Hello dear all,
this is not a response to any specific mails on this thread, just a few thoughts from my side.
I am not very heavily involved in the FDC process, what I did was, well, as one of the board member decided to create this process and one of the advisory group member observed the feedbacks, and I read a few of the mails in this thread. By all means, I would not call myself expert in this matter. I have a very high respect for those people who apply for funds throw the FDC process and I have a very high respect for the FDC members. I know most of these people (both the applicants and the FDC members) and I believe in their good will, their honest, their belief that what they are doing is helping the movement and the effort they invested.
Now back to the matter.
One of the issue that the advisory group reviewed in May this year was that the FDC is a very hard and, because of this, a very expensive process. Every partner organization that apply for FDC has an annual planning, this alone is an organizational effort that eat up fund that do not go into program. I know from the WMF that the annual planning is very expensive. The whole organization is involved and the entire process lasted (anyway when I was in board) half a year. One can do a rough estimation of manhours invested into this process and then put a price on it. My rough estimation would go into 4 digits, maybe five. Partner organizations have less (alone because they have less C-level management), but I believe the proportion would be the same. Atop of this partner organizations who apply for FDC have to do an extra effort. I cannot say how much this extra effort is, but from my remote observation and my impression from the frustration and accounts in the list I would say it is not a small one. I have a guess, but it is totally subjective. Maybe one of the chapters can provide an example of insight? All these costs go into organization and off from program. The anual planning part is unavoidable, the FDC part is atop. This makes a malignant feedback: More organizational cost makes the efficiency worse, and that makes it more necessary to make more effort in the presentation and reasoning, which means more FDC effort.
We need to break up this circle. The advisory group made two recommendations this spring: The first one is to make repeating applications easier, and the other is to allow applications for more than one year. My impression from this thread is that either these recommendations didn't catch, or they were not implemented in this round. If the last case is true (not implemented) I would like to ask FDC to take these recommendations seriously and implement them. If the first case is true (implemented but doesn't catch), then I would think that we need to think about this again. Can someone clarify which case is more the reality?
One of the critics about the fund dissimination as a total that catchs my eyes again is "how unbalanced the distribution is". As I said I know most of the people who expressed their frustration here. I know that they are all reasonable people. So, if let's say the total funding is declining, I believe that the outcry would not be so loud as that we currently have the situation that the total sum of the funding is increasing and the partner organizations feel that they are being cut off from that increase. The total amount that the FDC can distribute is not determined by FDC. So, since as I said most of the people are reasonbale and rational, I would like to call the Foundation to take this point really really seriously. It remains one of the biggest problem between the Foundation and the partner organizations.
Greetings. Ting