Hi Jessie,
Thanks for the quick reply.
Issue 1 may be challenging to measure even with Wikimetrics. Can we talk
about this during the Research Hackathon next week if we can set up a time
off-list?
Thanks for the info about issue 2. I am grateful to learn that you did an
evaluation of PEG. It is interesting to compare that evaluation with the
evaluation of IEG. A number of grantmaking committee members and grantees
will be at Wikimania and I hope the PED team will introduce themselves and
be available to discuss these studies, especially if there is a plenary
meeting of all the Meta grantmaking committee members who attend Wikimania.
Thanks very much,
Pine
On Jul 31, 2014 2:50 PM, "Jessie Wild" <jwild(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks for listening to the presentation, Pine!
There will be a more comprehensive analysis posted on Meta, but in the
meantime to answer your questions:
1. I'm aware that Program Evaluation is
examining the outcomes of
conferences this year, and Jamie and I have discussed this in at least two
places on Meta. I'm curious about if and how you plan to measure the online
impact of conferences; not just what people and groups say they will do in
post-survey conferences, but what they actually do online in verifiable
ways in the subsequent 3-12 months.
Jaime and I and the others on the Grantmaking team are working together on
this, and experimenting with some different ways of evaluating the work in
the few months following the conferences. One way to do this in a small
experiment, for example, is to run a cohort of users who received Wikimania
Scholarships through Wikimetrics at different increments throughout the
year following. This is something I have been curious to do for a long
time, but never had the tool to do it on an aggregate level!
2. You said in your presentation that there is no direct correlation
between grant size and measurable online impact. From the slides at around
the 1:13-1:15 minute marks, it looks to me like the correlation is
negative, meaning that smaller grants produced disproportionately more
impact. I can say that within IEG this occurred partly because we had some
highly motivated and generous grantees who volunteered a considerable
amount of time to work with modest amounts of money, and I don't think we
should expect that level of generosity from all grantees, but I think that
grantmaking committees may want (A) to take into account the level of
motivation of grantees, (B) to consider breaking large block grants into
discrete smaller projects with individual reporting requirements, and (C)
for larger grants where there seem to be a lot of problems with reporting
and a disappointing level of cost-effectiveness, to be more assertive about
tying funding to demonstrated results and reliable, standardized reporting
with assistance from WMF. What do you think?
Well, there are definite outliers, and the slides aggregate by program
type rather
than by size. So, for example, several of the IEG grants were
much bigger than than the majority of PEG grants. So - not exactly negative
correlation (at least, we can't definitively say that).
I absolutely agree with your (C) suggestion, and your (B) suggestion is
very interesting too - we haven't discussed that one. It may be worth
considering if there are larger project-based grants. For the annual plan
grants, we have this in terms of quarterly reports (and midpoint reports
for IEG), so we do try to do interventions with grantees if it looks like
they are off-track. As for (A), based on what we saw through our
evaluation of IEG[1], motivation is definitely important but the key
difference for outlier performance was from those grantees that had *specific
target audiences* identified, so they knew exactly who they wanted to be
working with and how to reach those people. So, I would want committees to
take into account grants with a specific target audience or specific target
topic area (for quality improvements, for example; we saw this for
successful outreach in PEG grants[2]). More explicitly on motivation, while
it is difficult to measure for new grantees, you can see a lot about
someone's motivation and creativity based on their past reports if they are
a returning grantee. I would definitely encourage our committees to look
back on past reports from returning grantees!
- Jessie
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Learning/Round_1_2013/Impact
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Learning/2013-14
--
*Jessie Wild SnellerGrantmaking Learning & Evaluation *
*Wikimedia Foundation*
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