Hoi,
I have done a project and there were two parts to my project. There was the
delivery of an input method and a font for a script that did not have any
UNICODE font. At that time there was functionality for fonts. So it should
have been a shoe in. The cost of the project was relatively large. This was
because of the cost of producing a new font. In real world terms the font
and input method were provided for a very low price..
Because of whatever internal issues, the font did not become available in
MediaWiki. While waiting the partner for the project lost his subsidy and
as an organisation the Royal Institute for the Tropics ended and the
Tropenmuseum was merged with two other museums. This was duly mentioned at
the time. I even blogged about it.
As a consequence of this all my project was gone. The money was spend, the
goods were available but not available to a project. I am no longer
involved in Batak and have no leads to revive it. I have no intention
either.
Now a long time after all this I was hassled for a report. As far as I am
aware I have attempted multiple iterations of a report. It did not fit the
mold or whatever was wrong with it.
With more reporting you get less project and more irritation. I loathe the
notion that more reporting will lead to anything positive. If anything it
makes sense to project manage the reports, keep a finger on the pulse. But
this is a personal affair and very much NOT an administrative affair.
When I am getting involved in another project I will very much try to stay
away from administrative bullshit while I am very much available for
personal contact.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 31 July 2014 23:50, 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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