At the opposite I consider that the limited time cannot produce long-time effect, it's not rare that some good grants proceed to submit a second phase to have a larger impact.
The best would be to check afterwards the impact of the solution of "promotion" of a specific area and a specific topic.
A program needs longer support, this is also the lesson learned by WLM (the discussion is started because the WLM team considers that few months cannot support a bigger program).
The grantmaking team is doing what the WLM team did some years ago: supporting a specific topic. WLM has been successful, probably would have created a lesser impact if someone suggested to reduce the organization of the event to 2-4 weeks.
Anyway the best is to check the feedback from the community in terms of projects submitted to the grantmaking team.
There is no reason at the moment to say that there will be damaging effects.
If there are a bad results, the best wold be to analyze the reasons and to proceed to learn a lesson and to check what can be set to have a better process.
At the moment the experiemnt is focused to give "more opportunities" to a specific area, I don't see nothing strange on that.
Regards
On 06.01.2015 07:59, Lodewijk wrote:
I'm still in the dark as to why this has to be a three month program (that is a very long period of time to put everything on hold for an experiment) and not just 2-4 weeks. Then you could actually commit to quicker run-through times in the program, etc. Reducing the time frame would reduce the damaging side effect significantly.
Lodewijk