. We can continue discussing there)
Hi,
Thanks for the elaborate work plan.
1. The way the budget is presented at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/Draft_Work_plan_July_2014_-_June_2015#Budget
is misleading. A good percent of this budget will be spent on staff salary, travel logisitics and other things which will not be there if the work is done by the community. So, this is not the actual cost needed for the desired output but the cost arising because of the involvement of paid professionals.
So besides this way of presenting the budget, there should also be a regular way of presenting budget like how the chapters are asked to submit during FDC application. It can be noted that during the last round of FDC funding application, WMIN faced very strict criterion regarding infrastructure cost, staff salary cost.
2. I have an eerie feeling that the community development work in India is getting outsourced to NGOs like CIS at the cost of crippling budding local chapters like WMIN. The way Hindi Wikipedia seeks help for content management (fixing Google articles) confirms my concern.
3. Where can I find WMF's open assessment of the work done by CIS-A2K in the previous year? How is the cost for the work done justified? If the cost if justified, then the actual communities and the content they have developed on their on own are worth many crores of Indian rupees. But, we face strict guidelines when applying for grants whereas NGOs like CIS don't have that strict criterion.