Hi all,
As you may have heard, I've started temporary contract work for WMF as an intern in Learning and Evaluation. [1] My work will focus on the Learning Patterns Library. [2] One of the goals for the internship is to enable easier and better reporting about grants, including financial reports. When grantees spend countless hours writing reports, that drains resources that could be invested in designing and producing more and better programs, and I've heard that grantees prefer designing and producing programs over tedious accounting and reporting tasks. You can expect to hear more from me about learning patterns in the next few months, and I am hoping to hear constructive ideas from community members and grantees that can be included in the Learning Patterns Library.
Generally I will use my current Pine accounts for my community roles, and I will save my WMF accounts for "official" WMF work.
I didn't know about these Finance Fellows either until I saw their profiles appear on the WMF staff page, and I emailed Garfield to ask about them. A community consultation in advance about this project would have been helpful. The goals of these Fellows make sense to me; I've previously had discussions with Grantmaking about trying to get comparable data across programs. I too am interested in hearing how WMF Finance will implement this program, and in particular how it will affect the Cascadia Wikimedians User Group which I am helping to coordinate. It does worry me a little that Wikimedia has a famously complicated social, financial, and legal environment, and there are lots of ways for things to go wrong, especially when people who have never before worked in this kind of environment are brought into a role like global finance for the movement. That said, I hope that Garfield will continue to address the concerns that are being discussed in this thread, and that the work of the Finance Fellows will be a net positive for everyone in the long run.
To the Finance Fellows: I hope that you are not discouraged by this discussion. I've been in this global community for years in a variety of roles, and I'm still learning. I hope that you have a good experience with us.
Regards,
Pine
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Bgibbs_(WMF) [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Learning_patterns
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