Greetings, Wikimedians!
For those of you curious about upcoming FDC proposal deadlines and with questions about proposal content, I am pleased to announce two sets of IRC chats (two sessions each) with FDC staff.
The first set of IRC office hours will focus on the proposal process and upcoming milestones. These 60 minute sessions will be held on: * Tuesday September 10 at 16:00 UTC, and * Tuesday September 10 at 23:00 UTC
The second set of office hours will focus on questions about content in FDC proposals. These sessions, also 60 minutes, will be held on: * Wednesday September 18 at 16:00 UTC, and * Friday September 20 at 00:00 UTC
Those of you who have questions or are curious about the FDC annual plan grant proposal process, please feel free to join! You are welcome to submit questions in advance (and encouraged to do so if your questions are quite tricky or complicated). The office hours will be logged, as usual, on Meta. [1] And if you can't attend, or prefer alternative modes of communication, no problem: contact FDCsupport@wikimedia.org and we'll set something up. You don't need to wait until these IRC office hours to ask any important questions.
A few notes on the FDC annual plan grants proposal deadlines:
Final confirmation of eligibility to submit proposals will be posted by FDC staff on September 16, as the deadline for entities in the "YES, IF" category to close any current gaps is September 15. [2] After that, only entities in the "YES" category of eligibility of the first Round of FDC funding for 2013-2014 will be eligible to submit proposals. We have been working closely with all the entities in the "YES, IF" category to ensure they are aware of their gaps and upcoming deadlines. If your entity is in that category and you have any questions, please contact us at FDCsupport@wikimedia.org - let's work together now to address any issues.
*As a reminder, all annual plan grant proposals must be submitted through the "proposal creation tool" on the FDC portal [3] by end of day UTC on October 1.* Late proposals will unfortunately not be accepted. All entities in the "YES" or "YES, IF" categories of eligibility have received information about this proposal process (and if you haven't, please contact us immediately), and we'd be happy to share more as requested.
For a more detailed timeline of the upcoming deadlines and milestones, please see the FDC portal. [4] We look forward to chatting with you!
Warm regards, Katy Love, on behalf of the FDC staff
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#2013 [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Eligibility_status/Current_round#... [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Timeline