Dear members of the Wikimedia community,

On behalf of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, I write to share the news that we have approved [1] the full slate of the FDC’s Round 1 2014-2015 recommendations [2] for the Annual Plan Grants. In this round, 11 Wikimedia organizations will be receiving a total of  $3,817,956 in grants. This leaves approximately $2 million for organizations likely to apply for Annual Plan Grants in Round 2 of this year. [3]

One organization, Wikimedia CH, submitted an appeal to the Board regarding their funding recommendation. [4] We carefully reviewed this appeal, including their proposal, the inputs into the FDC’s proposal review process, and the notes from the deliberation on the chapter's proposal. We appreciate the effort that its Board and staff put into creating the proposal and the appeal. Ultimately, however, we decided not to override the recommendation of the FDC.

We’re conscious and appreciative of the fact that WMCH is investing a lot in Kiwix — a valuable offline project for access to Wikipedia and one that we know is being used in innovative ways. This project indeed required us to evaluate the financial sustainability of all technical projects, which is currently not explicitly guaranteed by unrestricted grants; we will review  our grant strategy to see how we can accommodate these needs. We have asked the WMF staff to provide a recommendation on how to adapt the grant program to help ensure continued funding of certain projects when they are considered high-priority to our movement goals and needs. Subject to our review, such a process may be appropriate in the future for projects like Wikidata and Kiwix.  

We congratulate all eleven organizations on their grants, and we look forward to seeing what the year ahead will bring. We know that the volunteers, staff, and boards of these organizations are working hard to advance the goals of the movement.  We thank them for their work in doing so.  

We continue to optimize the Annual Plan Grant/FDC process and anticipate further improvements to the APG grant program in 2015 based on our ongoing impact analyses of grants as well as input and feedback from the communities.

Sincerely,

Frieda and Bishakha, on behalf of the WMF Board of Trustees

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Board_decisions/2014-2015_round1

[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/FDC_portal/FDC_recommendations/2014-2015_round1

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals