On mar, 2018-05-01 at 15:51 -0700, Woubzena Jifar wrote:
- Regarding having a minimum of $500 for the rapid grants program,
this is something we’re experimenting with while we’re aligning to the new strategic direction. Our preliminary data is showing that this change will improve our ability to support communities, allowing for more impactful grants with less overhead for a more effective use of our shared resources. We also need to make reductions in the time spent processing grants this year in order to make space for the considerable research and discussions needed to implement the new strategy, and we need to consider whether the impact of very small grants warrants their administrative expense.
I'm interested in better understanding this decision and its impact.
1. How many grants are actually impacted by this decision? In particular, in the last year: * How many grants below 500 $ have been approved? * Of the total 265.000 $ of rapid grants, how much went into grants below 500 $?
My rough estimate, by looking at the list on Meta, is that approximately 20% of rapid grants are below 500 $ (but I don't know the total), which I expect is around 10.000-20.000 $ per year.
2. From your experience, how do you value the quality of the requests for grants below 500 $? Do they have proportionally the same impact of the larger (rapid) grants, less, or more? In other words: this decision is led by the thought that impact is roughly proportial with the size of the grant, but the administrative cost for the WMF is more or less the same, so it's better to prioritize for larger grants? or that the small grants are actually comparatively worse (less impactful, or less likely to be approved anyway)? or what else?
3. Roughly, how much is the administrative overhead for each grant?
4. You mentioned preliminary data about this change. Is there any additional data that you can share?
Lorenzo