Thanks Siko.
Also, @Brian: the last I heard is that the Committee would like more members with software development experience. If that sounds like something you would want to do, I think that the committee coordinators or Marti would like to hear from you about joining IEGCom for the next round (although it may or may not be called IEG any more as it joins up with the new grants categories; the last I heard is that the new category will be "Project Grants" and they will have some nice new features).
Pine On Oct 7, 2015 10:06 AM, "Siko Bouterse" sbouterse@wikimedia.org wrote:
Useful points as always, thanks! Marti and Quim have partnered on improving processes for technical IEG proposals and there's no doubt still room for improvement, but always good to have feedback as they're building changes into each round. Having separate application templates for different kinds of proposals may be an option, but it will need significant thought to implement well so we haven't yet gone that route (more choices before a user can get started isn't always a good thing).
Templates aside, writing a great grant proposal or project plan isn't a skill everyone has (no matter how good the form/guidelines are), and there is a delicate balance to find between expecting an applicant to have everything prepared up front and creating so many barriers to entry so that good ideas are killed before the community has a chance to see them. We've found the IEG community comments period to be a useful time to help some folks improve their proposals significantly, get confirmation on those that are already in good shape, and also to flag issues to the committee which may seem obvious to you, but not to everyone.
On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 5:40 AM, Andre Klapper aklapper@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Tue, 2015-10-06 at 21:05 -0600, Brian Wolff wrote:
It would be nice if before asking for general review, the proposals were vetted to have sufficient detail. Some of these seem to be "I want X$ to do Y, and I'm not going to tell you how I plan to do Y, or how I determined X$ is needed, or even give a detailed definition of what Y is".
For a grant proposal, I'd expect to see budget justifications, time estimations broken down by rough sub tasks, a general plan of attack, potential risks and how the grantee plans to mitigate them, user acceptance criteria, etc
Thanks Brian. These sound like very valid points.
I'm curious if application templates of other (technical) programs have already been looked at for IEG and which conclusions were drawn. Seeing https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_programs/Application_template a nd
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_programs/Life_of_a_successful_projec...
I can imagine there's knowledge to share (*if* that hasn't happened yet).
andre
Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
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