Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Hello Jane, Sorry, but I think you miss the problem here. As I said before, I am fine with more projects that improve the coverage of so-called female topics, but not if this is damaging the projects which do not aim for such. I hope this campaign in this form is cancelled and witdrawn and that never ever such situation appears again. This way of working is damaging the trust in WMF, discouraging many volunteers, worsening projects, etc. Having a Gendergap campaign in this form is NOT in line with the vision the Wikimedia movement has. The current campaign is scheduled to be one of hopefully many, targeted at the community in order to generate themed proposals. If it was really targeted at the Wikimedia community, it would not have excluded other projects. I propose everyone to refuse to take part in this as this is a move in the wrong direction. And how WLM to attract more female particpation? By having a special category for pink buildings. Under this condition, a question as such can't be taken seriously. Romaine 2015-01-03 14:58 GMT+01:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com: As a member of the IEG committee I am happy to say that there is no need to panic. WLM is highly successful project and no one is talking about shutting it down, or any other project for that matter. The current campaign is scheduled to be one of hopefully many, targeted at the community in order to generate themed proposals. The current growth of highly diverse and inspirational proposals takes increasingly more energy to manage, judge, and maintain. By introducing a three-month long theme, it is hoped that the following will occur: 1) Grant committee members in their voluntary role as proposal reviewers and community sponsors will experience less burn-out in managing proposals as their will be more cross pollination per cohort of proposers and their proposals. 2) A targeted campaign to attract proposals will enable easier translation across projects if the target audience can be identified in advance 3) A targeted campaign will attract more volunteer committee members to manage proposals, hopefully attracting local experts in various Wikimedia projects. The Gendergap will be the first theme. I think it's a great idea! How can WLM attract more female participation? Any ideas? On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, Some disturbing news entered my mailbox the past days. The grant making team is going to shut down the grantmaking process for Project and Event Grants (PEG) and Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) for three full months! They have decided that they want to focus only on a specific strategic priority: the gender gap, and that all other good projects are refused for 3 months (February-April). Having more attention to a strategic priority is fine to me. Having more attention to the problem of the gender gap, sounds good to me as such, we can use much more projects and content in those areas. But that does not mean that many many volunteers who are organizing other projects should become the victim of other projects. This is a negative signal to all those volunteers who are currently working on project plans to be submitted in February, March and April. Good projects to be ignored, just because the WMF think those are less important. They say this is a positive campaign, but this sounds as a negative campaign to me. This discourages many volunteers in doing projects. And even worse: this is only to be generally announced 2 weeks before that period of shutting down starts! (this sounds like a joke, sadly it isn't) To organize a good project volunteers (yes, we are still unpaid! and organize these projects in our spare time!) we need the time to communicate well with all our partners and sponsors, and need the time to come up with a good project plan with a stable basis. Rushing a project in just a couple of weeks time is very unpleasant and does not help in getting a good quality project. And announcing it two weeks before the period indicates that organizers aren't taken seriously (enough). For example, we are currently planning to organize Wiki Loves Monuments in 2015 again, the world wide contest to have a better documentation and better display of all the cultural monuments worldwide, recognised as largest photo contest in the world by Guinness World Records. We are currently working on forming a team and want to have a good stable plan to be submitted within some weeks, but now we need to rush. And yes we need to start in January/February or it will be too late to organize it properly. Also all the national teams of Wiki Loves Monuments, the international team recommend all the national teams to start in January/February, to have a proper organisation together with various local partners and sponsors, but now all these teams are
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
As a member of the IEG committee I am happy to say that there is no need to panic. WLM is highly successful project and no one is talking about shutting it down, or any other project for that matter. The current campaign is scheduled to be one of hopefully many, targeted at the community in order to generate themed proposals. The current growth of highly diverse and inspirational proposals takes increasingly more energy to manage, judge, and maintain. By introducing a three-month long theme, it is hoped that the following will occur: 1) Grant committee members in their voluntary role as proposal reviewers and community sponsors will experience less burn-out in managing proposals as their will be more cross pollination per cohort of proposers and their proposals. 2) A targeted campaign to attract proposals will enable easier translation across projects if the target audience can be identified in advance 3) A targeted campaign will attract more volunteer committee members to manage proposals, hopefully attracting local experts in various Wikimedia projects. The Gendergap will be the first theme. I think it's a great idea! How can WLM attract more female participation? Any ideas? On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, Some disturbing news entered my mailbox the past days. The grant making team is going to shut down the grantmaking process for Project and Event Grants (PEG) and Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) for three full months! They have decided that they want to focus only on a specific strategic priority: the gender gap, and that all other good projects are refused for 3 months (February-April). Having more attention to a strategic priority is fine to me. Having more attention to the problem of the gender gap, sounds good to me as such, we can use much more projects and content in those areas. But that does not mean that many many volunteers who are organizing other projects should become the victim of other projects. This is a negative signal to all those volunteers who are currently working on project plans to be submitted in February, March and April. Good projects to be ignored, just because the WMF think those are less important. They say this is a positive campaign, but this sounds as a negative campaign to me. This discourages many volunteers in doing projects. And even worse: this is only to be generally announced 2 weeks before that period of shutting down starts! (this sounds like a joke, sadly it isn't) To organize a good project volunteers (yes, we are still unpaid! and organize these projects in our spare time!) we need the time to communicate well with all our partners and sponsors, and need the time to come up with a good project plan with a stable basis. Rushing a project in just a couple of weeks time is very unpleasant and does not help in getting a good quality project. And announcing it two weeks before the period indicates that organizers aren't taken seriously (enough). For example, we are currently planning to organize Wiki Loves Monuments in 2015 again, the world wide contest to have a better documentation and better display of all the cultural monuments worldwide, recognised as largest photo contest in the world by Guinness World Records. We are currently working on forming a team and want to have a good stable plan to be submitted within some weeks, but now we need to rush. And yes we need to start in January/February or it will be too late to organize it properly. Also all the national teams of Wiki Loves Monuments, the international team recommend all the national teams to start in January/February, to have a proper organisation together with various local partners and sponsors, but now all these teams are delayed for three months. And a personal project of mine in Belgium, I am planning to organize Wiki Loves Art in Belgium, together with various partners and sponsors. We intent to start in February, but now have to rush to get such done. By the way: did you know there is a Belgium Gap? Belgian subjects are relatively less and worse described on the various Wikipedias. This shutting down results in: * Discouraging many volunteers who are planning to submit good project proposals. * Having volunteers rushed with project plans, which lowers the quality of the plans. * Having volunteers being late and delayed with projects, for no good reason. Grantmaking is intented to support the communities, not frustrating them. WMF: stop this negative campaign! And for all project teams who want to organize a gender gap project: great you organize this, it is very very welcome! But I like to make a suggestion: submit the proposal on the first day after the shutting down period to give a strong signal to WMF that shutting down is a bad idea. It is time for a new strategic priority: closing the Community Gap. That is the gap between WMF and the local communities
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Hi Romaine, is there a link to an on-wiki page that states this. Based on your email, it is unfortunate that rather than stating that PEG/IEGs would be prioritized to gendergap proposals for a time, the choice appears to be to reject everything else. I am not against positive discrimination where carefully managed. A careful approach would avoid encouraging the perception that we have to choose between gendergap and the rest of the community. By the way, as a member of Wikimedia LGBT, my presumption is that LGBT related proposals would be rejected in this period as they would not be specifically about women. Fae On 3 January 2015 at 10:26, Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, Some disturbing news entered my mailbox the past days. The grant making team is going to shut down the grantmaking process for Project and Event Grants (PEG) and Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) for three full months! They have decided that they want to focus only on a specific strategic priority: the gender gap, and that all other good projects are refused for 3 months (February-April). Having more attention to a strategic priority is fine to me. Having more attention to the problem of the gender gap, sounds good to me as such, we can use much more projects and content in those areas. But that does not mean that many many volunteers who are organizing other projects should become the victim of other projects. This is a negative signal to all those volunteers who are currently working on project plans to be submitted in February, March and April. Good projects to be ignored, just because the WMF think those are less important. They say this is a positive campaign, but this sounds as a negative campaign to me. This discourages many volunteers in doing projects. And even worse: this is only to be generally announced 2 weeks before that period of shutting down starts! (this sounds like a joke, sadly it isn't) To organize a good project volunteers (yes, we are still unpaid! and organize these projects in our spare time!) we need the time to communicate well with all our partners and sponsors, and need the time to come up with a good project plan with a stable basis. Rushing a project in just a couple of weeks time is very unpleasant and does not help in getting a good quality project. And announcing it two weeks before the period indicates that organizers aren't taken seriously (enough). For example, we are currently planning to organize Wiki Loves Monuments in 2015 again, the world wide contest to have a better documentation and better display of all the cultural monuments worldwide, recognised as largest photo contest in the world by Guinness World Records. We are currently working on forming a team and want to have a good stable plan to be submitted within some weeks, but now we need to rush. And yes we need to start in January/February or it will be too late to organize it properly. Also all the national teams of Wiki Loves Monuments, the international team recommend all the national teams to start in January/February, to have a proper organisation together with various local partners and sponsors, but now all these teams are delayed for three months. And a personal project of mine in Belgium, I am planning to organize Wiki Loves Art in Belgium, together with various partners and sponsors. We intent to start in February, but now have to rush to get such done. By the way: did you know there is a Belgium Gap? Belgian subjects are relatively less and worse described on the various Wikipedias. This shutting down results in: * Discouraging many volunteers who are planning to submit good project proposals. * Having volunteers rushed with project plans, which lowers the quality of the plans. * Having volunteers being late and delayed with projects, for no good reason. Grantmaking is intented to support the communities, not frustrating them. WMF: stop this negative campaign! And for all project teams who want to organize a gender gap project: great you organize this, it is very very welcome! But I like to make a suggestion: submit the proposal on the first day after the shutting down period to give a strong signal to WMF that shutting down is a bad idea. It is time for a new strategic priority: closing the Community Gap. That is the gap between WMF and the local communities worldwide. It is not new, it exists for many years already. (It resulted also in the drama of the situation around the Mediaviewer in 2014, the drama with the Visual Editor in 2013, etc. in what WMF didn't sense well the community.) (Maybe the gap is less between WMF and the English speaking part of the world, but the world is larger. We have many people around the world who are speak a different language. WMF is not sensing the worldwide community well enough.) Finally we should do more about this Community Gap. For those celebrating: I wish you a happy new year with
[Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Hi all, Some disturbing news entered my mailbox the past days. The grant making team is going to shut down the grantmaking process for Project and Event Grants (PEG) and Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) for three full months! They have decided that they want to focus only on a specific strategic priority: the gender gap, and that all other good projects are refused for 3 months (February-April). Having more attention to a strategic priority is fine to me. Having more attention to the problem of the gender gap, sounds good to me as such, we can use much more projects and content in those areas. But that does not mean that many many volunteers who are organizing other projects should become the victim of other projects. This is a negative signal to all those volunteers who are currently working on project plans to be submitted in February, March and April. Good projects to be ignored, just because the WMF think those are less important. They say this is a positive campaign, but this sounds as a negative campaign to me. This discourages many volunteers in doing projects. And even worse: this is only to be generally announced 2 weeks before that period of shutting down starts! (this sounds like a joke, sadly it isn't) To organize a good project volunteers (yes, we are still unpaid! and organize these projects in our spare time!) we need the time to communicate well with all our partners and sponsors, and need the time to come up with a good project plan with a stable basis. Rushing a project in just a couple of weeks time is very unpleasant and does not help in getting a good quality project. And announcing it two weeks before the period indicates that organizers aren't taken seriously (enough). For example, we are currently planning to organize Wiki Loves Monuments in 2015 again, the world wide contest to have a better documentation and better display of all the cultural monuments worldwide, recognised as largest photo contest in the world by Guinness World Records. We are currently working on forming a team and want to have a good stable plan to be submitted within some weeks, but now we need to rush. And yes we need to start in January/February or it will be too late to organize it properly. Also all the national teams of Wiki Loves Monuments, the international team recommend all the national teams to start in January/February, to have a proper organisation together with various local partners and sponsors, but now all these teams are delayed for three months. And a personal project of mine in Belgium, I am planning to organize Wiki Loves Art in Belgium, together with various partners and sponsors. We intent to start in February, but now have to rush to get such done. By the way: did you know there is a Belgium Gap? Belgian subjects are relatively less and worse described on the various Wikipedias. This shutting down results in: * Discouraging many volunteers who are planning to submit good project proposals. * Having volunteers rushed with project plans, which lowers the quality of the plans. * Having volunteers being late and delayed with projects, for no good reason. Grantmaking is intented to support the communities, not frustrating them. WMF: stop this negative campaign! And for all project teams who want to organize a gender gap project: great you organize this, it is very very welcome! But I like to make a suggestion: submit the proposal on the first day after the shutting down period to give a strong signal to WMF that shutting down is a bad idea. It is time for a new strategic priority: closing the Community Gap. That is the gap between WMF and the local communities worldwide. It is not new, it exists for many years already. (It resulted also in the drama of the situation around the Mediaviewer in 2014, the drama with the Visual Editor in 2013, etc. in what WMF didn't sense well the community.) (Maybe the gap is less between WMF and the English speaking part of the world, but the world is larger. We have many people around the world who are speak a different language. WMF is not sensing the worldwide community well enough.) Finally we should do more about this Community Gap. For those celebrating: I wish you a happy new year with great projects that make every single human being freely share in the sum of all human knowledge!! Romaine ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Le 03/01/2015 12:55, Romaine Wiki a écrit : Hi Fae, I haven't seen a page about this on wiki yet. It appears that various volunteers who are working on organizing are informed about this behind the scenes directly. It also was mentioned in a discussion about the organisation of Wiki Loves Monuments which raised many concerns. It was first mentioned in this mail: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007597.html + https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007599.html Later confirmed by Alex Wang: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007600.html https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007603.html As I said this is not a positive campaign they intent, this is a negative campaign as other projects are a victim here. Yes, prioritizing is not a problem. But this does not feel good at all. This is not good for project organizers nor for the gender gap projects, nor for other projects. Romaine Thanks Romaine, that sounds terrible. I can imagine if Wikipedia was managed that way in its first period or anytime : We will proactively address our gap in History for the next 3 months, so please no more biology article until may (or maybe later we'll tell you) The fact is we can't rely or very poorly on the WMF anymore. Or just in the same way some people may apply for some governmental organisations/agencies subsidies and have to be skilled enough, not in their core project but to fit in the expectations, know the tricks for that and have the ability to deal with such hitches without being discouraged. User:Pi zero made a pretty good point here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:LilaTretikov_(WMF)oldid=10876939#Infrastructure The WMF is internally structured to centrally create major software initiatives to be designed, implemented, and imposed all from the top down. This is the way commercial enterprises approach proprietary software, so it's natural that people who come from that world (both administrators and software developers) would tend to do things that way. The approach is well suited to the purpose of creating software that maximizes customers' dependency on the commercial enterprise. In other words, it minimizes customers' ablity to improve, generalize, duplicate, or even maintain the software on their own. However, this approach is deeply inappropriate if you're trying to nurture volunteer wikis. (...) -- Mathias Damour User:Astirmays ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
This is not a good point but it always the same point of discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar Nothing new. Both models have their own strengths and their own weaknesses. regards On 03.01.2015 14:57, Mathias Damour wrote: User:Pi zero made a pretty good point here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:LilaTretikov_(WMF)oldid=10876939#Infrastructure The WMF is internally structured to centrally create major software initiatives to be designed, implemented, and imposed all from the top down. This is the way commercial enterprises approach proprietary software, so it's natural that people who come from that world (both administrators and software developers) would tend to do things that way. The approach is well suited to the purpose of creating software that maximizes customers' dependency on the commercial enterprise. In other words, it minimizes customers' ablity to improve, generalize, duplicate, or even maintain the software on their own. However, this approach is deeply inappropriate if you're trying to nurture volunteer wikis. (...) -- Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera Switzerland - 8008 Zürich Tel: +41764821371 http://www.wikimedia.ch ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com wrote: It is time for a new strategic priority: closing the Community Gap. That is the gap between WMF and the local communities worldwide. It is not new, it exists for many years already. (It resulted also in the drama of the situation around the Mediaviewer in 2014, the drama with the Visual Editor in 2013, etc. in what WMF didn't sense well the community.) (Maybe the gap is less between WMF and the English speaking part of the world, but the world is larger. We have many people around the world who are speak a different language. WMF is not sensing the worldwide community well enough.) Finally we should do more about this Community Gap. I think the gap is just as big in the English-speaking world, and that if asked (that kind of says something, I think) a lot of people would finger it as a priority—if nothing else, the content of traffic on this list would appear to back that up. Austin ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
..and I am hoping to see lots of gendergap paint On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 4:42 PM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: I hoped that after the discussions on the wiki loves monuments mailing list, someone of the grant team would have proactively informed the wider community in an earlier stage. I hope that the fact they did not do this, means they are reconsidering the way this campaign is shaped. As indicated before, this 'shutdown' (or focus) of Individual Engagement Grants as well as Project and Event Grants was confirmed https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007600.html by Alex Wang. She referred in that email to this onwiki description https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire_Grants_%E2%80%93_Gender_gap_campaign . I should also emphasize that Alex indicated that they don't expect this to impact WLM-related grants (because they expect teams to request funding much later in the process https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007603.html - not before june/july, an assumption I disagree with), and she also suggested the closing was not as hard as it sounds, as she's willing to discuss problems (she emphasized this in her email). I don't want to reiterate all discussions about whether gendergap is the problem or a symptom (we have many gaps in our community, of which the gender gap is the most visible and easiest to measure), but I do feel uncomfortable with this campaign. I have asked around a bit in the past week and only received negative feedback on the campaign - 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. 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. What I also fear, is that people will just give their request a tiny bit of 'gendergap'-paint, make up some way how they help reduce it (which is basically true for almost any outreach event aiming at a group with less than 90% men - i.e. almost any group aside from Wikipedia or catholic priests). I'm confident that most of our outreach projects, including Wiki Loves Monuments, could claim to reach relatively more women than the editor population contains. But I am very unhappy if we start distributing grants on such shaky grounds - those projects often are much stronger in general editor retention, which happens to be relatively more women. The focus of the projects would be unnaturally shifted in the grant request compared to the actual activities. Again, I hope that the decision makers involved here will reconsider the way this has been shaped, and frame it more in a positive way, focusing on supporting efforts in a thematic direction, rather than discouraging other thematic directions. And as I have said elsewhere: I would be similarly against this, with any other theme - I wouldn't be able to stand the idea to focus entirely on photo-events only for three months... Best, Lodewijk On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 3:59 PM, Jens Best jens.b...@wikimedia.de wrote: Hi all, I think some clarification is needed by people who are in charge for the grantmaking process. There is a difference between shutting down the grantmaking process (PEG) and (IEG) for three full months and adding a voluntary gendergap theme to a project to get better funding chances. So I really would like to see some clarifications about these leaked plans before having a propably heated debate about it. Needless to say that adding ideologically driven must-haves to a general grantmaking process which only purpose is to serve the voluntary work on a supposed-to-be-free encyclopedia would leave a disturbing impression on many people. best regards Jens Best 2015-01-03 15:46 GMT+01:00 Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com: There are multiple ways in how to define the Gendergap, in this case it is about female participation. I do think it is a problem that the number of female participants is dramatically lower than those of male contributors, but still this does not give any good reason to exclude good projects who are not particular aiming for female contributors. WMF wants to solve the Gendergap by excluding good other projects. That is a very bad situation. Trying to solve the Gendergap by enlarging the Community Gap. Bad idea. Romaine 2015-01-03 15:33 GMT+01:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com: Nope. Gendergap is about the gap in female participation, not in female-related topics.
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
I hoped that after the discussions on the wiki loves monuments mailing list, someone of the grant team would have proactively informed the wider community in an earlier stage. I hope that the fact they did not do this, means they are reconsidering the way this campaign is shaped. As indicated before, this 'shutdown' (or focus) of Individual Engagement Grants as well as Project and Event Grants was confirmed https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007600.htmlby Alex Wang. She referred in that email to this onwiki description https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire_Grants_%E2%80%93_Gender_gap_campaign. I should also emphasize that Alex indicated that they don't expect this to impact WLM-related grants (because they expect teams to request funding much later in the process https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007603.html - not before june/july, an assumption I disagree with), and she also suggested the closing was not as hard as it sounds, as she's willing to discuss problems (she emphasized this in her email). I don't want to reiterate all discussions about whether gendergap is the problem or a symptom (we have many gaps in our community, of which the gender gap is the most visible and easiest to measure), but I do feel uncomfortable with this campaign. I have asked around a bit in the past week and only received negative feedback on the campaign - 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. 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. What I also fear, is that people will just give their request a tiny bit of 'gendergap'-paint, make up some way how they help reduce it (which is basically true for almost any outreach event aiming at a group with less than 90% men - i.e. almost any group aside from Wikipedia or catholic priests). I'm confident that most of our outreach projects, including Wiki Loves Monuments, could claim to reach relatively more women than the editor population contains. But I am very unhappy if we start distributing grants on such shaky grounds - those projects often are much stronger in general editor retention, which happens to be relatively more women. The focus of the projects would be unnaturally shifted in the grant request compared to the actual activities. Again, I hope that the decision makers involved here will reconsider the way this has been shaped, and frame it more in a positive way, focusing on supporting efforts in a thematic direction, rather than discouraging other thematic directions. And as I have said elsewhere: I would be similarly against this, with any other theme - I wouldn't be able to stand the idea to focus entirely on photo-events only for three months... Best, Lodewijk On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 3:59 PM, Jens Best jens.b...@wikimedia.de wrote: Hi all, I think some clarification is needed by people who are in charge for the grantmaking process. There is a difference between shutting down the grantmaking process (PEG) and (IEG) for three full months and adding a voluntary gendergap theme to a project to get better funding chances. So I really would like to see some clarifications about these leaked plans before having a propably heated debate about it. Needless to say that adding ideologically driven must-haves to a general grantmaking process which only purpose is to serve the voluntary work on a supposed-to-be-free encyclopedia would leave a disturbing impression on many people. best regards Jens Best 2015-01-03 15:46 GMT+01:00 Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com: There are multiple ways in how to define the Gendergap, in this case it is about female participation. I do think it is a problem that the number of female participants is dramatically lower than those of male contributors, but still this does not give any good reason to exclude good projects who are not particular aiming for female contributors. WMF wants to solve the Gendergap by excluding good other projects. That is a very bad situation. Trying to solve the Gendergap by enlarging the Community Gap. Bad idea. Romaine 2015-01-03 15:33 GMT+01:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com: Nope. Gendergap is about the gap in female participation, not in female-related topics. The Dutch Wikipedia has a severe gap with only 6% female participation. I would say this is a pretty urgent problem for the Dutch and Flemish community, so I was very glad to see this as a main theme for the coming three months.
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Hi all, I think some clarification is needed by people who are in charge for the grantmaking process. There is a difference between shutting down the grantmaking process (PEG) and (IEG) for three full months and adding a voluntary gendergap theme to a project to get better funding chances. So I really would like to see some clarifications about these leaked plans before having a propably heated debate about it. Needless to say that adding ideologically driven must-haves to a general grantmaking process which only purpose is to serve the voluntary work on a supposed-to-be-free encyclopedia would leave a disturbing impression on many people. best regards Jens Best 2015-01-03 15:46 GMT+01:00 Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com: There are multiple ways in how to define the Gendergap, in this case it is about female participation. I do think it is a problem that the number of female participants is dramatically lower than those of male contributors, but still this does not give any good reason to exclude good projects who are not particular aiming for female contributors. WMF wants to solve the Gendergap by excluding good other projects. That is a very bad situation. Trying to solve the Gendergap by enlarging the Community Gap. Bad idea. Romaine 2015-01-03 15:33 GMT+01:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com: Nope. Gendergap is about the gap in female participation, not in female-related topics. The Dutch Wikipedia has a severe gap with only 6% female participation. I would say this is a pretty urgent problem for the Dutch and Flemish community, so I was very glad to see this as a main theme for the coming three months. On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 3:17 PM, Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com wrote: Hello Jane, Sorry, but I think you miss the problem here. As I said before, I am fine with more projects that improve the coverage of so-called female topics, but not if this is damaging the projects which do not aim for such. I hope this campaign in this form is cancelled and witdrawn and that never ever such situation appears again. This way of working is damaging the trust in WMF, discouraging many volunteers, worsening projects, etc. Having a Gendergap campaign in this form is NOT in line with the vision the Wikimedia movement has. The current campaign is scheduled to be one of hopefully many, targeted at the community in order to generate themed proposals. If it was really targeted at the Wikimedia community, it would not have excluded other projects. I propose everyone to refuse to take part in this as this is a move in the wrong direction. And how WLM to attract more female particpation? By having a special category for pink buildings. Under this condition, a question as such can't be taken seriously. Romaine 2015-01-03 14:58 GMT+01:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com: As a member of the IEG committee I am happy to say that there is no need to panic. WLM is highly successful project and no one is talking about shutting it down, or any other project for that matter. The current campaign is scheduled to be one of hopefully many, targeted at the community in order to generate themed proposals. The current growth of highly diverse and inspirational proposals takes increasingly more energy to manage, judge, and maintain. By introducing a three-month long theme, it is hoped that the following will occur: 1) Grant committee members in their voluntary role as proposal reviewers and community sponsors will experience less burn-out in managing proposals as their will be more cross pollination per cohort of proposers and their proposals. 2) A targeted campaign to attract proposals will enable easier translation across projects if the target audience can be identified in advance 3) A targeted campaign will attract more volunteer committee members to manage proposals, hopefully attracting local experts in various Wikimedia projects. The Gendergap will be the first theme. I think it's a great idea! How can WLM attract more female participation? Any ideas? On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, Some disturbing news entered my mailbox the past days. The grant making team is going to shut down the grantmaking process for Project and Event Grants (PEG) and Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) for three full months! They have decided that they want to focus only on a specific strategic priority: the gender gap, and that all other good projects are refused for 3 months (February-April). Having more attention to a strategic priority is fine to me. Having more attention to the problem of the gender gap,
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
There are multiple ways in how to define the Gendergap, in this case it is about female participation. I do think it is a problem that the number of female participants is dramatically lower than those of male contributors, but still this does not give any good reason to exclude good projects who are not particular aiming for female contributors. WMF wants to solve the Gendergap by excluding good other projects. That is a very bad situation. Trying to solve the Gendergap by enlarging the Community Gap. Bad idea. Romaine 2015-01-03 15:33 GMT+01:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com: Nope. Gendergap is about the gap in female participation, not in female-related topics. The Dutch Wikipedia has a severe gap with only 6% female participation. I would say this is a pretty urgent problem for the Dutch and Flemish community, so I was very glad to see this as a main theme for the coming three months. On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 3:17 PM, Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com wrote: Hello Jane, Sorry, but I think you miss the problem here. As I said before, I am fine with more projects that improve the coverage of so-called female topics, but not if this is damaging the projects which do not aim for such. I hope this campaign in this form is cancelled and witdrawn and that never ever such situation appears again. This way of working is damaging the trust in WMF, discouraging many volunteers, worsening projects, etc. Having a Gendergap campaign in this form is NOT in line with the vision the Wikimedia movement has. The current campaign is scheduled to be one of hopefully many, targeted at the community in order to generate themed proposals. If it was really targeted at the Wikimedia community, it would not have excluded other projects. I propose everyone to refuse to take part in this as this is a move in the wrong direction. And how WLM to attract more female particpation? By having a special category for pink buildings. Under this condition, a question as such can't be taken seriously. Romaine 2015-01-03 14:58 GMT+01:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com: As a member of the IEG committee I am happy to say that there is no need to panic. WLM is highly successful project and no one is talking about shutting it down, or any other project for that matter. The current campaign is scheduled to be one of hopefully many, targeted at the community in order to generate themed proposals. The current growth of highly diverse and inspirational proposals takes increasingly more energy to manage, judge, and maintain. By introducing a three-month long theme, it is hoped that the following will occur: 1) Grant committee members in their voluntary role as proposal reviewers and community sponsors will experience less burn-out in managing proposals as their will be more cross pollination per cohort of proposers and their proposals. 2) A targeted campaign to attract proposals will enable easier translation across projects if the target audience can be identified in advance 3) A targeted campaign will attract more volunteer committee members to manage proposals, hopefully attracting local experts in various Wikimedia projects. The Gendergap will be the first theme. I think it's a great idea! How can WLM attract more female participation? Any ideas? On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, Some disturbing news entered my mailbox the past days. The grant making team is going to shut down the grantmaking process for Project and Event Grants (PEG) and Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) for three full months! They have decided that they want to focus only on a specific strategic priority: the gender gap, and that all other good projects are refused for 3 months (February-April). Having more attention to a strategic priority is fine to me. Having more attention to the problem of the gender gap, sounds good to me as such, we can use much more projects and content in those areas. But that does not mean that many many volunteers who are organizing other projects should become the victim of other projects. This is a negative signal to all those volunteers who are currently working on project plans to be submitted in February, March and April. Good projects to be ignored, just because the WMF think those are less important. They say this is a positive campaign, but this sounds as a negative campaign to me. This discourages many volunteers in doing projects. And even worse: this is only to be generally announced 2 weeks before that period of shutting down starts! (this sounds like a joke, sadly it isn't) To organize a good project volunteers (yes, we are still unpaid! and organize
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Nope. Gendergap is about the gap in female participation, not in female-related topics. The Dutch Wikipedia has a severe gap with only 6% female participation. I would say this is a pretty urgent problem for the Dutch and Flemish community, so I was very glad to see this as a main theme for the coming three months. On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 3:17 PM, Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com wrote: Hello Jane, Sorry, but I think you miss the problem here. As I said before, I am fine with more projects that improve the coverage of so-called female topics, but not if this is damaging the projects which do not aim for such. I hope this campaign in this form is cancelled and witdrawn and that never ever such situation appears again. This way of working is damaging the trust in WMF, discouraging many volunteers, worsening projects, etc. Having a Gendergap campaign in this form is NOT in line with the vision the Wikimedia movement has. The current campaign is scheduled to be one of hopefully many, targeted at the community in order to generate themed proposals. If it was really targeted at the Wikimedia community, it would not have excluded other projects. I propose everyone to refuse to take part in this as this is a move in the wrong direction. And how WLM to attract more female particpation? By having a special category for pink buildings. Under this condition, a question as such can't be taken seriously. Romaine 2015-01-03 14:58 GMT+01:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com: As a member of the IEG committee I am happy to say that there is no need to panic. WLM is highly successful project and no one is talking about shutting it down, or any other project for that matter. The current campaign is scheduled to be one of hopefully many, targeted at the community in order to generate themed proposals. The current growth of highly diverse and inspirational proposals takes increasingly more energy to manage, judge, and maintain. By introducing a three-month long theme, it is hoped that the following will occur: 1) Grant committee members in their voluntary role as proposal reviewers and community sponsors will experience less burn-out in managing proposals as their will be more cross pollination per cohort of proposers and their proposals. 2) A targeted campaign to attract proposals will enable easier translation across projects if the target audience can be identified in advance 3) A targeted campaign will attract more volunteer committee members to manage proposals, hopefully attracting local experts in various Wikimedia projects. The Gendergap will be the first theme. I think it's a great idea! How can WLM attract more female participation? Any ideas? On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com wrote: Hi all, Some disturbing news entered my mailbox the past days. The grant making team is going to shut down the grantmaking process for Project and Event Grants (PEG) and Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) for three full months! They have decided that they want to focus only on a specific strategic priority: the gender gap, and that all other good projects are refused for 3 months (February-April). Having more attention to a strategic priority is fine to me. Having more attention to the problem of the gender gap, sounds good to me as such, we can use much more projects and content in those areas. But that does not mean that many many volunteers who are organizing other projects should become the victim of other projects. This is a negative signal to all those volunteers who are currently working on project plans to be submitted in February, March and April. Good projects to be ignored, just because the WMF think those are less important. They say this is a positive campaign, but this sounds as a negative campaign to me. This discourages many volunteers in doing projects. And even worse: this is only to be generally announced 2 weeks before that period of shutting down starts! (this sounds like a joke, sadly it isn't) To organize a good project volunteers (yes, we are still unpaid! and organize these projects in our spare time!) we need the time to communicate well with all our partners and sponsors, and need the time to come up with a good project plan with a stable basis. Rushing a project in just a couple of weeks time is very unpleasant and does not help in getting a good quality project. And announcing it two weeks before the period indicates that organizers aren't taken seriously (enough). For example, we are currently planning to organize Wiki Loves Monuments in 2015 again, the world wide contest to have a better documentation and better display of all the cultural monuments worldwide, recognised as largest photo contest in the world by Guinness World Records. We are
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Hi all, I think that it's important to say that someone of the grant's team probably will be out until 11th January (I have received an out of office), so I suggest to postpone this discussion if we would not proceed to a conviction in absentia. Personally I had some concerns and I did a proposal suggesting to dedicate a whole year to the a thematic priority but reducing 50% of the grants for each round to this topic. Why? It's simple, because there are some investments to do to revitalize or to improve some areas, but there is no sense to forget that the remaining areas still need to be supported and helped. The worst would be to lose editors in the traditional areas (without a good support) and in the same time to do not gain new volunteers through the gender gap in order to fill the loss. Though it is normal in any charitable foundation to assign a percentage of the annual grants to a specific priority, there is not a scandal. The best is to define what is the good way to have less stress in the community. I think that a good suggestion done friendly and without stress may help the movement. About the remaining part I would say that some budgets for WLM are also in the FDC applications and the FDC *already* stated the priorities for 2015 and *already* did some evaluations in order to define the impact. I suggest to consider also these statements for the next WLM. regards On 03.01.2015 11:26, Romaine Wiki wrote: Hi all, Some disturbing news entered my mailbox the past days. The grant making team is going to shut down the grantmaking process for Project and Event Grants (PEG) and Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) for three full months! They have decided that they want to focus only on a specific strategic priority: the gender gap, and that all other good projects are refused for 3 months (February-April). Having more attention to a strategic priority is fine to me. Having more attention to the problem of the gender gap, sounds good to me as such, we can use much more projects and content in those areas. But that does not mean that many many volunteers who are organizing other projects should become the victim of other projects. This is a negative signal to all those volunteers who are currently working on project plans to be submitted in February, March and April. Good projects to be ignored, just because the WMF think those are less important. They say this is a positive campaign, but this sounds as a negative campaign to me. This discourages many volunteers in doing projects. And even worse: this is only to be generally announced 2 weeks before that period of shutting down starts! (this sounds like a joke, sadly it isn't) To organize a good project volunteers (yes, we are still unpaid! and organize these projects in our spare time!) we need the time to communicate well with all our partners and sponsors, and need the time to come up with a good project plan with a stable basis. Rushing a project in just a couple of weeks time is very unpleasant and does not help in getting a good quality project. And announcing it two weeks before the period indicates that organizers aren't taken seriously (enough). For example, we are currently planning to organize Wiki Loves Monuments in 2015 again, the world wide contest to have a better documentation and better display of all the cultural monuments worldwide, recognised as largest photo contest in the world by Guinness World Records. We are currently working on forming a team and want to have a good stable plan to be submitted within some weeks, but now we need to rush. And yes we need to start in January/February or it will be too late to organize it properly. Also all the national teams of Wiki Loves Monuments, the international team recommend all the national teams to start in January/February, to have a proper organisation together with various local partners and sponsors, but now all these teams are delayed for three months. And a personal project of mine in Belgium, I am planning to organize Wiki Loves Art in Belgium, together with various partners and sponsors. We intent to start in February, but now have to rush to get such done. By the way: did you know there is a Belgium Gap? Belgian subjects are relatively less and worse described on the various Wikipedias. This shutting down results in: * Discouraging many volunteers who are planning to submit good project proposals. * Having volunteers rushed with project plans, which lowers the quality of the plans. * Having volunteers being late and delayed with projects, for no good reason. Grantmaking is intented to support the communities, not frustrating them. WMF: stop this negative campaign! And for all project teams who want to organize a gender gap project: great you organize this, it is very very welcome! But I like to make a suggestion: submit the proposal on the first day after the shutting down period to give a strong signal to WMF that shutting down is a
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
I find it interesting to discover via this conversation that it has not been defined yet! On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 4:12 PM, Bence Damokos bdamo...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 3:33 PM, Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com wrote: Nope. Gendergap is about the gap in female participation, not in female-related topics. I would say it is both, but in either case this would be important to define if that is the criteria on which to solicit proposals. (The vision of Wikimedia is to share the sum of all human knowledge, so from that standpoint the end is to close the gap in coverage, diversity in the editorship is a very important means to it.) In any case, experimentation with the grants programme is probably for the benefit of the community, but so is reliability and predictability. If the original assumptions are clear, announcing a major policy change for the grants programme only with 3 weeks of planned lead time seems to go againts those latter expectations unfortunately. Best regards, Bence ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
I would not comment but it's important to define if this gap has been minimal in the past. If the femal participation has always been under the 10% (in 10 years) within a community, probably there are some infrastructural problems to be analyzed. The expected impact can be perceived as a temporary bother by the current community and refused when the support will finish. regards On 03.01.2015 15:33, Jane Darnell wrote: Nope. Gendergap is about the gap in female participation, not in female-related topics. The Dutch Wikipedia has a severe gap with only 6% female participation. I would say this is a pretty urgent problem for the Dutch and Flemish community, so I was very glad to see this as a main theme for the coming three months. -- Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera Switzerland - 8008 Zürich Tel: +41764821371 http://www.wikimedia.ch ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 3:33 PM, Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com wrote: Nope. Gendergap is about the gap in female participation, not in female-related topics. I would say it is both, but in either case this would be important to define if that is the criteria on which to solicit proposals. (The vision of Wikimedia is to share the sum of all human knowledge, so from that standpoint the end is to close the gap in coverage, diversity in the editorship is a very important means to it.) In any case, experimentation with the grants programme is probably for the benefit of the community, but so is reliability and predictability. If the original assumptions are clear, announcing a major policy change for the grants programme only with 3 weeks of planned lead time seems to go againts those latter expectations unfortunately. Best regards, Bence ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
..and I dream of repetitive metrics that can be compared year to year On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 5:02 PM, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote: Ethically, I would rather defer a proposal, such as one for Wiki Loves Pride or a more general diversity event, until the restriction is lifted. There is too much pointless political flim flam already in our Wikimedia community without masking events as GenderGap for the sake of faking metrics. Fae On 3 Jan 2015 15:50, Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com wrote: ..and I am hoping to see lots of gendergap paint On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 4:42 PM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: I hoped that after the discussions on the wiki loves monuments mailing list, someone of the grant team would have proactively informed the wider community in an earlier stage. I hope that the fact they did not do this, means they are reconsidering the way this campaign is shaped. As indicated before, this 'shutdown' (or focus) of Individual Engagement Grants as well as Project and Event Grants was confirmed https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007600.html by Alex Wang. She referred in that email to this onwiki description https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire_Grants_%E2%80%93_Gender_gap_campaign . I should also emphasize that Alex indicated that they don't expect this to impact WLM-related grants (because they expect teams to request funding much later in the process https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007603.html - not before june/july, an assumption I disagree with), and she also suggested the closing was not as hard as it sounds, as she's willing to discuss problems (she emphasized this in her email). I don't want to reiterate all discussions about whether gendergap is the problem or a symptom (we have many gaps in our community, of which the gender gap is the most visible and easiest to measure), but I do feel uncomfortable with this campaign. I have asked around a bit in the past week and only received negative feedback on the campaign - 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. 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. What I also fear, is that people will just give their request a tiny bit of 'gendergap'-paint, make up some way how they help reduce it (which is basically true for almost any outreach event aiming at a group with less than 90% men - i.e. almost any group aside from Wikipedia or catholic priests). I'm confident that most of our outreach projects, including Wiki Loves Monuments, could claim to reach relatively more women than the editor population contains. But I am very unhappy if we start distributing grants on such shaky grounds - those projects often are much stronger in general editor retention, which happens to be relatively more women. The focus of the projects would be unnaturally shifted in the grant request compared to the actual activities. Again, I hope that the decision makers involved here will reconsider the way this has been shaped, and frame it more in a positive way, focusing on supporting efforts in a thematic direction, rather than discouraging other thematic directions. And as I have said elsewhere: I would be similarly against this, with any other theme - I wouldn't be able to stand the idea to focus entirely on photo-events only for three months... Best, Lodewijk On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 3:59 PM, Jens Best jens.b...@wikimedia.de wrote: Hi all, I think some clarification is needed by people who are in charge for the grantmaking process. There is a difference between shutting down the grantmaking process (PEG) and (IEG) for three full months and adding a voluntary gendergap theme to a project to get better funding chances. So I really would like to see some clarifications about these leaked plans before having a propably heated debate about it. Needless to say that adding ideologically driven must-haves to a general grantmaking process which only purpose is to serve the voluntary work on a supposed-to-be-free encyclopedia would leave a disturbing impression on many people. best regards Jens Best 2015-01-03 15:46 GMT+01:00 Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com: There are
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Ethically, I would rather defer a proposal, such as one for Wiki Loves Pride or a more general diversity event, until the restriction is lifted. There is too much pointless political flim flam already in our Wikimedia community without masking events as GenderGap for the sake of faking metrics. Fae On 3 Jan 2015 15:50, Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com wrote: ..and I am hoping to see lots of gendergap paint On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 4:42 PM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: I hoped that after the discussions on the wiki loves monuments mailing list, someone of the grant team would have proactively informed the wider community in an earlier stage. I hope that the fact they did not do this, means they are reconsidering the way this campaign is shaped. As indicated before, this 'shutdown' (or focus) of Individual Engagement Grants as well as Project and Event Grants was confirmed https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007600.html by Alex Wang. She referred in that email to this onwiki description https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire_Grants_%E2%80%93_Gender_gap_campaign . I should also emphasize that Alex indicated that they don't expect this to impact WLM-related grants (because they expect teams to request funding much later in the process https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007603.html - not before june/july, an assumption I disagree with), and she also suggested the closing was not as hard as it sounds, as she's willing to discuss problems (she emphasized this in her email). I don't want to reiterate all discussions about whether gendergap is the problem or a symptom (we have many gaps in our community, of which the gender gap is the most visible and easiest to measure), but I do feel uncomfortable with this campaign. I have asked around a bit in the past week and only received negative feedback on the campaign - 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. 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. What I also fear, is that people will just give their request a tiny bit of 'gendergap'-paint, make up some way how they help reduce it (which is basically true for almost any outreach event aiming at a group with less than 90% men - i.e. almost any group aside from Wikipedia or catholic priests). I'm confident that most of our outreach projects, including Wiki Loves Monuments, could claim to reach relatively more women than the editor population contains. But I am very unhappy if we start distributing grants on such shaky grounds - those projects often are much stronger in general editor retention, which happens to be relatively more women. The focus of the projects would be unnaturally shifted in the grant request compared to the actual activities. Again, I hope that the decision makers involved here will reconsider the way this has been shaped, and frame it more in a positive way, focusing on supporting efforts in a thematic direction, rather than discouraging other thematic directions. And as I have said elsewhere: I would be similarly against this, with any other theme - I wouldn't be able to stand the idea to focus entirely on photo-events only for three months... Best, Lodewijk On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 3:59 PM, Jens Best jens.b...@wikimedia.de wrote: Hi all, I think some clarification is needed by people who are in charge for the grantmaking process. There is a difference between shutting down the grantmaking process (PEG) and (IEG) for three full months and adding a voluntary gendergap theme to a project to get better funding chances. So I really would like to see some clarifications about these leaked plans before having a propably heated debate about it. Needless to say that adding ideologically driven must-haves to a general grantmaking process which only purpose is to serve the voluntary work on a supposed-to-be-free encyclopedia would leave a disturbing impression on many people. best regards Jens Best 2015-01-03 15:46 GMT+01:00 Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com: There are multiple ways in how to define the Gendergap, in this case it is about female participation. I do think it is a problem that the number of female participants is dramatically lower than those of male contributors, but still this does not give
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Teemu, Of course! Not only that, but I think that an internal survey already shows that WLM attracts a higher percentage of female contributors than any other project that measured it. Don't assume by the subject heading of this thread that any WLM project is being shut down. In fact, nothing is being shut down. Jane On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 6:03 PM, Leinonen Teemu teemu.leino...@aalto.fi wrote: Hei, 5 cents: would it make a difference if the Wiki Loves Monuments / Art project plans (and others) will explicitly promise that, for instance, the gender (f/m) balance of the participants (n 500) will be 40/60 and +50% of them will be new editors? This would be meet the strategic objectives. -Teemu On Sat Jan 03 2015 05:27:47 GMT-0500 (COT), Romaine Wiki wrote: Hi all, Some disturbing news entered my mailbox the past days. The grant making team is going to shut down the grantmaking process for Project and Event Grants (PEG) and Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) for three full months! They have decided that they want to focus only on a specific strategic priority: the gender gap, and that all other good projects are refused for 3 months (February-April). Having more attention to a strategic priority is fine to me. Having more attention to the problem of the gender gap, sounds good to me as such, we can use much more projects and content in those areas. But that does not mean that many many volunteers who are organizing other projects should become the victim of other projects. This is a negative signal to all those volunteers who are currently working on project plans to be submitted in February, March and April. Good projects to be ignored, just because the WMF think those are less important. They say this is a positive campaign, but this sounds as a negative campaign to me. This discourages many volunteers in doing projects. And even worse: this is only to be generally announced 2 weeks before that period of shutting down starts! (this sounds like a joke, sadly it isn't) To organize a good project volunteers (yes, we are still unpaid! and organize these projects in our spare time!) we need the time to communicate well with all our partners and sponsors, and need the time to come up with a good project plan with a stable basis. Rushing a project in just a couple of weeks time is very unpleasant and does not help in getting a good quality project. And announcing it two weeks before the period indicates that organizers aren't taken seriously (enough). For example, we are currently planning to organize Wiki Loves Monuments in 2015 again, the world wide contest to have a better documentation and better display of all the cultural monuments worldwide, recognised as largest photo contest in the world by Guinness World Records. We are currently working on forming a team and want to have a good stable plan to be submitted within some weeks, but now we need to rush. And yes we need to start in January/February or it will be too late to organize it properly. Also all the national teams of Wiki Loves Monuments, the international team recommend all the national teams to start in January/February, to have a proper organisation together with various local partners and sponsors, but now all these teams are delayed for three months. And a personal project of mine in Belgium, I am planning to organize Wiki Loves Art in Belgium, together with various partners and sponsors. We intent to start in February, but now have to rush to get such done. By the way: did you know there is a Belgium Gap? Belgian subjects are relatively less and worse described on the various Wikipedias. This shutting down results in: * Discouraging many volunteers who are planning to submit good project proposals. * Having volunteers rushed with project plans, which lowers the quality of the plans. * Having volunteers being late and delayed with projects, for no good reason. Grantmaking is intented to support the communities, not frustrating them. WMF: stop this negative campaign! And for all project teams who want to organize a gender gap project: great you organize this, it is very very welcome! But I like to make a suggestion: submit the proposal on the first day after the shutting down period to give a strong signal to WMF that shutting down is a bad idea. It is time for a new strategic priority: closing the Community Gap. That is the gap between WMF and the local communities worldwide. It is not new, it exists for many years already. (It resulted also in the drama of the situation around the Mediaviewer in 2014, the drama with the Visual Editor in 2013, etc. in what WMF didn't sense well the community.) (Maybe the gap is less between WMF and the English speaking part of the world, but the world is larger. We have many people around the world who are speak a
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Hei, 5 cents: would it make a difference if the Wiki Loves Monuments / Art project plans (and others) will explicitly promise that, for instance, the gender (f/m) balance of the participants (n 500) will be 40/60 and +50% of them will be new editors? This would be meet the strategic objectives. -Teemu On Sat Jan 03 2015 05:27:47 GMT-0500 (COT), Romaine Wiki wrote: Hi all, Some disturbing news entered my mailbox the past days. The grant making team is going to shut down the grantmaking process for Project and Event Grants (PEG) and Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) for three full months! They have decided that they want to focus only on a specific strategic priority: the gender gap, and that all other good projects are refused for 3 months (February-April). Having more attention to a strategic priority is fine to me. Having more attention to the problem of the gender gap, sounds good to me as such, we can use much more projects and content in those areas. But that does not mean that many many volunteers who are organizing other projects should become the victim of other projects. This is a negative signal to all those volunteers who are currently working on project plans to be submitted in February, March and April. Good projects to be ignored, just because the WMF think those are less important. They say this is a positive campaign, but this sounds as a negative campaign to me. This discourages many volunteers in doing projects. And even worse: this is only to be generally announced 2 weeks before that period of shutting down starts! (this sounds like a joke, sadly it isn't) To organize a good project volunteers (yes, we are still unpaid! and organize these projects in our spare time!) we need the time to communicate well with all our partners and sponsors, and need the time to come up with a good project plan with a stable basis. Rushing a project in just a couple of weeks time is very unpleasant and does not help in getting a good quality project. And announcing it two weeks before the period indicates that organizers aren't taken seriously (enough). For example, we are currently planning to organize Wiki Loves Monuments in 2015 again, the world wide contest to have a better documentation and better display of all the cultural monuments worldwide, recognised as largest photo contest in the world by Guinness World Records. We are currently working on forming a team and want to have a good stable plan to be submitted within some weeks, but now we need to rush. And yes we need to start in January/February or it will be too late to organize it properly. Also all the national teams of Wiki Loves Monuments, the international team recommend all the national teams to start in January/February, to have a proper organisation together with various local partners and sponsors, but now all these teams are delayed for three months. And a personal project of mine in Belgium, I am planning to organize Wiki Loves Art in Belgium, together with various partners and sponsors. We intent to start in February, but now have to rush to get such done. By the way: did you know there is a Belgium Gap? Belgian subjects are relatively less and worse described on the various Wikipedias. This shutting down results in: * Discouraging many volunteers who are planning to submit good project proposals. * Having volunteers rushed with project plans, which lowers the quality of the plans. * Having volunteers being late and delayed with projects, for no good reason. Grantmaking is intented to support the communities, not frustrating them. WMF: stop this negative campaign! And for all project teams who want to organize a gender gap project: great you organize this, it is very very welcome! But I like to make a suggestion: submit the proposal on the first day after the shutting down period to give a strong signal to WMF that shutting down is a bad idea. It is time for a new strategic priority: closing the Community Gap. That is the gap between WMF and the local communities worldwide. It is not new, it exists for many years already. (It resulted also in the drama of the situation around the Mediaviewer in 2014, the drama with the Visual Editor in 2013, etc. in what WMF didn't sense well the community.) (Maybe the gap is less between WMF and the English speaking part of the world, but the world is larger. We have many people around the world who are speak a different language. WMF is not sensing the worldwide community well enough.) Finally we should do more about this Community Gap. For those celebrating: I wish you a happy new year with great projects that make every single human being freely share in the sum of all human knowledge!! Romaine ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
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 lodew...@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 chriskeatingw...@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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
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 chriskeatingw...@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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Nope. Whether or not lots and lots of female-related content is generated and by whom, the participation factor is crucial. Without the women, there is no female perspective, period. And as far as gender measurement goes, even if you count all the ones who declined to specify their gender, the Dutch Wikipedia still comes up as less than 10% female. On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 5:54 PM, Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com wrote: It is perfectly defined, it only matters which point of view you take. The Wikimedia movement consists out of people, projects and content. There is less content about so-called female topics. There seem to be less projects that specifically cover those so-called female topics. And there are less female contributors. All three of these views are related with each other. And as I sometimes write about those so-called female topics, I notice it is more difficult to write neutral about those topics and therefore harder to write about. Further, I must say that I personally do not feel any need to disclose my gender, even while a lot of you have met me. Maybe it is different on some wikis, but generally I have the impression that many users do not want to disclose it either. So the percentage is less well defined, but I do think the m/f spread is far from balanced. But something what seems not to be defined is what those so-called female topics exactly are. And second, how large these subjects combined are in the outside world, because wanting them to be 50-50 is not fair if the subjects are 20-80 spread. Or maybe there are gender neutral topics also. So yes, there are certainly things that are not defined, but what the gendergap is, seems to be defined. Romaine 2015-01-03 16:48 GMT+01:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com: I find it interesting to discover via this conversation that it has not been defined yet! On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 4:12 PM, Bence Damokos bdamo...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 3:33 PM, Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com wrote: Nope. Gendergap is about the gap in female participation, not in female-related topics. I would say it is both, but in either case this would be important to define if that is the criteria on which to solicit proposals. (The vision of Wikimedia is to share the sum of all human knowledge, so from that standpoint the end is to close the gap in coverage, diversity in the editorship is a very important means to it.) In any case, experimentation with the grants programme is probably for the benefit of the community, but so is reliability and predictability. If the original assumptions are clear, announcing a major policy change for the grants programme only with 3 weeks of planned lead time seems to go againts those latter expectations unfortunately. Best regards, Bence ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
It is perfectly defined, it only matters which point of view you take. The Wikimedia movement consists out of people, projects and content. There is less content about so-called female topics. There seem to be less projects that specifically cover those so-called female topics. And there are less female contributors. All three of these views are related with each other. And as I sometimes write about those so-called female topics, I notice it is more difficult to write neutral about those topics and therefore harder to write about. Further, I must say that I personally do not feel any need to disclose my gender, even while a lot of you have met me. Maybe it is different on some wikis, but generally I have the impression that many users do not want to disclose it either. So the percentage is less well defined, but I do think the m/f spread is far from balanced. But something what seems not to be defined is what those so-called female topics exactly are. And second, how large these subjects combined are in the outside world, because wanting them to be 50-50 is not fair if the subjects are 20-80 spread. Or maybe there are gender neutral topics also. So yes, there are certainly things that are not defined, but what the gendergap is, seems to be defined. Romaine 2015-01-03 16:48 GMT+01:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com: I find it interesting to discover via this conversation that it has not been defined yet! On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 4:12 PM, Bence Damokos bdamo...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 3:33 PM, Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com wrote: Nope. Gendergap is about the gap in female participation, not in female-related topics. I would say it is both, but in either case this would be important to define if that is the criteria on which to solicit proposals. (The vision of Wikimedia is to share the sum of all human knowledge, so from that standpoint the end is to close the gap in coverage, diversity in the editorship is a very important means to it.) In any case, experimentation with the grants programme is probably for the benefit of the community, but so is reliability and predictability. If the original assumptions are clear, announcing a major policy change for the grants programme only with 3 weeks of planned lead time seems to go againts those latter expectations unfortunately. Best regards, Bence ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Hi Jane, Read! https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007600.html From February 1-April 30, PEG will only accept proposals as part of the gender gap campaign, with the exception for urgent requests. This means regular projects will not be accepted. That is effectively shutting the grantmaking down. Of course we will not let WLM to be shut down. But this grantmaking shutting down is very demotivating and discouraging, for many organisers. This is also counter productive in solving the gender gap problem. Romaine 2015-01-03 18:10 GMT+01:00 Jane Darnell jane...@gmail.com: Teemu, Of course! Not only that, but I think that an internal survey already shows that WLM attracts a higher percentage of female contributors than any other project that measured it. Don't assume by the subject heading of this thread that any WLM project is being shut down. In fact, nothing is being shut down. Jane On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 6:03 PM, Leinonen Teemu teemu.leino...@aalto.fi wrote: Hei, 5 cents: would it make a difference if the Wiki Loves Monuments / Art project plans (and others) will explicitly promise that, for instance, the gender (f/m) balance of the participants (n 500) will be 40/60 and +50% of them will be new editors? This would be meet the strategic objectives. -Teemu On Sat Jan 03 2015 05:27:47 GMT-0500 (COT), Romaine Wiki wrote: Hi all, Some disturbing news entered my mailbox the past days. The grant making team is going to shut down the grantmaking process for Project and Event Grants (PEG) and Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) for three full months! They have decided that they want to focus only on a specific strategic priority: the gender gap, and that all other good projects are refused for 3 months (February-April). Having more attention to a strategic priority is fine to me. Having more attention to the problem of the gender gap, sounds good to me as such, we can use much more projects and content in those areas. But that does not mean that many many volunteers who are organizing other projects should become the victim of other projects. This is a negative signal to all those volunteers who are currently working on project plans to be submitted in February, March and April. Good projects to be ignored, just because the WMF think those are less important. They say this is a positive campaign, but this sounds as a negative campaign to me. This discourages many volunteers in doing projects. And even worse: this is only to be generally announced 2 weeks before that period of shutting down starts! (this sounds like a joke, sadly it isn't) To organize a good project volunteers (yes, we are still unpaid! and organize these projects in our spare time!) we need the time to communicate well with all our partners and sponsors, and need the time to come up with a good project plan with a stable basis. Rushing a project in just a couple of weeks time is very unpleasant and does not help in getting a good quality project. And announcing it two weeks before the period indicates that organizers aren't taken seriously (enough). For example, we are currently planning to organize Wiki Loves Monuments in 2015 again, the world wide contest to have a better documentation and better display of all the cultural monuments worldwide, recognised as largest photo contest in the world by Guinness World Records. We are currently working on forming a team and want to have a good stable plan to be submitted within some weeks, but now we need to rush. And yes we need to start in January/February or it will be too late to organize it properly. Also all the national teams of Wiki Loves Monuments, the international team recommend all the national teams to start in January/February, to have a proper organisation together with various local partners and sponsors, but now all these teams are delayed for three months. And a personal project of mine in Belgium, I am planning to organize Wiki Loves Art in Belgium, together with various partners and sponsors. We intent to start in February, but now have to rush to get such done. By the way: did you know there is a Belgium Gap? Belgian subjects are relatively less and worse described on the various Wikipedias. This shutting down results in: * Discouraging many volunteers who are planning to submit good project proposals. * Having volunteers rushed with project plans, which lowers the quality of the plans. * Having volunteers being late and delayed with projects, for no good reason. Grantmaking is intented to support the communities, not frustrating them. WMF: stop this negative campaign! And for all project teams who want to organize a gender gap project: great you organize this,
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Thanks Lila! On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 7:35 PM, Lila Tretikov l...@wikimedia.org wrote: 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 lodew...@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 chriskeatingw...@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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
I hate to fall in repetition of the discussion we had already on the wiki loves monuments mailing list about this but: - the problems we identified are far more general than Wiki Loves Monuments. Even if WLM is fully unaffected, our points stand because that would be because of timing and not because it works so well. - One of the learning lessons in 2013 for the international team (I was part of that team), was that the grant request was finalized way too late. The request dragged on too long for many reasons, and was already started behind schedule. If it were up to me, the 2015 team would already make the request this month anyway. - Most teams indeed seem to either have it in an Annual Plan Grant, or are very late in requesting. Also this is something we learn from each time that it is, in fact, too late. I would definitely not encourage teams to delay requesting if they already know what they have to request (this is different if they are still chasing sponsors etc). Most of the other work for organizing is already due in June-Aug, so it would be smart to be finished with the finances by then. It allows to focus on what matters most during that time. Just to summarize from the other threat. Best, Lodewijk On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 8:53 PM, Ilario Valdelli valde...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Romaine, probably it's my feeling but a lot of countries apply for a grant for WLM very late (in general during summer). So it cannot be demotivating for WLM. I do not understand the impact of the project to assign the first three months of 2015 to a specific topic with the normal period of application for the national teams. The same international team of 2013 submitted the request in June. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Wiki_Loves_ Monuments_international_team/2013_coordination Regards On 03.01.2015 20:01, Romaine Wiki wrote: Hi Jane, Read! https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/ 2014-December/007600.html From February 1-April 30, PEG will only accept proposals as part of the gender gap campaign, with the exception for urgent requests. This means regular projects will not be accepted. That is effectively shutting the grantmaking down. Of course we will not let WLM to be shut down. But this grantmaking shutting down is very demotivating and discouraging, for many organisers. This is also counter productive in solving the gender gap problem. Romaine -- Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera Switzerland - 8008 Zürich Tel: +41764821371 http://www.wikimedia.ch ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Hi Ilario, As said before, that certain grant requests are submitted late, it doesn't mean it is a good idea. I was also not speaking about WLM organizers alone, but about all organizers in general. Shutting down the grantmaking for them is highly demotivating. Also when it does not effect them directly. It is effectively shutting down all projects that should start or are to be started in these three months. The Grants page says https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start : Supporting mission-allied people and organizations around the world. This is not supporting, but demotivating, demolishing, discouraging, and frustrating the organizing volunteers. Shutting down the grantmaking gives a strong negative signal to every organiser. Your project is not important enough for the movement, that is what this campaign says. This is campaign is not benefiting the community, it is damaging it and it is damaging the trust of the community in WMF. It is enlarging the Community Gap. Romaine 2015-01-03 20:53 GMT+01:00 Ilario Valdelli valde...@gmail.com: Hi Romaine, probably it's my feeling but a lot of countries apply for a grant for WLM very late (in general during summer). So it cannot be demotivating for WLM. I do not understand the impact of the project to assign the first three months of 2015 to a specific topic with the normal period of application for the national teams. The same international team of 2013 submitted the request in June. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Wiki_Loves_ Monuments_international_team/2013_coordination Regards On 03.01.2015 20:01, Romaine Wiki wrote: Hi Jane, Read! https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/ 2014-December/007600.html From February 1-April 30, PEG will only accept proposals as part of the gender gap campaign, with the exception for urgent requests. This means regular projects will not be accepted. That is effectively shutting the grantmaking down. Of course we will not let WLM to be shut down. But this grantmaking shutting down is very demotivating and discouraging, for many organisers. This is also counter productive in solving the gender gap problem. Romaine -- Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera Switzerland - 8008 Zürich Tel: +41764821371 http://www.wikimedia.ch ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Le 03/01/2015 14:58, Jane Darnell a écrit : As a member of the IEG committee I am happy to say that there is no need to panic. WLM is highly successful project and no one is talking about shutting it down, or any other project for that matter. The current campaign is scheduled to be one of hopefully many, targeted at the community in order to generate themed proposals. The current growth of highly diverse and inspirational proposals takes increasingly more energy to manage, judge, and maintain. By introducing a three-month long theme, it is hoped that the following will occur: 1) Grant committee members in their voluntary role as proposal reviewers and community sponsors will experience less burn-out in managing proposals as their will be more cross pollination per cohort of proposers and their proposals. 2) A targeted campaign to attract proposals will enable easier translation across projects if the target audience can be identified in advance 3) A targeted campaign will attract more volunteer committee members to manage proposals, hopefully attracting local experts in various Wikimedia projects. The Gendergap will be the first theme. I think it's a great idea! How can WLM attract more female participation? Any ideas? No, I have ideas for other good projects, not this one. I think that the capacity by the WMF - and actual action - to switch on and off the grants without debate and even notice depending on such thought and so-called campaign is prejudicial, like the capacity to switch on and off the donations from one country like - say Russia - is prejudicial too. Le 03/01/2015 22:21, Romaine Wiki a écrit : The Grants page says https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start : Supporting mission-allied people and organizations around the world. This is not supporting, but demotivating, demolishing, discouraging, and frustrating the organizing volunteers. More simply, I would say that supporting does not mean governing or piloting. All things considered, Sue Gardner was eventually wrong. Give the fundraising and the grantmaking back to the chapters. -- Mathias Damour User:Astirmays ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Yes, considering that WLM mailing list has less subscribers than this one, I suppose that it's better to repeat here this question. The discussion is now out of that thread because it has opened a new one here. This may be helpful for people who do not understand the root cause of this discussion. Regards On 03.01.2015 21:19, Lodewijk wrote: I hate to fall in repetition of the discussion we had already on the wiki loves monuments mailing list about this but: - the problems we identified are far more general than Wiki Loves Monuments. Even if WLM is fully unaffected, our points stand because that would be because of timing and not because it works so well. - One of the learning lessons in 2013 for the international team (I was part of that team), was that the grant request was finalized way too late. The request dragged on too long for many reasons, and was already started behind schedule. If it were up to me, the 2015 team would already make the request this month anyway. - Most teams indeed seem to either have it in an Annual Plan Grant, or are very late in requesting. Also this is something we learn from each time that it is, in fact, too late. I would definitely not encourage teams to delay requesting if they already know what they have to request (this is different if they are still chasing sponsors etc). Most of the other work for organizing is already due in June-Aug, so it would be smart to be finished with the finances by then. It allows to focus on what matters most during that time. Just to summarize from the other threat. Best, Lodewijk -- Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera Switzerland - 8008 Zürich Tel: +41764821371 http://www.wikimedia.ch ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] The Signpost -- Volume 10, Issue -1 -- 31 December 2014
One article was unfortunately omitted from the previous email notification to this list. *The next big step for Wikidata—forming a hub for researchers* focuses on a grant application to the EU that would expand Wikidata's scope by developing it as a science hub. The proposal, supported by more than 25 volunteers and half a dozen European institutions as project partners, aims to create a virtual research environment (VRE) that will enhance the project's capacity for freely sharing scientific data. It is located at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-12-31/News_and_notes . Thank you for your time. https://www.facebook.com/wikisignpost / https://twitter.com/wikisignpost -- Wikipedia Signpost Staff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 4:10 PM, Wikipedia Signpost wikipediasignp...@gmail.com wrote: Recent research: Wikipedia in higher education; gender-driven talk page conflicts; disease forecasting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-12-31/Recent_research Featured content: A bit fruity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-12-31/Featured_content In the media: Study tour controversy; class tackles the gender gap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-12-31/In_the_media Traffic report: Surfin' the Yuletide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-12-31/Traffic_report Op-ed: My issues with the Wiki Education Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-12-31/Op-ed Single page view http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signpost/Single PDF version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-12-31 https://www.facebook.com/wikisignpost / https://twitter.com/wikisignpost -- Wikipedia Signpost Staff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l -- Wikipedia Signpost Staff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Hi Romaine, probably it's my feeling but a lot of countries apply for a grant for WLM very late (in general during summer). So it cannot be demotivating for WLM. I do not understand the impact of the project to assign the first three months of 2015 to a specific topic with the normal period of application for the national teams. The same international team of 2013 submitted the request in June. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_international_team/2013_coordination Regards On 03.01.2015 20:01, Romaine Wiki wrote: Hi Jane, Read! https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikilovesmonuments/2014-December/007600.html From February 1-April 30, PEG will only accept proposals as part of the gender gap campaign, with the exception for urgent requests. This means regular projects will not be accepted. That is effectively shutting the grantmaking down. Of course we will not let WLM to be shut down. But this grantmaking shutting down is very demotivating and discouraging, for many organisers. This is also counter productive in solving the gender gap problem. Romaine -- Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera Switzerland - 8008 Zürich Tel: +41764821371 http://www.wikimedia.ch ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Allow me to throw in some perspective here, since I think I stand somewhere between midway and the opposite end of the spectrum vis-à-vis this discussion. Wiadomość napisana przez Romaine Wiki romaine.w...@gmail.com w dniu 4 sty 2015, o godz. 05:21: Hi Ilario, As said before, that certain grant requests are submitted late, it doesn't mean it is a good idea. I was also not speaking about WLM organizers alone, but about all organizers in general. Shutting down the grantmaking for them is highly demotivating. Also when it does not effect them directly. Wikimedia Philippines is still planning its 2015 annual plan, so for us, we don’t have a lot to lose from grantmaking opportunities lost due to the Grantmaking team’s focus on the gender gap. And while I disagree with the method by which it was done—that we were only informed three weeks in advance—I’m inclined to believe that this makes affiliates more innovative with their programs. If it means securing funding through doing programs that address the gender gap, then so be it if means expanding our skill set and helping woman participation in the process. In addition, we’re exaggerating the impact of the gender gap focus here: note that Alex’s announcement said that they will focus on other grants either before February 1 or after April 30. Them not accepting requests during that window need not mean that you can’t have a grant request already sitting pretty on Meta waiting for consideration; I think they were wrong in wording it, but I’m disinclined to believe that they will simply shoot requests down just because it fell during that window. It is effectively shutting down all projects that should start or are to be started in these three months. The Grants page says https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start : Supporting mission-allied people and organizations around the world. This is not supporting, but demotivating, demolishing, discouraging, and frustrating the organizing volunteers. Shutting down the grantmaking gives a strong negative signal to every organiser. Your project is not important enough for the movement, that is what this campaign says. I disagree. There’s nothing in the grant process that prevents you from keeping the proposal as a draft until the window lapses, and projects need not be derailed just because funding can’t be secured between February 1 and April 30. While I agree that it’s a big inconvenience for affiliates to see their calendars pushed back because they can’t get funding, I am also disinclined to believe that the signal this sends is as strong as you think it is. I’ve organized projects for WMPH, and ultimately since we’re dependent on the Foundation for our funding, we’ve had to find ways to meet halfway with respect to when projects ought to be implemented. For me, so long as the project is implemented, that’s fine with me regardless of when the project was implemented. The important thing here is that we’re forwarding the movement nonetheless. Thanks, Josh JAMES JOSHUA G. LIM Bachelor of Arts in Political Science Class of 2013, Ateneo de Manila University Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines jamesjoshua...@yahoo.com mailto:jamesjoshua...@yahoo.com | +63 (915) 321-7582 Facebook/Twitter: akiestar | Wikimedia: Sky Harbor http://about.me/josh.lim http://about.me/josh.lim ___ 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-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
