Hi Balazs,
I'm quite puzzled and wondering what are you basing your opinion of the FDC members' zero initial experience. I can speak only for myself, but I was an ED of an NGO for 6 years (and successfully applied for grants and ran a ~50k annual budget), and I've been on the funds dissemination board for Nida Foundation for over 10 years (smaller amounts, but many more projects each round); also for some years I was on the funds board for Interkl@sa program at American-Polish Freedom Foundation. I am currently an advisory board member for the largest scientific center in Poland (and besides regular advisory board duties, consult them on innovation management and strategy). I have experience in consulting on strategy to other NGOs and businesses. I also regularly teach strategic management to MBAs end execs, including programs specifically profiled towards IT and the Internet business. Of course you can always say that it would be better to have someone with more experience, but I believe the principle was that we also need people from within the movement, and able to make a significant time commitment. In any case, I find the statement about little or zero experience seriously unfounded.
best,
dariusz "pundit"
On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 12:05 PM, Balázs Viczián < balazs.viczian@wikimedia.hu> wrote:
In regards to the original problem brought up by Gerard, FDC is more or less on its maximum I think.
Its members never did such (or similar) job(s) before FDC (the closest would be credit checks, but that is like and IEG grant review - it is pretty far from such a comprehensive grant - technically a full "business plan" - review)
Despite the little to zero initial experience of its members, all-volunteer setup and the ever changing circumstances (global goals, focus points, etc.) and how in general awful it sounds if you say it out lout that an all-amateur (in the good sense) and inexperienced group of people are handling out USD 6 million every year in their free time and for free, it works pretty well.
Not perfect but you can not demand or expect perfection from such a setup.
That is why there is a whole process now to correct the mistakes that arise from this "non-professional system", including a dedicated ombudsperson for the case(s).
I think this is fair enough, the quality of the reviews are visibly improving from year to year and for the first time there is a real possibility to fix the mistakes and errors made, like the "incoherentness" of reviews.
Things from this point could be better only through radical changes to the system imo.
Balazs
2014-11-25 9:41 GMT, Ilario Valdelli valdelli@gmail.com:
In my opinion the work of the FDC cannot be limited to compare three
years,
to evaluate three budgets and to evaluate three impacts.
I would say that it's *out of context*.
I have had this feeling when I have read that the FDC consider that
Amical
is the best example to follow.
How "to follow"? Amical operates in a different context than other chapters. The question that a good example can be *cloned* is
surrealistic.
Ok, nothing to say but: a) Amical operates in small community where the language is a strong glue within the community b) Amical has a strong inter-relation Wikimedia projects = organization c) Amical has no big internal conflicts generated by external or internal questions (may be the opposite) d) the territory where Amical operates is relatively small
A good example to compare Amical is with Wikimedia Israel.
I would not speak in the specific case of WM DE but I suggest to look in the history of the German projects and in the German chapter and to check how many external decisions have had an impact in the German community to generate a bias. I don't think that these decisions have been a good solution to improve the community participation to the projects.
What I see is that the numbers of editors is decreasing a lot in the biggest projects.
It may be caused by a wrong strategy where is privileged the diversity
and
the Global South but without paying attention that the historical communities and to the "usual" editors. May be I am wrong but there are more online projects becoming attractive for the "potential" editors and the change of the target is not producing a real impact.
So it's not a question of comparison of three budget.
If the problem is critical the solution to limit the decreasing is not beneficial.
regards
Il 24/Nov/2014 19:14 "Sydney Poore" sydney.poore@gmail.com ha scritto:
Hi Patrik,
During this round of the FDC evaluating the requests, the majority of
the
organizations that we were looking at had submitted requests to the FDC for the past 3 years. While we have seen improvement around strategic planning, budget planning and evaluation, there is still a great amount of room
for
improvement from everyone in the wikimedia movement (including the WMF.)
If you read the recommendations, FDC is primarily asking the largest organizations to re-evaluate their current capacity to deliver impact to the movement in line with the funds that they are using. In many
instances
it involves looking at the organizations overall capacity to develop and execute a strategic plan. Because the FDC is making recommendations
about
unrestricted funds, rather than focusing on a specific project or
program,
often the reductions in funds is linked to concerns about an
organizations
capacity to grow (eg., hire and manage more staff, do more complicated projects.)
Warm regards,
Sydney Poore User:FloNight Member FDC
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe