[Foundation-l] Fundraising Letter Feb 2012

Thu Feb 9 22:52:20 UTC 2012

I wanted to share an experience with regards to a future FDC.

During two years, I was a member of the "comité de pilotage" (which I 
will here translate in "steering committee") of the ANR (National 
Research Agency in France).

The ANR distributes every year about 1000 M€ to support research in France.

The ANR programmatic activity is divided in 6 clearly defined themes + 1 
unspecific area. Some themes are further divided for more granularity.
For example, I was in the steering committee of CONTINT, which is one of 
the four programs of the main theme "information and communication 
technologies". My program was about "production and sharing of content 
and knowledge (creation, edition, search, interface, use, trust, 
reality, social network, futur of the internet), associated services and 
robotics"

Every year, the steering committee of each group define the strategic 
goals of the year and list keywords to better refine the description of 
what could be covered or not covered.

Then a public call for projects is made. People have 2 months to present 
their project. From memory, the projects received by CONTINT were 
possibly 200.

The projects are peer-reviewed by community members (just as research 
articles are reviewed by peers) and annotation/recommandation for 
support or not are provided by the peers. There is no administrative 
filter at this point.

Then a committee constituted of peers review all the projects and their 
annotation/comments and rank them in three groups. C rejected. B why 
not. A proposed. Still not administrative filtering at this point.

The steering committee, about 20 people made of community members 
(volunteers) and ANR staff review the A and B. Steering committee is 
kindly ask to try to keep A projects in A list and B projects in B list. 
However, various considerations will make it so that some projects are 
pushed up and others pushed down. It may range from "this lab is great, 
they need funding to continue a long-going research" to "damned, we did 
not fund any robotic project this year even though it is within our 
priorities; what would be the best one to push up ?" or "if we push down 
this rather costly project, we could fund these three smaller ones". We 
may also make recommandation to a project team to rework its budget if 
we think it was a little bit too costly compared to the impact expected.

At the end of the session, we have a brand new list of A followed by B. 
All projects are ranked. At this point, the budget is only an 
approximation, so we usually know that all A will be covered but 0 to a 
few Bs may be.

The budget is known slightly later and the exact list of projects funded 
published.

How do we make sure what we fund is the best choice ?
Not by administrative decision.
But by two rounds of independent peer-review who can estimate the 
quality of the project proposed and the chance for the organisations to 
do it well.
And by a further round through which we know that all projects are 
interesting and feasible, but will be selected according to strategic 
goals defined a year earlier.

There are also "special calls" if there is a budget to support a highly 
specific issue. Projects leaders have to decide if their project is 
related to a "regular theme", or a "white" or a "special call".

The idea behind this is also that they have to make the effort to 
articulate their needs clearly and show what would be the outcome.

The staff do not really make decisions. The staff is here to make sure 
all the process work smoothly, to receive the propositions and make sure 
they fit the basic requirements, to recruit peer for the reviews (upon 
suggestion made... by steering committee or other peers), to organise 
the meetings, to publish the results, and so on. Of course, some of them 
do impact the process because of their strong inner knowledge of all the 
actors involved. The staff is overall 30 people.

How do we evaluate afterwards that we made the good choice and funded 
the right ones ?
First because as in any funding research, there are some deliverables;
Second because once a year, there is a sort of conference where all 
funded organizations participate and show their results. If an 
organization does not respect the game or repeatedly fail to produce
results, they inevitably fall in the C range at some point in the 
peer-review process.

I present a simplify process, but that generally is it. I am not saying 
either that it is a perfect system, it is not. But according to what I 
hear, the system is working fairly well and is not manipulated as much 
as other funding system may be ;)

Last, members of the steering committee may only do a 2 years mandate. 
No more. There is a due COI agreement to sign and respect as well.
Thanks to the various steps in the process and thanks to the good 
(heavy) work provided by the staff, the workload of volunteers is 
totally acceptable.

Note that this is governement money but the government does not review 
each proposition. The governement set up a process in which there is 
enough trust (through the peer-review system and through the themes and 
keyword methodology) to delegate the decision-making. The program is a 3 
years-program defined by the board of the organization. The majority of 
the board are high level members of the governement (Education, Budget, 
Research, Industry etc.). This board does define the program and the 
dispatching of the budget between the various themes. But the board does 
not make the decision-making with regards to which programs are accepted 
or not.

Florence

On 2/9/12 9:11 AM, Ting Chen wrote:
> The Board approves the following letter to be sent to the community:
>
> Dear members of the Wikimedia Movement,
>
> As you are probably aware we have been discussing the the future of
> fundraising and fund dissemination for the Wikimedia Movement for almost
> 6 months now. After discussing fundraising and funds dissemination at
> this past meeting, the board has drafted the following statement. It our
> intention to discuss these matters in the coming weeks to come to a
> final decision mid March.
>
> But first we would like to thank everyone who took part in the
> discussion so far and spent their valuable time providing us with their
> viewpoints which we have of course taken into account in our decision
> making process. We hope that you will continue to participate by giving
> feedback on this letter.
>
> ==Funds dissemination==
> The board wants to create a volunteer-driven body to make
> recommendations for funding for movement-wide initiatives (Working
> title: Funds Dissemination Committee, FDC). The Wikimedia Foundation has
> decision-making authority, because it has fiduciary responsibilities to
> donors which it legally cannot delegate. The new body will make
> recommendations for funds dissemination to the Wikimedia Foundation. We
> anticipate a process in which the Wikimedia Foundation will review and
> approve all but a small minority of recommendations from the FDC. In the
> event that the Wikimedia Foundation does not approve a recommendation
> from the FDC, and the FDC and the Wikimedia Foundation aren't
> subsequently able to reach agreement, then the FDC can ask the Wikimedia
> Foundation Board of Trustees to request the recommendation be reconsidered.
>
> #the FDC will be a diverse body of people from across our movement
> (which may include paid staff) with appropriate expertise for this
> purpose, whose primary purpose is to disseminate funds to advance the
> Wikimedia mission;
> #the WMF staff will support and facilitate the work of the FDC
> #Proposals can range from one time smaller contributions for small
> projects from individuals to larger financing for operational costs of
> chapters or associations
>
> The board intends to evaluate this process together with the FDC and see
> if it is working.
>
> ==Fundraising==
> Our thoughts on fundraising are less specific. We have come to the
> following two statements which are important
>
> * If and when payment processing is done by chapters, it should be done
> primarily for reasons of tax, operational efficiency (including
> incentivizing donor cultivation and relations), should not be in
> conflict with funds dissemination principles and goals, and should avoid
> a perception of entitlement.
>
> * The board is sharpening the criteria for payment processing. Payment
> processing is not a natural path to growth for a chapter; and payment
> processing will likely be an exception -- most chapters will not do so.
>
>
> The Wikimedia Board of Trustees
>
> NB: Please note that rather than spend a LOT of time on wording at this
> time, the board preferred to amend the above text if necessary when
> moving towards a resolution. This letter indicates our intent, and we
> may "wordsmith as needed" in our final resolutions.
>