Like Bence, I would be interested to see how this kind of experiment in WMF grantmaking works out. And also like him I would be a little surprised if something like this is implemented with no notice period.
A couple of responses to Lodewijk's post;
with people confirming my fear that this will likely undermine the community support (or at least support by the 'organizing community') for gendergap-related projects in general - be it out of frustration, compensation or jealousy.
Out of interest, were any of these people doing anything at all to support the reduction of the gender gap in the first place? ;)
I called it a 'negative campaign' in my emails because the focus is not about actively boosting one type of requests (which is the claim), but rather about making it harder to do something unrelated to it in the hope that people instead will choose for the easy way, and organize a gendergap related event.
Equally, if you have limited resources, prioritising one thing means reducing attention to something else. So saying "we shouldn't work on the gender gap if anything else gets less atention as a result" is logically equivalent to saying "We shouldn't work on the gender gap".
Regards,
Chris