadlines do matter* and want to be respectful and appreciative of all the
entities that did close their eligibility gaps and submit their proposals
on time: congratulations to you all!
For now, WMIT and WMPH have withdrawn their proposals, and we have 12
completed proposals [1]. While the community review process is meant to be
two weeks as per the Framework [2], we have extended this period in order
to make sure this process is as vibrant and effective as possible. We
understand that proposals in English are always going to be a constraint
for non-English speaking community members, and that is a movement-wide
issue that the FDC cannot solve immediately; we do ask for your patience
and generosity on this front. Please reach out to others who might help you
with this, and start reviewing soon so that the entities can see and
respond to your comments right away. Your feedback will be a critical part
of the proposal review process, and we hope that you will be active
reviewers of the proposals.
Also, if there are any questions or comments on the FDC or the proposal
process itself, please provide them here [3].
Warmly,
Anasuya, on behalf of the FDC team
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Proposals
[2]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Framework_for_…
[3]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Questions_for_FDC_staff
--
***Anasuya Sengupta
Director of Global Learning and Grantmaking
Wikimedia Foundation*
*
*
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