Useful points as always, thanks! Marti and Quim have partnered on improving
processes for technical IEG proposals and there's no doubt still room for
improvement, but always good to have feedback as they're building changes
into each round. Having separate application templates for different kinds
of proposals may be an option, but it will need significant thought to
implement well so we haven't yet gone that route (more choices before a
user can get started isn't always a good thing).
Templates aside, writing a great grant proposal or project plan isn't a
skill everyone has (no matter how good the form/guidelines are), and there
is a delicate balance to find between expecting an applicant to have
everything prepared up front and creating so many barriers to entry so that
good ideas are killed before the community has a chance to see them. We've
found the IEG community comments period to be a useful time to help some
folks improve their proposals significantly, get confirmation on those that
are already in good shape, and also to flag issues to the committee which
may seem obvious to you, but not to everyone.
On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 5:40 AM, Andre Klapper <aklapper(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On Tue, 2015-10-06 at 21:05 -0600, Brian Wolff wrote:
It would be nice if before asking for general
review, the proposals
were vetted to have sufficient detail. Some of these seem to be "I
want X$ to do Y, and I'm not going to tell you how I plan to do Y, or
how I determined X$ is needed, or even give a detailed definition of
what Y is".
For a grant proposal, I'd expect to see budget justifications, time
estimations broken down by rough sub tasks, a general plan of attack,
potential risks and how the grantee plans to mitigate them, user
acceptance criteria, etc
Thanks Brian. These sound like very valid points.
I'm curious if application templates of other (technical) programs have
already been looked at for IEG and which conclusions were drawn. Seeing
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_programs/Application_template a
nd
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_programs/Life_of_a_successful_projeā¦
I can imagine there's knowledge to share (*if* that hasn't happened
yet).
andre
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http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
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