Hi Siko, are you planning to copy the relevant comments to the grant application pages? The Committee will likely want to read them.
Pine
On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 10:04 AM, Siko Bouterse sbouterse@wikimedia.org wrote:
Echoing Quim's thanks to you, bawolff! And I really appreciate the comments you've made directly on proposals in past weeks, which does help them improve.
Good proposals take time to develop, and I expect that incubating them longer in places like IdeaLab, where they can get more advice to help them mature, is one way to ensure they contain all info needed for assessing them as a grant proposal. I'm not sure this is something we could ever do well without the community.
I'm seeing more and more proposals for technical projects in IEG each round (for the first time, nearly half of the open proposals are for tools). As there seems to be increasing interest in using IEG to build tools, I agree that we'll want to start thinking about better guidelines for this type of proposal in particular. Will keep your suggestions in mind for this, and happy to hear more as we work on improving systems each round.
Siko
On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 5:56 AM, Quim Gil qgil@wikimedia.org wrote:
Brian, I just want to say Thank You for the time you took going through the proposals and writing this insightful email. CCing Siko because, even if you particular comments about certain proposals are interesting, they can be taken as samples, and what really matters are your meta
observations.
On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 7:08 AM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/10/14, Patrick Earley pearley@wikimedia.org wrote:
*(cross-posted to wikimedia-l)*
Hello all,
For our second round of Individual Engagement Grant applications in
2014,
we have a great crop of ideas. Wikimedians have dropped by to offer feedback, support, or expertise to some of the proposals, but many proposals have not been reviewed by community members. Over half of
these
proposals involve new tools, new uses of our databases, or have other technical elements. Some will be hosted on Labs if approved.
Members of this list may have key insights for our proposers. If
there
is
an open proposal that interests you, that you have concerns about, or
that
involves an area where you have experience or expertise, please drop
by
the
proposal page to share your views. This will help the proposers
better
hone their strategies, and will assist the IEG Committee in evaluating
some
of these fresh new ideas to improve the Wikimedia projects. Working
with
an IEG proposal may even inspire you to serve as a project advisor, or
to
propose one of your own for the next cycle! Comments are requested
until
October 20th.
Tools IEG proposals:
- IEG/Semi-automatically generate Categories for some small-scale &
medium-scale Wikis
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Semi-automatically_generate_Categ...
- IEG/WikiBrainTools
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/WikiBrainTools
- IEG/Dedicated Programming Compiler
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Dedicated_Programming_Compiler
- IEG/Gamified Microcontributions
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Gamified_Microcontributions%3E
- IEG/Enhance Proofreading for Dutch
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Enhance_Proofreading_for_Dutch
- IEG/Tamil OCR to recognize content from printed books
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Tamil_OCR_to_recognize_content_fr...
- IEG/Easy Micro Contributions for Wiki Source
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Easy_Micro_Contributions_for_Wiki...
- IEG/Citation data acquisition framework
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Citation_data_acquisition_framewo...
- IEG/Global Watchlist
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Global_Watchlist
- IEG/Automated Notability Detection
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Automated_Notability_Detection
- IEG/Piłsudski Institute of America GLAM-Wiki Scalable Archive
Project
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Pi%C5%82sudski_Institute_of_Ameri...
- IEG/Revision scoring as a service
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service%3E
Full list:
- IEG Grants/Review
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG#ieg-reviewing
Regards,
-- Patrick Earley Community Advocate Wikimedia Foundation pearley@wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
A lot of these proposals seem poorly written from the perspective of a technical proposal. Many appear to be more like sales pitches intended for a non-technical audience (Which I suppose kind of makes sense, the people who get lots of wikimedians to endorse them, "win").
I'm generalizing here, as it seems there's a lot of variation, but there's a lot of "what I am going to fix", not "how am I going to do it". They mostly don't have mock-up screenshots for the one's who propose new user facing things, there is largely no schedule of milestones, or even concrete minimum viable product specifications. If they were GSOC proposals, they would largely be rejected gsoc proposals.
For example [[meta:Grants:IEG/Tamil_OCR_to_recognize_content_from_printed_books]] you can't even tell that they intend to create a website instead of a desktop app, unless you read the talk page.
Second, its hard to comment on the appropriateness of scope, since there's not really any set criteria (That I've seen). In particular its unclear what is considered an appropriate asking amount for a given amount of work. For example, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Global_Watchlist asks for $7000, which seems excessive to essentially make a user script that has a for loop to get the user's watchlist on various wikis. That's the sort of thing which I would expect to take about a week. A very experienced developer might be able to pull it off in a day provided the interface elements were minimalist. (Although that proposal has a small little note about being able to mute/unmute (non-flow) threads on a per thread basis, which depending where you go with that, could be the hardest aspect of the project).
Similarly, people asking thousands of dollars so they can get computers to test the user script in different OS environments seems like an odd use of resources. No libraries available that have both Mac and windows available (Guess there's a lot of libs that only have windows computers). Even still, is multiple OS's really necessary to do browser testing? Almost all modern browsers are cross platform. Even IE can be run in wine on linux afaik.
Then there's proposals like
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Dedicated_Programming_Compiler
, where it appears the grant requester isn't entirely familiar with the meaning of the technical jargon that is in use in the proposal. Which should raise instant red flags.
Now that I've complained a lot, I should say its not all bad.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service
for example is a fairly well written proposal.
Hmm, not entirely sure where I was going with all this. Looking at all the proposals takes time. Maybe there should be some sort of minimum quality standard (e.g. Having a roadmap) to advance to the next step of proposal selection, and only ask the larger Wikimedia community to review those proposals that were sanity checked to have at least enough information on them that one could reasonably evaluate the proposal.
--bawolff
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
-- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
-- Siko Bouterse Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
sbouterse@wikimedia.org
*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. * *Donate https://donate.wikimedia.org or click the "edit" button today, and help us make it a reality!* _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l