Dear Wikimedians,
The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) meets twice a year to make recommendations about how to effectively allocate movement funds to achieve the Wikimedia movement's mission, vision, and strategy. This is now the 11th round of allocations made by the FDC, and we met in person from November 17-20, 2017 in Madrid to deliberate on 9 proposals submitted this round. Wikimedia Deutschland's annual plan will be reviewed separately.
We would like to thank all of the participating organizations for the hard work they put into this round’s proposals.
Our recommendations for Round 1 2017-2018 on the annual plan grants to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees have now been posted on Meta.[1] The Board will review our deliberations and make a decision by December 31, 2017.
We received grant requests for approximately USD 2,766,000 this round. Before we met, committee members reviewed all of the proposals and documents submitted. We were assisted in this review with input from the FDC staff assessments which included analysis on impact, finances, and programs, as well as community comments on the proposals.
As you may know, there is a formal process to submit complaints or appeals about these recommendations. Here are the steps for both:
Any organization that would like to submit an appeal on the FDC’s recommendation should submit it to the Board representatives to the FDC by 23:59 UTC on 8 December 2017 in accord with the appeal process outlined in the FDC Framework [2]. A formal appeal to challenge the FDC’s recommendation should be in the form of a 500-or-fewer word summary directed to the two non-voting WMF Board representatives to the FDC, Nataliia Tymkiv and Dariusz Jemielniak. The appeal should be submitted on-wiki, and must be submitted by the Board Chair of a funding-seeking applicant. The Wikimedia Foundation Board will publish its decision on this and all recommendations by December 31, 2017.
Anyone can file a complaint about the FDC process [3] with the Ombudsperson at any time. The complaint should be submitted on wiki, as well. The Ombudsperson will publicly document the complaint, and investigate as needed.
On behalf of the FDC,
Bishakha Datta FDC Chair
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/FDC_recommendations/2017-2018_Rou...
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Fra...
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Complaints_about_the_FDC_process