I'm pretty shocked at this idea; in fact, if someone created a Wikidata profile about me, I'd have it taken down under applicable legislation. Making financial support contingent on adding one's name to a publicly editable database does not seem to be particularly wise, nor for that matter particularly equitable; dozens if not hundreds of Wikimedians who have received sponsorships/scholarships to date live in places where publicly linking oneself to Wikipedia or its sister projects could be actively harmful to them. There are very, very few reasons for requiring a Wikimedian to publicly provide information about themselves in this way.
Getting back to the original question: a lot of what would constitute best practices depends on the purpose of the scholarship. Is it a local or regional event? Is there a particular focus on the event (e.g., development of technical skills such as a hackathon, leadership education, new editor recruitment, a particular wikiproject such as Wikisource or Wikiquote, etc.)? Are there particular underrepresented groups that you want to encourage? All of these are worth considering, so that scholarships can be targeted in a way that is most likely to achieve the goals of the event.
Also...consider whether you want to extend scholarships to people with a "proven track record" primarily, or to those who are new or even not yet part of the community. If you're going for the "proven track record" objective, consider what you'd count in favour of evidence of engagement: local/regional/chapter/user group activities, on-wiki activities, holding roles of responsibility either onwiki or offwiki, publishing research about Wikimedia projects, years involved, etc.
Finally, decide what you want to ask the scholarship recipients to give you in return. Do you want them to commit to writing a report? commit to sharing information with other groups/local editors/etc?
I'd encourage those offering scholarships to be forthright in identifying the criteria that will be used to assess the applicants in advance, as much as possible. If this is a large event and you'll be making an open invitation for scholarship applicants, it's important that you tell them what kind of applicant you are looking for, what the scholarship includes and excludes (e.g., travel, registration, accommodation, meals or per diem), and what you expect in return for the scholarship.
Risker/Anne
On Mon, 7 Oct 2019 at 16:39, Lane Rasberry lane@bluerasberry.com wrote:
Hello,
I have wished that eventually when people apply for scholarships or even when they attend wiki events they create profiles for themselves in Wikidata so that we could generate visualizations of the demographics of participants.
I do not think the wiki movement is quite ready for this, but if we actually want to track and report demographics, doing so in Wikidata is probably the way most natural for the wiki community.
On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 9:27 AM Fæ faewik@gmail.com wrote:
Plans for a Wikimedia LGBT+ conference and workshops in 2020 are moving forward. We would very much like to learn and borrow successful experiences from other conferences. This conference is expected to be relatively modest in size, around 50 attendees, and is to be hosted in Linz, Austria.
We are planning on opening up applications for scholarships very soon, to allow several months for early booking of travel tickets and visa applications where needed. Naturally this means we have to create a process for assessing applications to a hopefully short and non-subjective checklist (we are all volunteers after all!).
Can anyone recommend documented good practices for assessing applications for travel grants and expenses for similar sized events? Some issues we have discussed that need to be addressed before finalizing our policies are:
- Creating a fair assessment process that balances the diversity of
attendees against other metrics like on-project experience, for example ensuring that we have a healthy gender balance and a wide geographic representation
- Whether it may be better to prefer the simplicity of assessing for
full scholarships, or whether partial payments are a good way of ensuring wider access
- How to draw up rules for travel and partial scholarships for folks
planning on making this part of a holiday, as often happens for those travelling long distances
- When to recommend that specific Wikimedia Affiliates should provide
grants and expenses, which may have additional requirements for applications and reporting
- How to build in incentives for greener travel options, even where
this may not be the cheapest option
You can read the conference proposal at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Conference/Kawayashu/Queering_Wikiped...
and everyone is welcome to provide suggestions and feedback on the discussion page there, if on-wiki editing works better for you than email. :-)
Thanks Fae -- Wikimedia LGBT+ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_LGBT faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
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-- Lane Rasberry user:bluerasberry on Wikipedia 206.801.0814 lane@bluerasberry.com _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe