[Foundation-l] [Announcement] New Head of Business Development: Kul Wadhwa

[SJ Klein]

On Fri, 4 Jan 2008, Sue Gardner wrote:

> I certainly aspire, later, to be able to expand into hiring people whose
> work will be more directly mission-focused - for example, people to
> create distribution partnerships with other non-profits, or people to
> support community members who want to write grant proposals. But the
> priority obviously needs to be the core stuff.


Working with other non-profits for distribution, and organized writing of 
grant proposals, both strike me as things that the community at large 
excels at.  We have hundreds of talented contributors who happen to be 
staff or organizers of their own non-profits, skilled at this work; just 
as we have many talented people skilled at dealing with media.

The most interest and success we have ever had in grant writing was
when a group of active contributors started scoping out the landscape of 
relevant grants and drafting proposals on their own.  (this stopped when 
the process was shut down; a closed grantswiki was created and the whole 
process eventually ended.)

Since then, a number of communities of Wikipedians have successfully 
gotten their own small grants; we must have many more people with 
experience in the process and pieces of proposals that could be reused.

Similarly with distribution partnerships: a number of successful examples 
have been planned and carried out by groups of Wikipedians, who could 
advise others on how to do the same.

SJ