Hello Wikimedians,
The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) meets twice a year to help make decisions about how to effectively allocate movement funds to achieve the Wikimedia movement's mission, vision, and strategy. [1] Just before the Wikimedia Conference, the FDC met in Berlin to deliberate on the five proposals submitted for this Round. [2] We thank these organizations for their hard work on their annual plans and their proposals.
The FDC has now posted our recommendations on Meta for Round 2 2014-2015 on the annual plan grants to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. [3] Thanks to the leadership of the FDC’s two Board Representatives (Maria Sefidari and Frieda Brioschi), the WMF Board will review the recommendations and then make their decision on them by 1 July 2015.
This round, the six proposals were submitted to the FDC. One proposal was withdrawn before we met to deliberate. We recommended allocations totaling roughly $1,248,913 USD for these five organizations. Note that all allocations were made in local currency. A total of $5,060,913 was allocated in both rounds in this year (2014-2015). The remaining $939,087 from the FDC’s $6 million budget will be returned to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Before our face-to-face deliberations, the FDC reviewed the proposals in careful detail. We also reviewed staff assessments and analysis on impact, finances, and programs, as well as community comments on the proposals. We also took into consideration the discussion pages of relevant documents.
There is a formal process for grant applicants 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 Round 2 recommendation should submit it to the Board representatives to the FDC by 23:59 UTC on 8 July 2015 in accordance with the appeal process outlined in the FDC Framework. 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 (Maria Sefidari and Frieda Brioschi). The appeal should be submitted on-wiki, [4] and must be submitted by the Board Chair of a funding-seeking applicant. The Board will publish its decision on this and all recommendations by 1 July 2015.
Complaints to the ombudsperson about the FDC process can be filed by anyone with the Ombudsperson and can be made any time. The complaint should be submitted on wiki, as well. [5] The ombudsperson will publicly document the complaint, and investigate as needed.
The FDC would like to thank Wikimedia Deutschland for hosting this Round’s deliberations. We appreciate the team that worked hard to make our deliberations meeting a smooth and successful event.
Finally, we offer our sincere thanks to the six organizations who submitted annual plan grant proposals to the FDC.
On behalf of the FDC,
"pundit" Dariusz Jemielniak (FDC Chair)
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round2
[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/FDC_portal/FDC_recommendations/20...
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Appeals_to_the_Board_on_the_recom...
[5] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Complaints_about_the_FDC_process