For everyone here: I've asked our Grantmaking team to comment and clarify the details of this plan.
On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 9:32 AM, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org wrote:
Answering to Teemu and Chris:
I do think that the for Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Art it is safe to claim that if we organize it the way we would always do, it would still tip the gender balance in our community a little more to the female side. However, I disagree that this should be a main consideration, because I think that would be true for so many outreach projects. Focusing on that would be a pity and a distraction imho. Also, for most participants we don't know the gender, and we don't want to know the gender (because asking for it alone can scare people away) - except for a sample of them, who happen to answer the survey afterwards. All data on that is quite shaky.
If necessary, I could easily make a case why WLM is a wonderful gendergap project - the point is that I don't want volunteers to waste their time on making such cases, but rather let them be innovative, come up with new ideas instead of rebranding existing ideas on something like the gendergap. My problems are more fundamental than 'I can't get money for my specific project'.
So Chris: yes, these people do a lot for reducing the gender gap in our projects. Also, Wikimedia organizers tend to hop between projects - their next might be more focused on a topic that is popular with women, if their current idea isn't yet. Drawing them into a topic in a positive way (what we do is cool! Join us!) tends to be more successful than telling them they are not allowed to do other stuff (we won't fund you at all unless you do this specific theme).
Prioritisation sounds great, but that only works that way if you have one clearly defined pool of resources, that you can actually control. What do you think is the major bottle neck in organizing activities in the Wikimedia movement? In my experience, that is not money, or even WMF staff capacity (even though it is a limiting factor sometimes), but the primary bottle neck is volunteer organizers (or editors). And volunteer time is not a resource you can easily 'control'. If you want to influence it, the most effective way is by persuading the volunteers why another angle is more interesting, more fun, more effective.
Best, Lodewijk
On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 6:11 PM, Chris Keating chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com wrote:
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 _______________________________________________ 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
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