Dear friends and colleagues,

This message is to announce that the names of the Wikimedia Foundation’s grants programs are being changed to better reflect the purpose and function they serve, while the names of the volunteer-driven committees that serve these programs remain unchanged. We hope this will help any current and future applicants to these programs understand their purpose better at a glance, while keeping the continuity of names (a.k.a beloved acronyms!) that our movement is already familiar with. :-)

Last year was a significant year for Grantmaking at the Wikimedia Foundation, particularly through our narrowing focus exercise, in which we emphasised that the Foundation will support the growth and development of Wikimedia communities through the main platforms of technology and grants. We moved from being a small team primarily led by Asaf and supported by Winifred, to being a stand-alone department at the end of the year. The Funds Dissemination Committee and the Individual Engagement Grants were launched, with dedication and commitment from every community member involved.

Now that we’ve moved into the new fiscal year of 2013-14, one of the Grantmaking department’s efforts this year will be to improve the structure and design of our grants programs so that they're effective in supporting different constituencies and needs of our movement. This is the focus of the first quarter of the year for our team, including developing much clearer communication and guidelines for good proposals and reporting, criteria for assessment of the proposals, and building out a back-end grantsmanagement platform. We will be keeping you posted on this, and welcome your comments and suggestions for improvements.

In the meantime, part of our effort is to be clearer about what our grantsprograms are *for*, so that their functions are pretty apparent at first glance.[1]

1. Annual Plan Grants/Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC): The grants or funding that the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) allocates will be called Annual Plan Grants, since they are essentially general support grants for the annual plans of eligible entities. The name of the FDC - the committee itself - stays unchanged.

2. Project and Event Grants/Grants Advisory Committee (GAC): The name of the Wikimedia Grants Program (which made sense when it was the only grants program we had) is being modified to Project and Event Grants, which reflects the purpose for which they now exist. Again, the GAC - as the advisory committee - remains unchanged in name.

To be clear: chapters and other groups that have projects and programs that need support for up to a year - including project management support (for e.g. part time staff or administrative costs like payments to an accounting firm) - can continue to apply for project grants under this program. In fact, they may be consolidated such that these grants essentially support most of an organisation or group's programmatic work. While some Wikimedia entities may choose to apply to the FDC because they want full time support for substantial operating and programmatic costs, others may wish to opt for the agility of project grants that are simpler to apply and report for, and can be accessed any time of the year.

3. Individual Engagement Grants/Individual Engagement Grants committee (IEGcommittee): This name will stay unchanged, as does the name of the IEG committee. The program is meant to support individual Wikimedia contributors or small teams, to lead projects with online impact. Over this next year, the Grantmaking team would like to see more resources going to the core of our contributing community as effectively as possible.

4. Travel and Participation Support: This program name changes to Travel and Participation Support, from simply Participation Support, to make clear that these grants are for travel related to active participation in non-Wikimedia events. We are thinking about the purpose of this program more closely, so that we can deepen its impact, and will be working on this with our team (and our partners like WMDE and WMCH) over the next few months.

In addition, we are moving our Brazil catalyst program into a ‘Partnership Grant’ model as we did with India last year. I will be sharing more details on this in the next few weeks, but essentially, Partnership Grants will be with significant allied organisations - particularly in the Global South - who support our communities in expanding reach and participation. These grant proposals will go through substantial on wiki review by the local community (for e.g. the Brazilian PT community), and then a short review by the global Wikimedia community. After this, the proposal will be approved (or not) by the Grantmaking team, primarily Asaf Bartov and Anasuya Sengupta. This model is likely to be used sparingly, and only when the opportunities offered by an allied organisation are significant to the growth of a community. We hope that these allies will, after the initial grants through this model, be familiar enough with our movement to apply directly for annual plan grants through the FDC or project grants through the GAC.

In order to move from setting up the appropriate structures for grants to assessing their impact, we are also consolidating the Grantmaking Learning and Evaluation team. The team is responsible for designing the grant reporting processes and assessing the overall impact of grants, analysing and supporting research on organizational development in our movement, and monitoring the internal performance indicators of the Grantmakingdepartment. Led by Jessie Wild (Senior Manager), it includes Jonathan Morgan (Learning Strategist) and Haitham Shammaa (Global South Learning Strategist). Evan Rosen, who used to serve as the Data Analytics Manager, has left the Foundation to pursue his interests in machine learning and pure research. The Grantmaking Learning and Evaluation team will work in close partnership with the Program Evaluation and Design team (Frank Schulenburg, Jaime Anstee, Sarah Stierch), responsible for assessing the effectiveness and impact of programmatic activities in the Wikimedia movement, thereby supporting the Grantmaking staff and committees, as well as program leaders across the movement.

To remind you all, the first Grantmaking Quarterly Review was held in May, and notes from it offer significant context for our work.[2] In addition, if you happen to be at Wikimania in Hong Kong this year, please do come find us at the Grantmaking booth [3] or the Grantmaking lunch [4] or any of the other events our team will be facilitating and leading. We look forward to meeting you!

The Wikimedia movement - contributors, organisations, donors and allies - expects and deserves to have its shared resources be as impactful as possible. Putting responsive structures and processes in place is a key step in ensuring that grants are effective in growing our communities and content. We share in this responsibility together, and I look forward to our continued conversations on how to do this as well as possible.

Warmly,

Anasuya

[1] For more information on the grants structures and processes: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start http://www.fluxx.io/

[2] The first Grantmaking Quarterly Review notes http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_rev...

[3] The Grantmaking booth at Wikimania: http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grantmaking_booth

[4] The Grantmaking lunch at Wikimania http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grantmaking_meetup