Craig, Patrik,
On Sun, Nov 23, 2014 at 1:40 PM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
The other danger of across the board cuts like this, especially where the rationale is not clear, is that entities may start to inflate their requests, factoring an expected 10% or 20% to be shaved off the top by the FDC, thus leaving them with the figure that they *really *want. If the rationale is clearly explained, this will probably be less of a factor.
the current framework ONLY allows to make across the board cuts. Sadly. We would very much rather have a possibility to recommend some projects to be funded or not, but these are unrestricted funds. In the case of WMDE, I think we did make it abundantly clear that Wikidata is an excellent project that should receive more funding. It would also be really valuable if the Board considered multi-year funding for this particular project separately.
While we strive to be as detailed as possible in our recommendations, I hope it is understandable that there is a difference in detail of reasoning for a budget requested on the one hand, and for a recommended amount on the other. For starters, as a committee, we may differ initially in recommended allocations - it is the end result that is a consensus we worked out, basing on different rationales. We have used many approaches and lenses to see this (expense-side, project-side, staff-side, diversification of other funding-side, etc.), but ultimately, our belief was that WMDE may need to reflect on their role in the movement and how it spends the movement's resources. Also, our recommendation was based on the quality of proposals (judged comparatively, taking the amounts into account). Finally, we did have to reflect on the fact that the total amounts of requests exceeded our overall budget (but this consideration was not driving our decisionmaking, we in fact were discussing a possibility of recommending budget increase, if all projects were outstanding).
Nemo: absolutely no hostility meant towards technological decentralization! Speaking only for myself, I believe that the more our movement is relying on various resources (including technologies) the better.
best,
dariusz "pundit"