This reminds me of a slightly heretical idea I had a while ago while thinking about crowdfunding and WMF fundraising...
Currently the WMF raises money via site banners, and spends these on programmes and disburses them via grants, which go to all kinds of projects - education, outreach, development, Wikimedians in Residence, etc etc. Despite the relative openness of the WMF as an organisation, this is still a very centralised, top down method of handling (the disbursement of) these funds. If we're truly going down the "everything open, everything community driven" route, the more consistent approach would be something like the following:
The community submit funding proposals for projects they want to do, of any kind. Each has a campaign page with a description of the project (much like a kickstarter page, with project milestones, background, team etc), a monetary target they're trying to raise, and a banner design. These projects compete for advertising time on the site banner via a community curated queue; When they're at the top of this queue, they're displayed on the banners, which lead to their project pages; if they hit their fundraising target, they're taken down; if they have a low conversion rate (% of views that lead to donations), they're demoted down the queue and, if persistently low, rejected entirely.
The criteria for prioritisation of projects in the queue and the vetting of project quality is done organically by the community, who would create and evolve guidelines and policies. The actual handling of the queue could be done algorithmically via an openly editable algorithm, or even done manually like with e.g. WP:ITN - you'd just need a widget that tells you how much a given project has raised so far and what the conversion rate is. If the community is concerned about people being shown too many banners, we dial down the number of people being shown banners, or raise the bar in terms of acceptable conversion rates.
If a project raises money and is ultimately considered a failure, then hopefully the community will learn from this and provide more support / be more careful with that kind of project in the future. However, one hopes that this will also allow for bolder project ideas to get off the ground, and also allow for a much larger amount of small funding to go to many small projects, as there is no centralised grants body that has to process them all.
In order to pay for its own programmes, then, the WMF itself would have to submit projects into this queue. Nobody would have to go to any centralised body for money - all funds would be raised and disbursed via this one channel. Operationally I suppose the WMF would provide the infrastructure to actually receive and send out the money.
You could even start getting clever with e.g. showing different campaigns to readers from different geographical regions, or particular campaigns to readers looking at articles from particular wikipedia categories, and I imagine that kind of thing would start to evolve on its own.
It really struck me that the discussions around the centralnotice fundraising banners fell into a classic pattern; one centralised team doing their best, but being overwhelmed by feedback from a large community. This model puts all this attention to good use.
*Edward Saperia* Conference Director for Wikimania 2014 http://www.wikimanialondon.org email edsaperia@gmail.com • facebook http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia • twitter http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia • 07796955572 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
On 24 February 2015 at 18:54, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 10:43 AM, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com wrote:
With more and more Wikimedians engaging in crowdfunding, I suppose we can talk about whether the mailing list for Wikimedia movement organization is the place to advertise in this way. For my part, I don't think a simple (i.e., without any additional context) "please check out this Indiegogo" is any different from "hey, check out my blog," so when the last one came through the queue I rejected it without much thought. It certainly wasn't done with any prejudice.
For my part, I always like to see crowdfunding pitches from Wikimedians. There haven't been *that* many of them (maybe 8 or 10?), and so far they've all (that I've seen) come from prolific contributors.
These crowdfunding pitches generally take a lot more effort to put together than a blog post does, and they are also easy and satisfying to act on. If I can take 3 minutes and a few dollars to simultaneously say thanks to a great contributor and help them make even better contributions, I'm grateful for that opportunity.
-Sage
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
On 15-02-25 09:37 AM, Edward Saperia wrote:
if they hit their fundraising target [...]
Your idea is provocative, and intriguing, but I think that - at least in this form - it is doomed to fail because it actually steps around what makes kickstarter-like crowdfunding work.
(a) people put forth their own money, and therefore assume the element of risk themselves.
(b) people who participate in crowdfunding do so with highly variable amounts - from a few dollars to several thousands - according to how much interest they have, and that's an important dynamic of the funding process.
(c) many (most?) of the people who contribute to campaigns of this nature do so for the perks, or contribute /more/ to the funding because of the perks.
Nevertheless, the idea of having the communities themselves "fund" some of the projects is intriguing. I'm just unconvinced the crowdsourcing model is the one to gun for.
-- Marc
I'm not sure you've understood correctly. In my proposed system, people propose projects and these projects are advertised on the centralnotice banners. When clicked on, readers are taken to the individual project pages and donate to them directly, rather than donating into a central pot.
(a) people put forth their own money, and therefore assume the element of risk themselves.
Not sure what you mean here? Readers will donate their own money to individual projects.
(b) people who participate in crowdfunding do so with highly variable amounts - from a few dollars to several thousands - according to how much interest they have, and that's an important dynamic of the funding process.
Nothing stopping donors donating different amounts directly to projects.
(c) many (most?) of the people who contribute to campaigns of this nature
do so for the perks, or contribute /more/ to the funding because of the perks.
Well, Wikipedia is successfully crowdfunded at the moment without perks. This just breaks it down into individual projects instead of crowdfunding the entire entity in one go. Intuition would suggest that we'd raise more money this way rather than less, because of the variety of campaigns, and the effectiveness of a community at evolving campaign designs over time.
Of course, there's nothing stopping projects from offering perks either. Wikipedia swag perhaps? All the fulfilment logistics are already there via the official shop.
On 15-02-25 11:15 AM, Edward Saperia wrote:
I'm not sure you've understood correctly. In my proposed system, people propose projects and these projects are advertised on the centralnotice banners.
Ah, I indeed hadn't. My understanding was that you wanted to substitute for the grants process(es) but that the actual source of funding would remain the WMF coffers.
In which case I need to reclassify your idea from "intriguing" to "horrifying" in my opinion. Not because I find anything fundamentally objectionable to crowdfunding (I do not, and have indeed thrown money at a number of cool crowdfunded projects in the past) but because - as FloNight noted - this is an invitation to formalize and cement systemic bias to an insane degree. "All the knowlegde" - not "all the knowledge someone is willing and able to afford".
Beyond which is the simple reality that many things you'll find no shortage of agreement that they need to be done are, fundamentally, unsexy and unimpressive. You would be hard-pressed to make a workable "marketing campaign" for them, and quickly find that the boring stuff gets underfunded no matter how important.
I still think there is something to the idea of trying to work in more "crowdsourcing" to the project financing processes - being able to create a lightweight and attractive way of getting a vast number of community members to weigh in on the relative desirability of ways to spend money towards the projects /is/ a laudable objective.
-- Marc
I'm pretty concerned that the systematic biases in the wikimedia movement would be continued if there was no organized effort to do a comprehensive review of all proposals to see where we are lacking diversity. I'm in favor of having more focused funding calls like the Inspire Gender Gap campaign.
A large part of the work of the community grant committees..IEG, PEG, FDC...is evaluating the feasibility of the projects, the impact of work, and giving feedback. This work needs the assistance of paid staff to make sure all the information needed to make decision is available. Then volunteers to look at the information and give a recommendation. I'm not clear on how the work flow you suggest would get the important aspects of the work accomplished.
I'm not opposed to a group outside of WMF taking over this type of work. But there was a huge vacuum in the movement around Learning and Evaluation until recently. The WMF began doing this work for lack of anyone else doing it well. At this point, I can't see an independent organization being feasible.
Instead of small Project and Event Grants, micro grants, or travel grants, many organizations are asking for unrestricted funds to pay for staff, offices, equipment, specialized staff for software development. They want to have funds to make long term plans with GLAM partner organizations. The evaluation of these large grant requests is extremely time consuming. Our current method of asking a group of volunteers to be available to this type of work a set period of time, and having it also open for other community comment seems to the best approach to make sure every project get a fair look.
Today there are dozens of ideas for projects on meta waiting for people to comment and offer assistance of some type. I'm in favor of doing more to encourage members of the wikimedia movement to come to meta and join in working on them.
IdeaLab. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Ideas
Sydney Poore User:FloNight
Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 9:37 AM, Edward Saperia edsaperia@gmail.com wrote:
This reminds me of a slightly heretical idea I had a while ago while thinking about crowdfunding and WMF fundraising...
Currently the WMF raises money via site banners, and spends these on programmes and disburses them via grants, which go to all kinds of projects
- education, outreach, development, Wikimedians in Residence, etc etc.
Despite the relative openness of the WMF as an organisation, this is still a very centralised, top down method of handling (the disbursement of) these funds. If we're truly going down the "everything open, everything community driven" route, the more consistent approach would be something like the following:
The community submit funding proposals for projects they want to do, of any kind. Each has a campaign page with a description of the project (much like a kickstarter page, with project milestones, background, team etc), a monetary target they're trying to raise, and a banner design. These projects compete for advertising time on the site banner via a community curated queue; When they're at the top of this queue, they're displayed on the banners, which lead to their project pages; if they hit their fundraising target, they're taken down; if they have a low conversion rate (% of views that lead to donations), they're demoted down the queue and, if persistently low, rejected entirely.
The criteria for prioritisation of projects in the queue and the vetting of project quality is done organically by the community, who would create and evolve guidelines and policies. The actual handling of the queue could be done algorithmically via an openly editable algorithm, or even done manually like with e.g. WP:ITN - you'd just need a widget that tells you how much a given project has raised so far and what the conversion rate is. If the community is concerned about people being shown too many banners, we dial down the number of people being shown banners, or raise the bar in terms of acceptable conversion rates.
If a project raises money and is ultimately considered a failure, then hopefully the community will learn from this and provide more support / be more careful with that kind of project in the future. However, one hopes that this will also allow for bolder project ideas to get off the ground, and also allow for a much larger amount of small funding to go to many small projects, as there is no centralised grants body that has to process them all.
In order to pay for its own programmes, then, the WMF itself would have to submit projects into this queue. Nobody would have to go to any centralised body for money - all funds would be raised and disbursed via this one channel. Operationally I suppose the WMF would provide the infrastructure to actually receive and send out the money.
You could even start getting clever with e.g. showing different campaigns to readers from different geographical regions, or particular campaigns to readers looking at articles from particular wikipedia categories, and I imagine that kind of thing would start to evolve on its own.
It really struck me that the discussions around the centralnotice fundraising banners fell into a classic pattern; one centralised team doing their best, but being overwhelmed by feedback from a large community. This model puts all this attention to good use.
*Edward Saperia* Conference Director for Wikimania 2014 http://www.wikimanialondon.org email edsaperia@gmail.com • facebook http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia • twitter http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia • 07796955572 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
On 24 February 2015 at 18:54, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 10:43 AM, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com wrote:
With more and more Wikimedians engaging in crowdfunding, I suppose we can talk about whether the mailing list for Wikimedia movement organization is the place to advertise in this way. For my part, I don't think a simple (i.e., without any additional context) "please check out this Indiegogo" is any different from "hey, check out my blog," so when the last one came through the queue I rejected it without much thought. It certainly wasn't done with any prejudice.
For my part, I always like to see crowdfunding pitches from Wikimedians. There haven't been *that* many of them (maybe 8 or 10?), and so far they've all (that I've seen) come from prolific contributors.
These crowdfunding pitches generally take a lot more effort to put together than a blog post does, and they are also easy and satisfying to act on. If I can take 3 minutes and a few dollars to simultaneously say thanks to a great contributor and help them make even better contributions, I'm grateful for that opportunity.
-Sage
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Of course you're very correct that there are many projects sitting around asking for scrutiny - the difference here is the (potential of) funding would be default yes instead of default no, with the discussion just around the priority. I expect that would attract a lot more attention very quickly indeed.
*Edward Saperia* email edsaperia@gmail.com • facebook http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia • twitter http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia • 07796955572 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
On 25 February 2015 at 15:38, Sydney Poore sydney.poore@gmail.com wrote:
I'm pretty concerned that the systematic biases in the wikimedia movement would be continued if there was no organized effort to do a comprehensive review of all proposals to see where we are lacking diversity. I'm in favor of having more focused funding calls like the Inspire Gender Gap campaign.
A large part of the work of the community grant committees..IEG, PEG, FDC...is evaluating the feasibility of the projects, the impact of work, and giving feedback. This work needs the assistance of paid staff to make sure all the information needed to make decision is available. Then volunteers to look at the information and give a recommendation. I'm not clear on how the work flow you suggest would get the important aspects of the work accomplished.
I'm not opposed to a group outside of WMF taking over this type of work. But there was a huge vacuum in the movement around Learning and Evaluation until recently. The WMF began doing this work for lack of anyone else doing it well. At this point, I can't see an independent organization being feasible.
Instead of small Project and Event Grants, micro grants, or travel grants, many organizations are asking for unrestricted funds to pay for staff, offices, equipment, specialized staff for software development. They want to have funds to make long term plans with GLAM partner organizations. The evaluation of these large grant requests is extremely time consuming. Our current method of asking a group of volunteers to be available to this type of work a set period of time, and having it also open for other community comment seems to the best approach to make sure every project get a fair look.
Today there are dozens of ideas for projects on meta waiting for people to comment and offer assistance of some type. I'm in favor of doing more to encourage members of the wikimedia movement to come to meta and join in working on them.
IdeaLab. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Ideas
Sydney Poore User:FloNight
Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 9:37 AM, Edward Saperia edsaperia@gmail.com wrote:
This reminds me of a slightly heretical idea I had a while ago while thinking about crowdfunding and WMF fundraising...
Currently the WMF raises money via site banners, and spends these on programmes and disburses them via grants, which go to all kinds of
projects
- education, outreach, development, Wikimedians in Residence, etc etc.
Despite the relative openness of the WMF as an organisation, this is
still
a very centralised, top down method of handling (the disbursement of)
these
funds. If we're truly going down the "everything open, everything
community
driven" route, the more consistent approach would be something like the following:
The community submit funding proposals for projects they want to do, of
any
kind. Each has a campaign page with a description of the project (much
like
a kickstarter page, with project milestones, background, team etc), a monetary target they're trying to raise, and a banner design. These projects compete for advertising time on the site banner via a community curated queue; When they're at the top of this queue, they're displayed
on
the banners, which lead to their project pages; if they hit their fundraising target, they're taken down; if they have a low conversion
rate
(% of views that lead to donations), they're demoted down the queue and,
if
persistently low, rejected entirely.
The criteria for prioritisation of projects in the queue and the vetting
of
project quality is done organically by the community, who would create
and
evolve guidelines and policies. The actual handling of the queue could be done algorithmically via an openly editable algorithm, or even done manually like with e.g. WP:ITN - you'd just need a widget that tells you how much a given project has raised so far and what the conversion rate
is.
If the community is concerned about people being shown too many banners,
we
dial down the number of people being shown banners, or raise the bar in terms of acceptable conversion rates.
If a project raises money and is ultimately considered a failure, then hopefully the community will learn from this and provide more support /
be
more careful with that kind of project in the future. However, one hopes that this will also allow for bolder project ideas to get off the ground, and also allow for a much larger amount of small funding to go to many small projects, as there is no centralised grants body that has to
process
them all.
In order to pay for its own programmes, then, the WMF itself would have
to
submit projects into this queue. Nobody would have to go to any
centralised
body for money - all funds would be raised and disbursed via this one channel. Operationally I suppose the WMF would provide the infrastructure to actually receive and send out the money.
You could even start getting clever with e.g. showing different campaigns to readers from different geographical regions, or particular campaigns
to
readers looking at articles from particular wikipedia categories, and I imagine that kind of thing would start to evolve on its own.
It really struck me that the discussions around the centralnotice fundraising banners fell into a classic pattern; one centralised team
doing
their best, but being overwhelmed by feedback from a large community.
This
model puts all this attention to good use.
*Edward Saperia* Conference Director for Wikimania 2014 http://www.wikimanialondon.org email edsaperia@gmail.com • facebook <
http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia%3E
• twitter http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia • 07796955572 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
On 24 February 2015 at 18:54, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 10:43 AM, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com
wrote:
With more and more Wikimedians engaging in crowdfunding, I suppose we can talk about whether the mailing list for Wikimedia movement organization is the place to advertise in this way. For my part, I don't think a simple (i.e., without any additional context) "please check out this Indiegogo" is any different from "hey, check out my blog," so when the last one came through the queue I rejected it without much thought. It certainly wasn't done with any prejudice.
For my part, I always like to see crowdfunding pitches from Wikimedians. There haven't been *that* many of them (maybe 8 or 10?), and so far they've all (that I've seen) come from prolific contributors.
These crowdfunding pitches generally take a lot more effort to put together than a blog post does, and they are also easy and satisfying to act on. If I can take 3 minutes and a few dollars to simultaneously say thanks to a great contributor and help them make even better contributions, I'm grateful for that opportunity.
-Sage
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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In your scheme, items would not get moved up to be considered if they are not popular enough, right? From my experience working on wikimedia global committees, it would be likely that the volume of requests would be much larger than the capacity of the wikimedia movement to evaluate them. People join the movement primarily to create content with a smaller part being willing to do administrative website work. And an even smaller group being willing to do work around evaluation. Reader come to read content.
So well populated parts of the movement would have a huge advantage over less populated areas. Right now a small user group has a fair chance of getting funds to do a project that might be over shadowed by larger groups that had a constant flow of requests coming in.
How do you propose that we make sure that funds are give out in a way that supports more diversity not less?
Sydney
Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 10:50 AM, Edward Saperia edsaperia@gmail.com wrote:
Of course you're very correct that there are many projects sitting around asking for scrutiny - the difference here is the (potential of) funding would be default yes instead of default no, with the discussion just around the priority. I expect that would attract a lot more attention very quickly indeed.
*Edward Saperia* email edsaperia@gmail.com • facebook http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia • twitter http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia • 07796955572 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
On 25 February 2015 at 15:38, Sydney Poore sydney.poore@gmail.com wrote:
I'm pretty concerned that the systematic biases in the wikimedia movement would be continued if there was no organized effort to do a comprehensive review of all proposals to see where we are lacking diversity. I'm in
favor
of having more focused funding calls like the Inspire Gender Gap
campaign.
A large part of the work of the community grant committees..IEG, PEG, FDC...is evaluating the feasibility of the projects, the impact of work, and giving feedback. This work needs the assistance of paid staff to make sure all the information needed to make decision is available. Then volunteers to look at the information and give a recommendation. I'm not clear on how the work flow you suggest would get the important aspects of the work accomplished.
I'm not opposed to a group outside of WMF taking over this type of work. But there was a huge vacuum in the movement around Learning and
Evaluation
until recently. The WMF began doing this work for lack of anyone else doing it well. At this point, I can't see an independent organization
being
feasible.
Instead of small Project and Event Grants, micro grants, or travel
grants,
many organizations are asking for unrestricted funds to pay for staff, offices, equipment, specialized staff for software development. They want to have funds to make long term plans with GLAM partner organizations.
The
evaluation of these large grant requests is extremely time consuming. Our current method of asking a group of volunteers to be available to this
type
of work a set period of time, and having it also open for other community comment seems to the best approach to make sure every project get a fair look.
Today there are dozens of ideas for projects on meta waiting for people
to
comment and offer assistance of some type. I'm in favor of doing more to encourage members of the wikimedia movement to come to meta and join in working on them.
IdeaLab. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Ideas
Sydney Poore User:FloNight
Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 9:37 AM, Edward Saperia edsaperia@gmail.com wrote:
This reminds me of a slightly heretical idea I had a while ago while thinking about crowdfunding and WMF fundraising...
Currently the WMF raises money via site banners, and spends these on programmes and disburses them via grants, which go to all kinds of
projects
- education, outreach, development, Wikimedians in Residence, etc etc.
Despite the relative openness of the WMF as an organisation, this is
still
a very centralised, top down method of handling (the disbursement of)
these
funds. If we're truly going down the "everything open, everything
community
driven" route, the more consistent approach would be something like the following:
The community submit funding proposals for projects they want to do, of
any
kind. Each has a campaign page with a description of the project (much
like
a kickstarter page, with project milestones, background, team etc), a monetary target they're trying to raise, and a banner design. These projects compete for advertising time on the site banner via a
community
curated queue; When they're at the top of this queue, they're displayed
on
the banners, which lead to their project pages; if they hit their fundraising target, they're taken down; if they have a low conversion
rate
(% of views that lead to donations), they're demoted down the queue
and,
if
persistently low, rejected entirely.
The criteria for prioritisation of projects in the queue and the
vetting
of
project quality is done organically by the community, who would create
and
evolve guidelines and policies. The actual handling of the queue could
be
done algorithmically via an openly editable algorithm, or even done manually like with e.g. WP:ITN - you'd just need a widget that tells
you
how much a given project has raised so far and what the conversion rate
is.
If the community is concerned about people being shown too many
banners,
we
dial down the number of people being shown banners, or raise the bar in terms of acceptable conversion rates.
If a project raises money and is ultimately considered a failure, then hopefully the community will learn from this and provide more support /
be
more careful with that kind of project in the future. However, one
hopes
that this will also allow for bolder project ideas to get off the
ground,
and also allow for a much larger amount of small funding to go to many small projects, as there is no centralised grants body that has to
process
them all.
In order to pay for its own programmes, then, the WMF itself would have
to
submit projects into this queue. Nobody would have to go to any
centralised
body for money - all funds would be raised and disbursed via this one channel. Operationally I suppose the WMF would provide the
infrastructure
to actually receive and send out the money.
You could even start getting clever with e.g. showing different
campaigns
to readers from different geographical regions, or particular campaigns
to
readers looking at articles from particular wikipedia categories, and I imagine that kind of thing would start to evolve on its own.
It really struck me that the discussions around the centralnotice fundraising banners fell into a classic pattern; one centralised team
doing
their best, but being overwhelmed by feedback from a large community.
This
model puts all this attention to good use.
*Edward Saperia* Conference Director for Wikimania 2014 <http://www.wikimanialondon.org
email edsaperia@gmail.com • facebook <
http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia%3E
• twitter http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia • 07796955572 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
On 24 February 2015 at 18:54, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 10:43 AM, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com
wrote:
With more and more Wikimedians engaging in crowdfunding, I suppose
we
can talk about whether the mailing list for Wikimedia movement organization is the place to advertise in this way. For my part, I don't think a simple (i.e., without any additional context) "please check out this Indiegogo" is any different from "hey, check out my blog," so when the last one came through the queue I rejected it without much thought. It certainly wasn't done with any prejudice.
For my part, I always like to see crowdfunding pitches from Wikimedians. There haven't been *that* many of them (maybe 8 or 10?), and so far they've all (that I've seen) come from prolific contributors.
These crowdfunding pitches generally take a lot more effort to put together than a blog post does, and they are also easy and satisfying to act on. If I can take 3 minutes and a few dollars to
simultaneously
say thanks to a great contributor and help them make even better contributions, I'm grateful for that opportunity.
-Sage
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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Well, you could create a guideline that said "In the interest of innovation, we should try and fund a diversity of projects" and then with the community hash out what dimensions you care about for diversity in this context, and how far from equality you are happy to go without artificial interference, and then what interference should happen if you go outside that boundary.
Let's say we've decided that we care about a diversity in where project leads come from. Then you'd create a way to record from where successful projects are from, and if there is a lack of diversity then this will be obvious - like how it works with rotating Wikimania around different continents: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania/past
I actually imagine that while this list would rarely be empty, the individual items on it would be burned through very fast; it'd be like the front page of Reddit. Most projects would be looking for small amounts of money, so they'd either get fully funded in hours, or are shown to have a low conversion rate and get kicked back down the queue - unless we're holding them there because we think funding them is critical.
Also presumably we'd have an empirically derived "cut-off" conversion rate; if after x thousand views, fewer than 0.???% of viewers donate on a proposed project then it gets removed from the queue. If there are no projects in the queue then we don't show any banners at all. So if people are complaining that we show too many banners, they can instead try and quantify how much by arguing to raise this cut-off rate by a certain amount.
*Edward Saperia* email edsaperia@gmail.com • facebook http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia • twitter http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia • 07796955572 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
On 25 February 2015 at 16:24, Sydney Poore sydney.poore@gmail.com wrote:
In your scheme, items would not get moved up to be considered if they are not popular enough, right? From my experience working on wikimedia global committees, it would be likely that the volume of requests would be much larger than the capacity of the wikimedia movement to evaluate them. People join the movement primarily to create content with a smaller part being willing to do administrative website work. And an even smaller group being willing to do work around evaluation. Reader come to read content.
So well populated parts of the movement would have a huge advantage over less populated areas. Right now a small user group has a fair chance of getting funds to do a project that might be over shadowed by larger groups that had a constant flow of requests coming in.
How do you propose that we make sure that funds are give out in a way that supports more diversity not less?
Sydney
Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 10:50 AM, Edward Saperia edsaperia@gmail.com wrote:
Of course you're very correct that there are many projects sitting around asking for scrutiny - the difference here is the (potential of) funding would be default yes instead of default no, with the discussion just
around
the priority. I expect that would attract a lot more attention very
quickly
indeed.
*Edward Saperia* email edsaperia@gmail.com • facebook <
http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia%3E
• twitter http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia • 07796955572 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
On 25 February 2015 at 15:38, Sydney Poore sydney.poore@gmail.com
wrote:
I'm pretty concerned that the systematic biases in the wikimedia
movement
would be continued if there was no organized effort to do a
comprehensive
review of all proposals to see where we are lacking diversity. I'm in
favor
of having more focused funding calls like the Inspire Gender Gap
campaign.
A large part of the work of the community grant committees..IEG, PEG, FDC...is evaluating the feasibility of the projects, the impact of
work,
and giving feedback. This work needs the assistance of paid staff to
make
sure all the information needed to make decision is available. Then volunteers to look at the information and give a recommendation. I'm
not
clear on how the work flow you suggest would get the important aspects
of
the work accomplished.
I'm not opposed to a group outside of WMF taking over this type of
work.
But there was a huge vacuum in the movement around Learning and
Evaluation
until recently. The WMF began doing this work for lack of anyone else doing it well. At this point, I can't see an independent organization
being
feasible.
Instead of small Project and Event Grants, micro grants, or travel
grants,
many organizations are asking for unrestricted funds to pay for staff, offices, equipment, specialized staff for software development. They
want
to have funds to make long term plans with GLAM partner organizations.
The
evaluation of these large grant requests is extremely time consuming.
Our
current method of asking a group of volunteers to be available to this
type
of work a set period of time, and having it also open for other
community
comment seems to the best approach to make sure every project get a
fair
look.
Today there are dozens of ideas for projects on meta waiting for people
to
comment and offer assistance of some type. I'm in favor of doing more
to
encourage members of the wikimedia movement to come to meta and join in working on them.
IdeaLab. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Ideas
Sydney Poore User:FloNight
Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration
On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 9:37 AM, Edward Saperia edsaperia@gmail.com wrote:
This reminds me of a slightly heretical idea I had a while ago while thinking about crowdfunding and WMF fundraising...
Currently the WMF raises money via site banners, and spends these on programmes and disburses them via grants, which go to all kinds of
projects
- education, outreach, development, Wikimedians in Residence, etc
etc.
Despite the relative openness of the WMF as an organisation, this is
still
a very centralised, top down method of handling (the disbursement of)
these
funds. If we're truly going down the "everything open, everything
community
driven" route, the more consistent approach would be something like
the
following:
The community submit funding proposals for projects they want to do,
of
any
kind. Each has a campaign page with a description of the project
(much
like
a kickstarter page, with project milestones, background, team etc), a monetary target they're trying to raise, and a banner design. These projects compete for advertising time on the site banner via a
community
curated queue; When they're at the top of this queue, they're
displayed
on
the banners, which lead to their project pages; if they hit their fundraising target, they're taken down; if they have a low conversion
rate
(% of views that lead to donations), they're demoted down the queue
and,
if
persistently low, rejected entirely.
The criteria for prioritisation of projects in the queue and the
vetting
of
project quality is done organically by the community, who would
create
and
evolve guidelines and policies. The actual handling of the queue
could
be
done algorithmically via an openly editable algorithm, or even done manually like with e.g. WP:ITN - you'd just need a widget that tells
you
how much a given project has raised so far and what the conversion
rate
is.
If the community is concerned about people being shown too many
banners,
we
dial down the number of people being shown banners, or raise the bar
in
terms of acceptable conversion rates.
If a project raises money and is ultimately considered a failure,
then
hopefully the community will learn from this and provide more
support /
be
more careful with that kind of project in the future. However, one
hopes
that this will also allow for bolder project ideas to get off the
ground,
and also allow for a much larger amount of small funding to go to
many
small projects, as there is no centralised grants body that has to
process
them all.
In order to pay for its own programmes, then, the WMF itself would
have
to
submit projects into this queue. Nobody would have to go to any
centralised
body for money - all funds would be raised and disbursed via this one channel. Operationally I suppose the WMF would provide the
infrastructure
to actually receive and send out the money.
You could even start getting clever with e.g. showing different
campaigns
to readers from different geographical regions, or particular
campaigns
to
readers looking at articles from particular wikipedia categories,
and I
imagine that kind of thing would start to evolve on its own.
It really struck me that the discussions around the centralnotice fundraising banners fell into a classic pattern; one centralised team
doing
their best, but being overwhelmed by feedback from a large community.
This
model puts all this attention to good use.
*Edward Saperia* Conference Director for Wikimania 2014 <
http://www.wikimanialondon.org
email edsaperia@gmail.com • facebook <
http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia%3E
• twitter http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia • 07796955572 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG
On 24 February 2015 at 18:54, Sage Ross <
ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 10:43 AM, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com
wrote:
With more and more Wikimedians engaging in crowdfunding, I
suppose
we
can talk about whether the mailing list for Wikimedia movement organization is the place to advertise in this way. For my part,
I
don't think a simple (i.e., without any additional context)
"please
check out this Indiegogo" is any different from "hey, check out
my
blog," so when the last one came through the queue I rejected it without much thought. It certainly wasn't done with any
prejudice.
For my part, I always like to see crowdfunding pitches from Wikimedians. There haven't been *that* many of them (maybe 8 or
10?),
and so far they've all (that I've seen) come from prolific contributors.
These crowdfunding pitches generally take a lot more effort to put together than a blog post does, and they are also easy and
satisfying
to act on. If I can take 3 minutes and a few dollars to
simultaneously
say thanks to a great contributor and help them make even better contributions, I'm grateful for that opportunity.
-Sage
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