Perhaps the Equity Fund could invest a few million in developing, building, and sustaining the Community Tech team to help it fix all the underlying problems that continue to plague the projects. They could then provide equity of coverage across all projects, improve participation across all countries.

On Wed, 26 Jan 2022 at 15:35, Peter Southwood <peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:

Good points, these. I hope someone will answer them.
Cheers,
Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: Inductiveload [mailto:inductiveload@gmail.com]
Sent: 26 January 2022 02:36
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Seeking community recommendations for Equity Fund
grantees

On 25 January 2022 17:11:59 GMT, Nadee Gunasena <ngunasena@wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> I've shared more
>information about how we'll be sharing the recommendations and making
>decisions about the grantees on Meta in response to your comment there:
>https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Equity_Fund#Concerns.

Besides how the grants are allocated in the first place, something I do not
see on that page is the clear description of how the success of the grants
are measured and reported, auditing of expenditures and when the results are
due.

From the Meta page:

> The Equity Fund is focused on supporting groups outside of the movement
whose work will impact and improve knowledge equity on the Wikimedia
projects over the long term.

Thus I imagine a good part of the results will be able to be tied to long
term changes that will be measurable as some kind of wiki engagement? If the
results are not expected to manifest "on-wiki", where and when are they
expected to manifest? Obviously, "long term" implies no final results
"soon", but responsible management means that the outcomes of interest are,
of course, known already along with a plan for follow-up analysis.

No self-respecting organisation would spend over $7 million without even a
way to tell if the money is being spent as promised, or no way to tell if
the project is working or has lasting effects.

For context, it's enough money to keep the servers on for years, or, as
about 50 person-years of payroll and overhead expenditure, keep a modest dev
team trucking for a decade or so. The story of what knowledge-societal good
has been done with this amount of money will be absolutely fascinating to
anyone with an interest in knowledge equity, and critical to justifying
support for similar initiatives in future. The analysis and accurate
reporting of the outcomes of these grants is at least as valuable to future
similar efforts as the grants themselves. Imagine the utterly disastrous
effect it would have if it were impossible to showcase the success: it could
undermine the whole idea of knowledge equity in general as a worthwhile
financial cause, and within the wiki movement, it would badly injure the
concept that funds donated in good faith are spent carefully.

I look forward to reading in detail about what outcomes have been selected
to be tracked, how and why that selection was made, how each grant is
expected and hoped to affect them, and when and how we may be expected to
find out how it went, both "on the ground" for the grantees and in terms of
the already-set outcomes. These are all things that must already have been
carefully documented.

Down the road, a thorough breakdown of how it actually did go and how it can
be done better, if possible, for future rounds will be a cornerstone of
best-practice for knowledge equity initiatives for years to come.

Cheers,

--IL
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GN.