New subject: [Wikitech-l] Types of allowed projects for grant funding (renamed)

21 Feb 2015

(Now continuing this discussion on Wikimedia-l also, since we are
discussing grant policies.)

For what it's worth, I repeatedly advocated for allowing IEG to support a
broader range of tech projects when I was on IEGCom. I had the impression
that there was a lot of concern about limited code review staff time, but
it serms to me that WMF has more than enough funds to to pay for staffing
for code review if that is the bottleneck for tech-focused IEGs (as well as
other code changes).

I also think that the grant scope policies in general seem too conservative
with regard to small grants (roughly $30k and under). WMF has millions of
dollars in reserves, there is plenty of mission-aligned work to be done,
and WMF itself  frequently hires contractors to perform technical,
administrative, communications, legal and organizing work. It seems to me
that the scope of allowed funding for grants should be similar to the scope
of allowed work for contractors, and it would serve the purposes that
donors have in mind when they donate to WMF if the scope of allowed
purposes for grants is expanded, particularly given WMF's and the
community's increasing skills with designing and measuring projects for
impact.

In the past I think there were probably some wasteful uses of grant
funding, and the response at the time might have been to prohibit or refuse
to fund entire categories of expenses. Now that everyone has more planning
and evaluation capacity, it seems to me that this is a good time to rethink
the categorical prohibitions and replace at least some of them with
appropriate expectations for impact that would better serve our overall
mission of creating and sharing knowledge.

Pine
On Feb 21, 2015 12:05 PM, "Brian Wolff" &lt;bawolff(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

...
  On 2/21/15, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
  In general WMF has a conservative grant policy
(with the exception of  IEG,
  grant funding seems to be getting more
conservative every year, and some
 mission-aligned projects can't get funding because they don't fit into 
the
  current molds of the grants programs).
Spontaneous cash awards for  previous
  work are unlikely. However, if there is an
existing project that could  use
  some developer time, it may be possible to get
grant funding for future
 work.

 [Rant]

 I find this kind of doubtful when IEG's (which for an individual
 developer doing a "small" project is really the type of funding that
 applies) have been traditionally denied for anything that even
 remotely touches WMF infrastructure. (Arguably the original question
 was about toollabs things, which is far enough away from WMF
 infrastructure to be allowed as an IEG grant, but I won't let that
 stop my rant...). Furthermore, it appears that IEGs now seem to be
 focusing primarily on gender gap grants.

 I find it odd, that we have grants through GSOC and OPW to people who
 are largely "newbies" (although there are exceptions), and probably
 not in a position to do anything "major". IEG provides grants as long
 as they are far enough away from the main site to not actually change
 much. But we do not provide grants to normal contributors who want to
 improve the technology of our websites, in big or important ways.

 Ostensibly this is done in the name of:
 Any technical components must be standalone or
completed on-wiki.  Projects are
 completed without assistance or review from WMF
engineering, so MediaWiki
Extensions or software features requiring code review and integration  cannot be
 funded. On-wiki tech work (templates, user
scripts, gadgets) and  completely
 standalone applications without a hosting
dependency are allowed. 
 Which on one hand is understandable. WMF-tech has its own priorities,
 and can't spend all its time babysitting whatever random ideas get
 funded. So I understand the fear that brought this about. On the other
 hand it is silly, since a grant to existing tech contributors is going
 to have much less review burden than gsoc/opw, and many projects might
 have minimal review burden, especially because most review could
 perhaps be done by non-wmf employees with +2, requiring only a final
 security/performance sign off. In fact, we do already provide very
 limited review to whatever randoms submit code to us over the internet
 (regardless of how they are funded, or lack thereof). If IEG grants
 were allowed in this area, it would be something that the grantee
 would have to plan and account for, with the understanding that nobody
 is going to provide a team of WMF developers to make someone else's
 grant happen. We should be providing the same amount of support to IEG
 grantees that we would to anyone who submitted code to us. That is,
 not much, but perhaps a little, and the amount dependent on how good
 their ideas are, and how clean their code is.

 [End rant]

 Politically, I think its dangerous how WMF seems to more and more
 become the only stakeholder in MediaWiki development (Not that there
 is anything wrong with the WMF, I just don't like there being only 1
 stakeholder). One way for there to be a more diverse group of
 interests is to allow grants to groups with goals consistent with
 Wikimedia's. While not exactly super diverse (all groups have similar
 goals), at least there would then be more groups, and hopefully result
 in more interesting and radical projects.

 --bawolff

 _______________________________________________
 Wikitech-l mailing list
 Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
 https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Types of allowed projects for grant funding (renamed)