[Foundation-l] Fundraising Letter Feb 2012

Thu Feb 9 23:12:05 UTC 2012

Thanks you so much, Florence. This is really interesting and
definitely valuable food for thought - a very good starting point for
the conversation about funds dissemination.

Arne

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 12:02 AM, Florence Devouard <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l