Hi everyone, As most of you know by now, the first round of the Funds Dissemination Committee is now underway! We’ve had many entities submit proposals, and now it’s time for the hard work of evaluating these proposals and making recommendations on a funds allocation to begin. The FDC and FDC staff are both in the process of doing just this. The staff, in particular, will be completing the Staff Proposal Assessment forms over the next few weeks, and the FDC will be meeting at the end of the month (October 28-31) to discuss and deliberate on these proposals. The deadline for the FDC recommendations to the Board is November 15. We hope that you will all be involved with this process as well between now and October 22nd (over the next two weeks). *The proposals are open for community commentary, and we ask you to read and review the proposals and provide questions, comments, and other feedback on the respective proposal talk pages*. While the deadline was October 1, we found that with this being the first ever time we were doing this process, we had requests for an extension of the deadline (WMFR) as well as partially completed proposals (WMAT and WMAU, as well as WMIT and WMPH). We asked all these entities to either withdraw or explain the delays on the Discussion page of their proposal hubs. We are being flexible about the deadline for this first time, as it is a learning process for all of us. We believe that *deadlines do matter* and want to be respectful and appreciative of all the entities that did close their eligibility gaps and submit their proposals on time: congratulations to you all! For now, WMIT and WMPH have withdrawn their proposals, and we have 12 completed proposals [1]. While the community review process is meant to be two weeks as per the Framework [2], we have extended this period in order to make sure this process is as vibrant and effective as possible. We understand that proposals in English are always going to be a constraint for non-English speaking community members, and that is a movement-wide issue that the FDC cannot solve immediately; we do ask for your patience and generosity on this front. Please reach out to others who might help you with this, and start reviewing soon so that the entities can see and respond to your comments right away. Your feedback will be a critical part of the proposal review process, and we hope that you will be active reviewers of the proposals. Also, if there are any questions or comments on the FDC or the proposal process itself, please provide them here [3]. Warmly, Anasuya, on behalf of the FDC team [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Proposals [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Framework_for_… [3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Questions_for_FDC_staff -- ***Anasuya Sengupta Director of Global Learning and Grantmaking Wikimedia Foundation* * * Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! Support Wikimedia <https://donate.wikimedia.org/>