[Foundation-l] Fundraising Letter Feb 2012

[Stuart West]

Yes thanks, Florence.  My view is that agreeing on a community-driven process (the Funds Dissemination Committee, or Funds Allocation Committee, whatever it wants to be called) to allocate funds is the easy part.  The hard part is figuring out all the details:

- how many people on this committee
- how are they selected
- what terms
- what will annual cycle be of submission/review
- how will staff support
- will it be ready in a few months to deal with the grant / operating plan cycle this summer?
- if it isn't ready, or for any reason isn't functioning well, what is backup?  we can't really have bureaucratic delays that keep grants from being distributed. 
- And more than anything else, how do we make this really work?

Your email gave some great food for thought on all of these.

I hope we can have a session on this at Wikimedia France's Finance Meeting next week.

-s

On Feb 9, 2012, at 3:12 PM, Arne Klempert wrote:

> 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.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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