On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 12:24 PM, Ravishankar <ravidreams(a)gmail.com> wrote:
(copy of this comment placed at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:India_Access_To_Knowledge/Draft_Work_p….
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_J…
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.
Exactly . Here the role of community gets diminished ( in fact
demotivates active
community users ) , while that of paid professionals
gains upper hand .
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.
I still remember , that WMIN was made to cut down its budget estimate
heavily .
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.
NGOisation of Wiki at the cost of community volunteers is not correct .
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.
Where is transparency ?
Ravi
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