Hi Anders, my 2 cents. A project has a budget, this budget can be financed externally but there are some countries which have more opportunities than others.
In addition (it's my personal point of view) the external funding introduces a bigger complexity to the projects in terms of management of sponsors and external funders (matching the strategies of WMF and to apply for WMF funds is not the same to find a compromise with the strategies and the accountability of the external funders). In my opinion the external funds generate the request to have some additional skills in the team of the project and probably longer time to setup the project.
In the other hand it would be easier to find external funds if a program/project has already generated some good results. In your example you say that the second year the project received more funds, but you have been lucky to find someone trusting on you the first year.
For this reason I can apply your example more to WLM than to gender gap because WLM has already a well established history and very good results to attract external funds, instead of some other new projects requiring to be "incubated" more.
Regards
On 06.01.2015 11:37, Anders Wennersten wrote:
Thanks Siko, also from me.
I do hope that you use this time to really learn of the dynamics of grants/impact, by following up of earlier experience and also in defining expectations targets etc in a specific area
For me an eyeopener was a program run in Sweden by WMSE to get more female contributors. It was funded from outside WMF and primary involved workshops for Wikipedia writing, in a form we are all familiar with. The workshops was run in different middlesized towns and got a very limited attendance, 3-15 persons, whereof only a tiny fraction stayed on as Wikipedians after the workshop. I got annoyed at first noticing it cost something like 100-200 dollar per participant, and 20 times as much to get the one among them who stayed on but only making some 50-100 edits. I saw it as a truly waste of money (not WMF though).
But then I learned that those activities attracted more media attention than any other program having been run by WMSE, there must now be between 30-50 coverages in local and nationwide papers and radio stations. And the funding body saw this as a thundering success, and has given even more funding for a second year. And then something happened as a result from this media coverage, more female editors has now a year later turned up!
Anders