Siko makes an important point here. If there are too many time sensitive non-theme requests then that would be justification for allocating more resources to the grantmaking team next year.
Let's wait and see how the data plays out.
Sydney
Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration
On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 2:55 PM, Siko Bouterse sbouterse@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 10:59 PM, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org wrote:
Actually, the experiment is whether such a campaign would drive more successful grants, as I understand it. It works from the assumption that such grants would have a positive impact. I'm happy to go with that assumption though.
I still strongly disagree with this initiative, but especially the way it is executed. I'm glad to hear that all time-sensitive requests can still apply during this period - that would probably be quite a few requests.
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.
The campaign itself will only run for a month - in my experience with past open calls for IEG, you really do need more than 2 weeks to get the word out and get new ideas not only started but also developed w/ enough community input that we rely on to assess which grants should move forward. But in addition to the actual campaign itself, we need to bake in enough time to prepare for it beforehand and get funded projects started afterwards. There is significant staff effort behind the scenes for any grantmaking we do, and in my experience even quick pilots take time to prep and wrapup.
I'm hearing your concerns loud and clear, still, and agree it will be interesting to see how many truly time-sensitive requests will come up during this period. If the campaign is deemed a success worth repeating and we also find we're over-stretching those involved (staff and volunteers) because many non-theme focused projects need to be concurrently considered (this is a big concern for me, and something we'll be keeping a close eye on), that could be data-driven rationale for resourcing grantmaking differently in next year's annual plan.
Siko
Lodewijk
On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:47 AM, Peter Southwood < peter.southwood@telkomsa.net> wrote:
Did you not see the bit about "experimental"? Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bjoern Hoehrmann Sent: 06 January 2015 05:48 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
- Siko Bouterse wrote:
Why the gender gap? Although we’ve committed to supporting and increasing gender diversity, so far these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale. In the first half of this year, IEG and PEG have spent only 9% of funds on projects aiming to directly impact this gap and less than ? of our grantee project
leaders
have been women.
Without taking time to focus on increasing gender diversity in our content and contributors, this trend is likely to continue.
What evidence is there that spending more on "gender gap" will have any measurable impact on "gender gap"? I also note that you say "projects" have not "emerged". That sounds like people do not actually have ideas
how
to "impact" "gender gap" with money. Could you identify a couple of projects that would have considerable "impact" on "gender gap" but that have been refused funding in the past due to a lack of "focus" on "gen-
der
gap"?
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de ·
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