[Foundation-l] Fundraising Letter Feb 2012

Thu Feb 9 23:02:32 UTC 2012

Ah yeah. From what I understood, what I outline as a process is very 
similar to any type of academic call of projects/funding in the USA, 
such as NSF, NASA, NIH, DOE etc.

Most basic principle: peer review evaluation.

Florence

On 2/9/12 11:52 PM, Florence Devouard wrote:
> 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.
>>
>
>
>
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