Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Hi Sydney, I understand your perspective, but I also understand the where is the carrot? question. I would actively support the campaign if it had been run as one of stating that for X weeks or months that the WMF grants system would give priority to gendergap related proposals and that we would have other themes during the year. This is effectively what has been said is happening, it just has been expressed as a ban against non-gendergap proposals. Folks would understand if their proposal then got responses such as thank you, with the priority on gendergap we have scheduled your excellent WLM/Belgium/LGBT Pride proposal for a review in 2 months time. As a founder of a user group and once a trustee of a chapter, I would be concerned if this same method was applied to my most loved project areas for a month or two, unless the volunteer group were notified well in advance so that we could work with the grants team with our network of contacts and communication channels to ensure a healthy mix of proposals in time for the limited window available. A community changing and high impact proposal might take up to a year to assemble a team of volunteers and have a strong enough vision to put a detailed proposal together. A month or even 3 months notice puts a huge amount of stress on the handful of unpaid volunteers prepared to put in the hard work that these proposals take, not because the system is overly bureaucratic, but because we are so worried about doing the right thing, doing it well and keepinhg our network of volunteers on-board with plans and ready to use the grant to maximum effect when it arrives. Sadly burn-out remains a major issue for our most active volunteers and we should take care to set up our systems to be flexible and low stress. I hope the experiment is successful and there are some interesting gendergap proposals that have significant measurable outcomes on our projects, in terms of active users and content creation. At the same time I hope that folks responsible for the grants process will adapt and improve to find a more harmonious positive approach to prioritization; i.e. lots of easy to understand carrots which are not too tricky to reach for. Fae On 9 January 2015 at 15:34, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote: It appears to me that you are entirely missing the actual nature of the problem and the reason for having a campaign targeted at the gender gap. The *problem* is that there have been a suboptimal number of grant requests for funds to address the gender gap even though it a listed priority of the WMF. The purpose of the campaign is to invite requests for funding, have extra support available if people need mentoring or assistance of other kinds. To do this campaign well, the WMF staff needs to refocus the time of people toward this endeavor. A wonderful response from people reading about this campaign would be to ask: what can I do to help bring in high quality grant requests? Those of you who are familiar with making grant requests or using the IdeaLab, offer to help people who are newer to the process. Those of you who are developers and see a way to improve an idea with technology, step in and make suggestion. Over the past 3-4 years all around the world people have holding conferences and discussing the gender gap. Now is the time to expand on the work that has been done in these conference. Help spread the word. Assist with translations to help some who is less comfortable writing in English bring there ideas to meta. The point of this targeted campaign is far more than reserving a specific amount of dollars for the gender gap issue. The biggest obstacle to success will be the lack of human resources to refine and execute the projects. Therefore is the reason that people and organizations are being asked to set aside other projects in order to help address this vital area of concern. I hope everyone reading this email will do at least one small thing to help. Warm regards, Sydney On Jan 8, 2015 11:04 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann derhoe...@gmx.net wrote: -- fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae ___ 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
Please try not to split threads. ___ 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's not denying attention or funds. It's focusing attention and funds on a badly needed area for 3 months out of the year, and the rest of the projects get the full 9 months. Inviting people to focus their proposals on the gender gap (which, btw, doesn't need scare quotes, as I assure you it's real), has the potential to make a far bigger impact than the past 4-5 years of talking about it have. This sounds suspiciously like white people whining about why there's no white history month when the shortest month of the year is allocated to black history month. Just some food for thought. On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 11:09 AM, Bjoern Hoehrmann derhoe...@gmx.net wrote: * Sydney Poore wrote: It appears to me that you are entirely missing the actual nature of the problem and the reason for having a campaign targeted at the gender gap. The *problem* is that there have been a suboptimal number of grant requests for funds to address the gender gap even though it a listed priority of the WMF. Denying attention and funds to unrelated projects is not an appropriate way to encourage people interested in gender gap to request funds. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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
Identifying priority areas and directing resources (funds and human) toward them is a non-controversial way to achieve goals. This is exactly what is happening with this targeted campaign. The grants team has made it clear that during this round it intends to work with people and organizations that have urgent time sensitive needs. It is a legitimate to question whether it makes sense to keep having an ongoing open call for grant proposals instead of a period for targeted requests when the top priorities of the wikimedia movement are not being addressed with the current process. That this particular targeted campaign is not *perfectly executed* does not take this legitimate topic off the table. Sydney Sydney Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 12:09 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann derhoe...@gmx.net wrote: * Sydney Poore wrote: It appears to me that you are entirely missing the actual nature of the problem and the reason for having a campaign targeted at the gender gap. The *problem* is that there have been a suboptimal number of grant requests for funds to address the gender gap even though it a listed priority of the WMF. Denying attention and funds to unrelated projects is not an appropriate way to encourage people interested in gender gap to request funds. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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
My 2 cents? The carrot would be a different approach of the committees in the evaluation and a better consideration of the role of the women. When I said to several women that there will be a session of grants dedicated to the women, the answer has been really positive, I would say that they felt like receiving more consideration. What would be the feeling of a woman if you are sitting in a bus and you offer her your place? Having a softer approach is a big added value and it may be the carrot. Regards On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 5:11 PM, Fæ fae...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Sydney, I understand your perspective, but I also understand the where is the carrot? question. I would actively support the campaign if it had been run as one of stating that for X weeks or months that the WMF grants system would give priority to gendergap related proposals and that we would have other themes during the year. This is effectively what has been said is happening, it just has been expressed as a ban against non-gendergap proposals. Folks would understand if their proposal then got responses such as thank you, with the priority on gendergap we have scheduled your excellent WLM/Belgium/LGBT Pride proposal for a review in 2 months time. As a founder of a user group and once a trustee of a chapter, I would be concerned if this same method was applied to my most loved project areas for a month or two, unless the volunteer group were notified well in advance so that we could work with the grants team with our network of contacts and communication channels to ensure a healthy mix of proposals in time for the limited window available. A community changing and high impact proposal might take up to a year to assemble a team of volunteers and have a strong enough vision to put a detailed proposal together. A month or even 3 months notice puts a huge amount of stress on the handful of unpaid volunteers prepared to put in the hard work that these proposals take, not because the system is overly bureaucratic, but because we are so worried about doing the right thing, doing it well and keepinhg our network of volunteers on-board with plans and ready to use the grant to maximum effect when it arrives. Sadly burn-out remains a major issue for our most active volunteers and we should take care to set up our systems to be flexible and low stress. I hope the experiment is successful and there are some interesting gendergap proposals that have significant measurable outcomes on our projects, in terms of active users and content creation. At the same time I hope that folks responsible for the grants process will adapt and improve to find a more harmonious positive approach to prioritization; i.e. lots of easy to understand carrots which are not too tricky to reach for. Fae On 9 January 2015 at 15:34, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote: It appears to me that you are entirely missing the actual nature of the problem and the reason for having a campaign targeted at the gender gap. The *problem* is that there have been a suboptimal number of grant requests for funds to address the gender gap even though it a listed priority of the WMF. The purpose of the campaign is to invite requests for funding, have extra support available if people need mentoring or assistance of other kinds. To do this campaign well, the WMF staff needs to refocus the time of people toward this endeavor. A wonderful response from people reading about this campaign would be to ask: what can I do to help bring in high quality grant requests? Those of you who are familiar with making grant requests or using the IdeaLab, offer to help people who are newer to the process. Those of you who are developers and see a way to improve an idea with technology, step in and make suggestion. Over the past 3-4 years all around the world people have holding conferences and discussing the gender gap. Now is the time to expand on the work that has been done in these conference. Help spread the word. Assist with translations to help some who is less comfortable writing in English bring there ideas to meta. The point of this targeted campaign is far more than reserving a specific amount of dollars for the gender gap issue. The biggest obstacle to success will be the lack of human resources to refine and execute the projects. Therefore is the reason that people and organizations are being asked to set aside other projects in order to help address this vital area of concern. I hope everyone reading this email will do at least one small thing to help. Warm regards, Sydney On Jan 8, 2015 11:04 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann derhoe...@gmx.net wrote: -- fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
* Sydney Poore wrote: It appears to me that you are entirely missing the actual nature of the problem and the reason for having a campaign targeted at the gender gap. The *problem* is that there have been a suboptimal number of grant requests for funds to address the gender gap even though it a listed priority of the WMF. Denying attention and funds to unrelated projects is not an appropriate way to encourage people interested in gender gap to request funds. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
The real problem is that there have been conferences for 3 or 4 years all around the world but (a) no new empirical work on the actual size of the gender gap; and (b) whether that is changing over time; and (c) the underlying reasons for that gap; and (d) whether any past conference, program, or initiative has moved the needle even a whit. Instead of hiring a couple statistics people and doing serious surveying and analysis to figure out what truly needs to be done, WMF is delighted to throw money at the problem. Come one, come all, with your grant pitches! We've got the money, hurrah! Cart before horse. Tim Davenport Carrite on WP Corvallis, OR ===old message=== Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2015 10:34:45 -0500 From: Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason Message-ID: caa6zo2q-_zbofzzfctf3ajxzy-5mzqmjbf3oc+gvuay-ra8...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 It appears to me that you are entirely missing the actual nature of the problem and the reason for having a campaign targeted at the gender gap. The *problem* is that there have been a suboptimal number of grant requests for funds to address the gender gap even though it a listed priority of the WMF. The purpose of the campaign is to invite requests for funding, have extra support available if people need mentoring or assistance of other kinds. To do this campaign well, the WMF staff needs to refocus the time of people toward this endeavor. A wonderful response from people reading about this campaign would be to ask: what can I do to help bring in high quality grant requests? Those of you who are familiar with making grant requests or using the IdeaLab, offer to help people who are newer to the process. Those of you who are developers and see a way to improve an idea with technology, step in and make suggestion. Over the past 3-4 years all around the world people have holding conferences and discussing the gender gap. Now is the time to expand on the work that has been done in these conference. Help spread the word. Assist with translations to help some who is less comfortable writing in English bring there ideas to meta. The point of this targeted campaign is far more than reserving a specific amount of dollars for the gender gap issue. The biggest obstacle to success will be the lack of human resources to refine and execute the projects. Therefore is the reason that people and organizations are being asked to set aside other projects in order to help address this vital area of concern. I hope everyone reading this email will do at least one small thing to help. Warm regards, Sydney ___ 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 appears to me that you are entirely missing the actual nature of the problem and the reason for having a campaign targeted at the gender gap. The *problem* is that there have been a suboptimal number of grant requests for funds to address the gender gap even though it a listed priority of the WMF. The purpose of the campaign is to invite requests for funding, have extra support available if people need mentoring or assistance of other kinds. To do this campaign well, the WMF staff needs to refocus the time of people toward this endeavor. A wonderful response from people reading about this campaign would be to ask: what can I do to help bring in high quality grant requests? Those of you who are familiar with making grant requests or using the IdeaLab, offer to help people who are newer to the process. Those of you who are developers and see a way to improve an idea with technology, step in and make suggestion. Over the past 3-4 years all around the world people have holding conferences and discussing the gender gap. Now is the time to expand on the work that has been done in these conference. Help spread the word. Assist with translations to help some who is less comfortable writing in English bring there ideas to meta. The point of this targeted campaign is far more than reserving a specific amount of dollars for the gender gap issue. The biggest obstacle to success will be the lack of human resources to refine and execute the projects. Therefore is the reason that people and organizations are being asked to set aside other projects in order to help address this vital area of concern. I hope everyone reading this email will do at least one small thing to help. Warm regards, Sydney On Jan 8, 2015 11:04 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann derhoe...@gmx.net wrote: * Sydney Poore wrote: It has become pretty obvious that funding the interests/values of existing community members through regular channels is not creating content free of systemic bias in general nor closing the human gender gap. (I say this as someone who has read all types of WMF funding proposals and evaluations of for several years now.) Temporarily doing a 3 month targeted Gender Gap experimental campaign is a modest approach to take in addressing one of the biggest weaknesses of Wikimedia Foundation projects. The reaction of some members of the community was predictable, because it is evident in the majority of previous and current funding requests that increasing the diversity of the larger Wikimedia movement is secondary priority of most existing people and organizations. Proposed projects with a good chance to measurably shrink the gender gap are not being denied adequate funding as far as I can tell. Without actual resource shortages concerning the gender gap topic with respect to grants, be that money or staff time for proposal reviews, what we have here is a solution looking for a problem. We would have a different kind of discussion if we were talking about there is a huge backlog of great gender gap projects in need of funding, but you don't say that it is evident in the *rejection* of requests, you say that's evident in the requests themself. Earlier Siko Bouterse wrote the same, these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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
Siko makes an important point here. If there are too many time sensitive non-theme requests then that would be justification for allocating more resources to the grantmaking team next year. Let's wait and see how the data plays out. Sydney Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 2:55 PM, Siko Bouterse sboute...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 10:59 PM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Actually, the experiment is whether such a campaign would drive more successful grants, as I understand it. It works from the assumption that such grants would have a positive impact. I'm happy to go with that assumption though. I still strongly disagree with this initiative, but especially the way it is executed. I'm glad to hear that all time-sensitive requests can still apply during this period - that would probably be quite a few requests. I'm still in the dark as to why this has to be a three month program (that is a very long period of time to put everything on hold for an experiment) and not just 2-4 weeks. Then you could actually commit to quicker run-through times in the program, etc. Reducing the time frame would reduce the damaging side effect significantly. The campaign itself will only run for a month - in my experience with past open calls for IEG, you really do need more than 2 weeks to get the word out and get new ideas not only started but also developed w/ enough community input that we rely on to assess which grants should move forward. But in addition to the actual campaign itself, we need to bake in enough time to prepare for it beforehand and get funded projects started afterwards. There is significant staff effort behind the scenes for any grantmaking we do, and in my experience even quick pilots take time to prep and wrapup. I'm hearing your concerns loud and clear, still, and agree it will be interesting to see how many truly time-sensitive requests will come up during this period. If the campaign is deemed a success worth repeating and we also find we're over-stretching those involved (staff and volunteers) because many non-theme focused projects need to be concurrently considered (this is a big concern for me, and something we'll be keeping a close eye on), that could be data-driven rationale for resourcing grantmaking differently in next year's annual plan. Siko Lodewijk On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:47 AM, Peter Southwood peter.southw...@telkomsa.net wrote: Did you not see the bit about experimental? Cheers, Peter -Original Message- From: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bjoern Hoehrmann Sent: 06 January 2015 05:48 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason * Siko Bouterse wrote: Why the gender gap? Although we’ve committed to supporting and increasing gender diversity, so far these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale. In the first half of this year, IEG and PEG have spent only 9% of funds on projects aiming to directly impact this gap and less than ? of our grantee project leaders have been women. Without taking time to focus on increasing gender diversity in our content and contributors, this trend is likely to continue. What evidence is there that spending more on gender gap will have any measurable impact on gender gap? I also note that you say projects have not emerged. That sounds like people do not actually have ideas how to impact gender gap with money. Could you identify a couple of projects that would have considerable impact on gender gap but that have been refused funding in the past due to a lack of focus on gen- der gap? -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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 - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2015.0.5577 / Virus Database: 4257/8874 - Release Date: 01/05/15 ___ 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,
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
On 9 January 2015 at 20:31, Bjoern Hoehrmann derhoe...@gmx.net wrote: * Siko Bouterse wrote: We've heard from a number of chapters/groups so far that are excited about the campaign and are wondering how to help. We've heard from only a few people so far about specific time-sensitive requests of concern, and we're really quite open to continue working with anyone who needs support in this regard. I'm not going to engage in broader theoretical discussion on this list about whether or not the gender gap warrants focused attention, and I tend to think experiments and new data can be the best way to help drive more useful future discussions and decisions, but I and my grantmaking colleagues are absolutely on hand to help solve specific, actionable problems! Please keep bringing them to us. Where are you going to engage in a public discussion with the broader community regarding the decision to make the first IEG funding round this year entirely devoted to the gender gap in your role as Head of Individual Engagement Grants, if, as you say, not on this list? The paragraph you quote is basically the answer to the non-querulous parts of the question you ask. After this discussion, the need for this initiative is made clearer. I look forward to the results. - d. ___ 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
* Sydney Poore wrote: It has become pretty obvious that funding the interests/values of existing community members through regular channels is not creating content free of systemic bias in general nor closing the human gender gap. (I say this as someone who has read all types of WMF funding proposals and evaluations of for several years now.) Temporarily doing a 3 month targeted Gender Gap experimental campaign is a modest approach to take in addressing one of the biggest weaknesses of Wikimedia Foundation projects. The reaction of some members of the community was predictable, because it is evident in the majority of previous and current funding requests that increasing the diversity of the larger Wikimedia movement is secondary priority of most existing people and organizations. Proposed projects with a good chance to measurably shrink the gender gap are not being denied adequate funding as far as I can tell. Without actual resource shortages concerning the gender gap topic with respect to grants, be that money or staff time for proposal reviews, what we have here is a solution looking for a problem. We would have a different kind of discussion if we were talking about there is a huge backlog of great gender gap projects in need of funding, but you don't say that it is evident in the *rejection* of requests, you say that's evident in the requests themself. Earlier Siko Bouterse wrote the same, these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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
When I first heard about the idea - I was timid and concerned. However, after reading the responses - I am not sure that everyone is looking at this the right way. My concerns have been addressed, largely by the commitment to accept time-sensitive requests and the description of the idea. It has become increasingly common for grant organizations to encourage applicants to focus their programs on target areas - sometimes that requirement applies to the enter year. However, that generally does not mean you cannot submit your usual programs and ideas - it just challenges you to expand them in a particular focus area. Given the focus on gender gap work in the tech sector, starting with that during a trial run seems logical. It seems to me that this would be a good excuse for events like WLM, Wiki Loves Pride, Wikimedia Conference, and others possibly planning during those months to consider how to increase the focus on the gender gap. Promoting themes that encourage articles about women (we already know there are huge gaps in a lot of professions), Pride could give prizes to great articles about lesbian pioneers, or WLM could promote photos of female inspired or involved architectural projects. With the possible exception of things like specific tech development projects, I think most outreach projects could be challenged to find a way to include addressing the gender gap into their plans for work that would be funded during those months. I'm not sure that this threatens gender gap projects after that period, or threatens projects that are not traditionally seen as gender gap focused. If it does, then we will know it didn't work. But I would encourage folks to think of this as a challenge on how they can help include addressing gender gap in their programming rather than viewing it as an obstacle to funding. Plus, it sounds like the underlying message remains what it always is - if you have an idea and are concerned about the timelines - contact the grantmaking staff or volunteers to talk it through. -greg aka varnent On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 6:33 PM, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote: Values. It is a matter of values. If you believe, as I do, that lack of diversity of Wikimedia projects is seriously compromising the content of the projects then designing a campaign that addresses one or more aspects of this concern is a reasonable top priority even if it displaces other interests/values. It has become pretty obvious that funding the interests/values of existing community members through regular channels is not creating content free of systemic bias in general nor closing the human gender gap. (I say this as someone who has read all types of WMF funding proposals and evaluations of for several years now.) Temporarily doing a 3 month targeted Gender Gap experimental campaign is a modest approach to take in addressing one of the biggest weaknesses of Wikimedia Foundation projects. The reaction of some members of the community was predictable, because it is evident in the majority of previous and current funding requests that increasing the diversity of the larger Wikimedia movement is secondary priority of most existing people and organizations. (Of course there are other wikimedians who also share my passion. I greatly appreciate your work!) My inspiration for continuing to do volunteer work for the wikimedia movement has largely come from the people inside the parent WMF and the WMF Board. Despite the constant criticism from the community, I find the folks employed at the WMF to be hard core believers in the Wikimedia movement and share my value of increasing the diversity of the community and content, and working to eliminate systemic bias in content. So it is not surprising to me that there is disconnect between the community and the WMF staff and Board around supporting current volunteers and recruiting a more diverse community. I appreciate the WMF grant team for doing this type of experimentation, and encourage other WMF affiliated organizations (chapters, thematic organization, and user groups) to not be timid in addressing all types of diversity and systemic bias by narrowing their focus in order to get the best results. I sincerely apologize if some people reading my comment feel under appreciated and become dispirited. But creating a diverse wikimedia movement in order to eliminate entrenched systemic bias is a stronger value for me. I hope that hearing from someone like myself who is inspired by the experiment will change the minds of some people. But even if that doesn't happen it is important to me to speak out in support of the Inspire Gender Gap campaign and the staff volunteers who share my vision of collecting and disseminating free content to everyone in the world. Warm regards to all people everywhere in the wikimedia movement! Sydney Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration On Sat,
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Values. It is a matter of values. If you believe, as I do, that lack of diversity of Wikimedia projects is seriously compromising the content of the projects then designing a campaign that addresses one or more aspects of this concern is a reasonable top priority even if it displaces other interests/values. It has become pretty obvious that funding the interests/values of existing community members through regular channels is not creating content free of systemic bias in general nor closing the human gender gap. (I say this as someone who has read all types of WMF funding proposals and evaluations of for several years now.) Temporarily doing a 3 month targeted Gender Gap experimental campaign is a modest approach to take in addressing one of the biggest weaknesses of Wikimedia Foundation projects. The reaction of some members of the community was predictable, because it is evident in the majority of previous and current funding requests that increasing the diversity of the larger Wikimedia movement is secondary priority of most existing people and organizations. (Of course there are other wikimedians who also share my passion. I greatly appreciate your work!) My inspiration for continuing to do volunteer work for the wikimedia movement has largely come from the people inside the parent WMF and the WMF Board. Despite the constant criticism from the community, I find the folks employed at the WMF to be hard core believers in the Wikimedia movement and share my value of increasing the diversity of the community and content, and working to eliminate systemic bias in content. So it is not surprising to me that there is disconnect between the community and the WMF staff and Board around supporting current volunteers and recruiting a more diverse community. I appreciate the WMF grant team for doing this type of experimentation, and encourage other WMF affiliated organizations (chapters, thematic organization, and user groups) to not be timid in addressing all types of diversity and systemic bias by narrowing their focus in order to get the best results. I sincerely apologize if some people reading my comment feel under appreciated and become dispirited. But creating a diverse wikimedia movement in order to eliminate entrenched systemic bias is a stronger value for me. I hope that hearing from someone like myself who is inspired by the experiment will change the minds of some people. But even if that doesn't happen it is important to me to speak out in support of the Inspire Gender Gap campaign and the staff volunteers who share my vision of collecting and disseminating free content to everyone in the world. Warm regards to all people everywhere in the wikimedia movement! Sydney Sydney Poore User:FloNight Wikipedian in Residence at Cochrane Collaboration On Sat, Jan 3, 2015 at 5:26 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
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
* Liam Wyatt wrote: I understand from the explanations that the reason for not accepting any non-gender-gap focused grants for several months is because of the expected workload on the staff in reviewing applications and supporting the projects that do get funded. However, what I don't understand is what added incentive there is for people to submit grant applications on the chosen topic (in this instance it is gender-gap, but it could be other topics in the future)? Since it is already possible to submit a gender-gap focused grant, how does the refusal to accept other kinds of project submissions increase the number/quality/variety of gender-gap grants? One reason would be that anyone interested in applying for a gender- gap focused grant will have to do it now, since odds of success will be very low for such applications after the three months. -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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
Maybe the carrot is the site notice to advertise it, and the fear is that too many projects are being proposed? Which is good. But I am with lodewijk that this is not the way to go. It only exposes the main weakness of the current grant making process. It is global, central and has a lot of administrative overhead attached to it, mainly driven by Anglo American policies difficult to understand in the rest of the world why they would be necessary at all. it leads to a bottleneck not necessary. The sitenotice is nice. But it could be used better if grantmaking is distributed like all the other content and community work, imo. Rupert On Jan 7, 2015 5:56 PM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: On 7 January 2015 at 00:06, Siko Bouterse sboute...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 12:17 PM, MF-Warburg mfwarb...@googlemail.com wrote: Sorry if this was already answered and I overlooked it, but will there be something like a special form of advertising this campaign in order to attract many requests that propose to do something about the Gender Gap? Great question. Current thinking is to do the usual announcing on mailing lists, blog/social media, village pumps, etc, as well as experimenting with running Central Notice banners. Would like to attract folks from various wikis who have interest in this theme and ability to lead a project in their community, beyond the usual (relatively small) slice who regularly participate in lists like these or in the usual grantmaking discussions on meta-wiki. And although outside media could help bring total newbies to contribute ideas, discussion, and other forms of participation, it is pretty darn important to have at least 1 experienced Wikimedian on a funded team in order to lead and execute a useful community project, so in-movement (particularly on-wiki) promotion is a priority. Any thoughts/suggestions would be welcome! TL:DR I see the stick, but where is the carrot? [1] I understand from the explanations that the reason for not accepting any non-gender-gap focused grants for several months is because of the expected workload on the staff in reviewing applications and supporting the projects that do get funded. However, what I don't understand is what added incentive there is for people to submit grant applications on the chosen topic (in this instance it is gender-gap, but it could be other topics in the future)? Since it is already possible to submit a gender-gap focused grant, how does the refusal to accept other kinds of project submissions increase the number/quality/variety of gender-gap grants? I can see the unfortunate possibility for: - some grants to be re-written with a false veneer of gender-gap focus (pink-washing) simply to access the money - valid (but non gender-gap focused) grant applications having to wait until after the 3-month project, and potentially having to cancel altogether depending on the volunteer's availability. I think this is what Lodewijk was referring to when he called it a negative campaign - there is a DISincentive for other kinds of grant applications, but no apparent specific incentive for the desired type of application. I see the stick, but where is the carrot? Am I missing something? -Liam [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot_and_stick ___ 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
On 7 January 2015 at 00:06, Siko Bouterse sboute...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 12:17 PM, MF-Warburg mfwarb...@googlemail.com wrote: Sorry if this was already answered and I overlooked it, but will there be something like a special form of advertising this campaign in order to attract many requests that propose to do something about the Gender Gap? Great question. Current thinking is to do the usual announcing on mailing lists, blog/social media, village pumps, etc, as well as experimenting with running Central Notice banners. Would like to attract folks from various wikis who have interest in this theme and ability to lead a project in their community, beyond the usual (relatively small) slice who regularly participate in lists like these or in the usual grantmaking discussions on meta-wiki. And although outside media could help bring total newbies to contribute ideas, discussion, and other forms of participation, it is pretty darn important to have at least 1 experienced Wikimedian on a funded team in order to lead and execute a useful community project, so in-movement (particularly on-wiki) promotion is a priority. Any thoughts/suggestions would be welcome! TL:DR I see the stick, but where is the carrot? [1] I understand from the explanations that the reason for not accepting any non-gender-gap focused grants for several months is because of the expected workload on the staff in reviewing applications and supporting the projects that do get funded. However, what I don't understand is what added incentive there is for people to submit grant applications on the chosen topic (in this instance it is gender-gap, but it could be other topics in the future)? Since it is already possible to submit a gender-gap focused grant, how does the refusal to accept other kinds of project submissions increase the number/quality/variety of gender-gap grants? I can see the unfortunate possibility for: - some grants to be re-written with a false veneer of gender-gap focus (pink-washing) simply to access the money - valid (but non gender-gap focused) grant applications having to wait until after the 3-month project, and potentially having to cancel altogether depending on the volunteer's availability. I think this is what Lodewijk was referring to when he called it a negative campaign - there is a DISincentive for other kinds of grant applications, but no apparent specific incentive for the desired type of application. I see the stick, but where is the carrot? Am I missing something? -Liam [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot_and_stick ___ 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
Thanks for the details Siko! Going back to the original message in this thread - I would indeed be concerned if the WMF was shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no good reason. However that's not really what's happening. It's more that non-urgent grantmaking is being postponed; and there is a good rationale for it (one more about wanting to experiment with grantmaking styles, than about the gender gap being a special case). Makes sense to me. Chris On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:59 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Actually, the experiment is whether such a campaign would drive more successful grants, as I understand it. It works from the assumption that such grants would have a positive impact. I'm happy to go with that assumption though. I still strongly disagree with this initiative, but especially the way it is executed. I'm glad to hear that all time-sensitive requests can still apply during this period - that would probably be quite a few requests. I'm still in the dark as to why this has to be a three month program (that is a very long period of time to put everything on hold for an experiment) and not just 2-4 weeks. Then you could actually commit to quicker run-through times in the program, etc. Reducing the time frame would reduce the damaging side effect significantly. Lodewijk On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:47 AM, Peter Southwood peter.southw...@telkomsa.net wrote: Did you not see the bit about experimental? Cheers, Peter -Original Message- From: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bjoern Hoehrmann Sent: 06 January 2015 05:48 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason * Siko Bouterse wrote: Why the gender gap? Although we’ve committed to supporting and increasing gender diversity, so far these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale. In the first half of this year, IEG and PEG have spent only 9% of funds on projects aiming to directly impact this gap and less than ? of our grantee project leaders have been women. Without taking time to focus on increasing gender diversity in our content and contributors, this trend is likely to continue. What evidence is there that spending more on gender gap will have any measurable impact on gender gap? I also note that you say projects have not emerged. That sounds like people do not actually have ideas how to impact gender gap with money. Could you identify a couple of projects that would have considerable impact on gender gap but that have been refused funding in the past due to a lack of focus on gen- der gap? -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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 - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2015.0.5577 / Virus Database: 4257/8874 - Release Date: 01/05/15 ___ 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
Thanks Siko, also from me. I do hope that you use this time to really learn of the dynamics of grants/impact, by following up of earlier experience and also in defining expectations targets etc in a specific area For me an eyeopener was a program run in Sweden by WMSE to get more female contributors. It was funded from outside WMF and primary involved workshops for Wikipedia writing, in a form we are all familiar with. The workshops was run in different middlesized towns and got a very limited attendance, 3-15 persons, whereof only a tiny fraction stayed on as Wikipedians after the workshop. I got annoyed at first noticing it cost something like 100-200 dollar per participant, and 20 times as much to get the one among them who stayed on but only making some 50-100 edits. I saw it as a truly waste of money (not WMF though). But then I learned that those activities attracted more media attention than any other program having been run by WMSE, there must now be between 30-50 coverages in local and nationwide papers and radio stations. And the funding body saw this as a thundering success, and has given even more funding for a second year. And then something happened as a result from this media coverage, more female editors has now a year later turned up! Anders Chris Keating skrev den 2015-01-06 10:53: Thanks for the details Siko! Going back to the original message in this thread - I would indeed be concerned if the WMF was shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no good reason. However that's not really what's happening. It's more that non-urgent grantmaking is being postponed; and there is a good rationale for it (one more about wanting to experiment with grantmaking styles, than about the gender gap being a special case). Makes sense to me. Chris On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:59 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Actually, the experiment is whether such a campaign would drive more successful grants, as I understand it. It works from the assumption that such grants would have a positive impact. I'm happy to go with that assumption though. I still strongly disagree with this initiative, but especially the way it is executed. I'm glad to hear that all time-sensitive requests can still apply during this period - that would probably be quite a few requests. I'm still in the dark as to why this has to be a three month program (that is a very long period of time to put everything on hold for an experiment) and not just 2-4 weeks. Then you could actually commit to quicker run-through times in the program, etc. Reducing the time frame would reduce the damaging side effect significantly. Lodewijk On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:47 AM, Peter Southwood peter.southw...@telkomsa.net wrote: Did you not see the bit about experimental? Cheers, Peter -Original Message- From: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bjoern Hoehrmann Sent: 06 January 2015 05:48 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason * Siko Bouterse wrote: Why the gender gap? Although we’ve committed to supporting and increasing gender diversity, so far these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale. In the first half of this year, IEG and PEG have spent only 9% of funds on projects aiming to directly impact this gap and less than ? of our grantee project leaders have been women. Without taking time to focus on increasing gender diversity in our content and contributors, this trend is likely to continue. What evidence is there that spending more on gender gap will have any measurable impact on gender gap? I also note that you say projects have not emerged. That sounds like people do not actually have ideas how to impact gender gap with money. Could you identify a couple of projects that would have considerable impact on gender gap but that have been refused funding in the past due to a lack of focus on gen- der gap? -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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 - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2015.0.5577 / Virus Database: 4257/8874 - Release Date: 01/05/15 ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
At the opposite I consider that the limited time cannot produce long-time effect, it's not rare that some good grants proceed to submit a second phase to have a larger impact. The best would be to check afterwards the impact of the solution of promotion of a specific area and a specific topic. A program needs longer support, this is also the lesson learned by WLM (the discussion is started because the WLM team considers that few months cannot support a bigger program). The grantmaking team is doing what the WLM team did some years ago: supporting a specific topic. WLM has been successful, probably would have created a lesser impact if someone suggested to reduce the organization of the event to 2-4 weeks. Anyway the best is to check the feedback from the community in terms of projects submitted to the grantmaking team. There is no reason at the moment to say that there will be damaging effects. If there are a bad results, the best wold be to analyze the reasons and to proceed to learn a lesson and to check what can be set to have a better process. At the moment the experiemnt is focused to give more opportunities to a specific area, I don't see nothing strange on that. Regards On 06.01.2015 07:59, Lodewijk wrote: I'm still in the dark as to why this has to be a three month program (that is a very long period of time to put everything on hold for an experiment) and not just 2-4 weeks. Then you could actually commit to quicker run-through times in the program, etc. Reducing the time frame would reduce the damaging side effect significantly. Lodewijk -- 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
Hi Anders, my 2 cents. A project has a budget, this budget can be financed externally but there are some countries which have more opportunities than others. In addition (it's my personal point of view) the external funding introduces a bigger complexity to the projects in terms of management of sponsors and external funders (matching the strategies of WMF and to apply for WMF funds is not the same to find a compromise with the strategies and the accountability of the external funders). In my opinion the external funds generate the request to have some additional skills in the team of the project and probably longer time to setup the project. In the other hand it would be easier to find external funds if a program/project has already generated some good results. In your example you say that the second year the project received more funds, but you have been lucky to find someone trusting on you the first year. For this reason I can apply your example more to WLM than to gender gap because WLM has already a well established history and very good results to attract external funds, instead of some other new projects requiring to be incubated more. Regards On 06.01.2015 11:37, Anders Wennersten wrote: Thanks Siko, also from me. I do hope that you use this time to really learn of the dynamics of grants/impact, by following up of earlier experience and also in defining expectations targets etc in a specific area For me an eyeopener was a program run in Sweden by WMSE to get more female contributors. It was funded from outside WMF and primary involved workshops for Wikipedia writing, in a form we are all familiar with. The workshops was run in different middlesized towns and got a very limited attendance, 3-15 persons, whereof only a tiny fraction stayed on as Wikipedians after the workshop. I got annoyed at first noticing it cost something like 100-200 dollar per participant, and 20 times as much to get the one among them who stayed on but only making some 50-100 edits. I saw it as a truly waste of money (not WMF though). But then I learned that those activities attracted more media attention than any other program having been run by WMSE, there must now be between 30-50 coverages in local and nationwide papers and radio stations. And the funding body saw this as a thundering success, and has given even more funding for a second year. And then something happened as a result from this media coverage, more female editors has now a year later turned up! Anders -- 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
Ilario, My point is rather that while WLM has a clear-cut dynamic, put in resources-get photos in Commons, I believe that in the area of gender-gap the dynamic could be more complex (as in my example). And if WMF only want to see a direct link between effort and impact, they could miss out other dynamics. And in my example I think the funding body never even asked it the number of female editors in Wikipedia increased, for them the media coverage was a more concrete and satisfying result (I wonder if this would be true for WMF grantmaking?) Anders Ilario Valdelli skrev den 2015-01-06 12:00: Hi Anders, my 2 cents. A project has a budget, this budget can be financed externally but there are some countries which have more opportunities than others. In addition (it's my personal point of view) the external funding introduces a bigger complexity to the projects in terms of management of sponsors and external funders (matching the strategies of WMF and to apply for WMF funds is not the same to find a compromise with the strategies and the accountability of the external funders). In my opinion the external funds generate the request to have some additional skills in the team of the project and probably longer time to setup the project. In the other hand it would be easier to find external funds if a program/project has already generated some good results. In your example you say that the second year the project received more funds, but you have been lucky to find someone trusting on you the first year. For this reason I can apply your example more to WLM than to gender gap because WLM has already a well established history and very good results to attract external funds, instead of some other new projects requiring to be incubated more. Regards On 06.01.2015 11:37, Anders Wennersten wrote: Thanks Siko, also from me. I do hope that you use this time to really learn of the dynamics of grants/impact, by following up of earlier experience and also in defining expectations targets etc in a specific area For me an eyeopener was a program run in Sweden by WMSE to get more female contributors. It was funded from outside WMF and primary involved workshops for Wikipedia writing, in a form we are all familiar with. The workshops was run in different middlesized towns and got a very limited attendance, 3-15 persons, whereof only a tiny fraction stayed on as Wikipedians after the workshop. I got annoyed at first noticing it cost something like 100-200 dollar per participant, and 20 times as much to get the one among them who stayed on but only making some 50-100 edits. I saw it as a truly waste of money (not WMF though). But then I learned that those activities attracted more media attention than any other program having been run by WMSE, there must now be between 30-50 coverages in local and nationwide papers and radio stations. And the funding body saw this as a thundering success, and has given even more funding for a second year. And then something happened as a result from this media coverage, more female editors has now a year later turned up! Anders ___ 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's also my point considering that to get external funds probably a team (like WLM) can bu pushed to find a stronger impact outside Wikimedia movement in order to get more external funds. The Gender gap has a stronger potentiality because is more flexible to be adapted to external funds, but my expectation is that the teams submitting the request of grants can also learn the ability to setup a good project and good reports and to reach a maturity consisting in the capacity to design interesting projects for external funds (also for the global South). Basically to build a best practice in these terms: someting that enable organizations to deliver benefits, return on investment, and value on investment through a sustained approach (ITIL definition). In my opinion the experience of WM SWE can become a best practice but for mature teams. regards On 06.01.2015 12:26, Anders Wennersten wrote: Ilario, My point is rather that while WLM has a clear-cut dynamic, put in resources-get photos in Commons, I believe that in the area of gender-gap the dynamic could be more complex (as in my example). And if WMF only want to see a direct link between effort and impact, they could miss out other dynamics. And in my example I think the funding body never even asked it the number of female editors in Wikipedia increased, for them the media coverage was a more concrete and satisfying result (I wonder if this would be true for WMF grantmaking?) Anders -- 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
Anders Wennersten, 06/01/2015 12:26: I believe that in the area of gender-gap the dynamic could be more complex (as in my example). And if WMF only want to see a direct link between effort and impact, they could miss out other dynamics. I think this is always a good point to remind ourselves, thanks for your example (and self-criticism). Nemo ___ 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
Sorry if this was already answered and I overlooked it, but will there be something like a special form of advertising this campaign in order to attract many requests that propose to do something about the Gender Gap? 2015-01-06 21:11 GMT+01:00 Siko Bouterse sboute...@wikimedia.org: On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 2:37 AM, Anders Wennersten m...@anderswennersten.se wrote: Thanks Siko, also from me. I do hope that you use this time to really learn of the dynamics of grants/impact, by following up of earlier experience and also in defining expectations targets etc in a specific area For me an eyeopener was a program run in Sweden by WMSE to get more female contributors. It was funded from outside WMF and primary involved workshops for Wikipedia writing, in a form we are all familiar with. The workshops was run in different middlesized towns and got a very limited attendance, 3-15 persons, whereof only a tiny fraction stayed on as Wikipedians after the workshop. I got annoyed at first noticing it cost something like 100-200 dollar per participant, and 20 times as much to get the one among them who stayed on but only making some 50-100 edits. I saw it as a truly waste of money (not WMF though). But then I learned that those activities attracted more media attention than any other program having been run by WMSE, there must now be between 30-50 coverages in local and nationwide papers and radio stations. And the funding body saw this as a thundering success, and has given even more funding for a second year. And then something happened as a result from this media coverage, more female editors has now a year later turned up! Anders Thanks for sharing this example, Anders. We're definitely going to learn a lot from this experiment, as I am from this discussion, and will be sharing back findings too :) Your point about media interest as well as longer term impact is super important. While we do need to be able to demonstrate some short-term impact, I also think that for many of the grants we make the impact can really only seen much more clearly in the longer term. So following up well after the pilot is over will also be important. I don't usually think that media coverage alone = thundering success (like you, I'd probably have been disappointed at first with the early outcomes you mentioned). But I do see that one possible outcome for campaigns like this is increased media coverage which in turn could result in longer term impact by bringing in more people to the projects. Will be on the lookout for this - glad you mentioned it! Siko Chris Keating skrev den 2015-01-06 10:53: Thanks for the details Siko! Going back to the original message in this thread - I would indeed be concerned if the WMF was shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no good reason. However that's not really what's happening. It's more that non-urgent grantmaking is being postponed; and there is a good rationale for it (one more about wanting to experiment with grantmaking styles, than about the gender gap being a special case). Makes sense to me. Chris On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:59 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Actually, the experiment is whether such a campaign would drive more successful grants, as I understand it. It works from the assumption that such grants would have a positive impact. I'm happy to go with that assumption though. I still strongly disagree with this initiative, but especially the way it is executed. I'm glad to hear that all time-sensitive requests can still apply during this period - that would probably be quite a few requests. I'm still in the dark as to why this has to be a three month program (that is a very long period of time to put everything on hold for an experiment) and not just 2-4 weeks. Then you could actually commit to quicker run-through times in the program, etc. Reducing the time frame would reduce the damaging side effect significantly. Lodewijk On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:47 AM, Peter Southwood peter.southw...@telkomsa.net wrote: Did you not see the bit about experimental? Cheers, Peter -Original Message- From: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bjoern Hoehrmann Sent: 06 January 2015 05:48 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason * Siko Bouterse wrote: Why the gender gap? Although we’ve committed to supporting and increasing gender diversity, so far these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale. In the first half of this year, IEG and PEG have spent only 9% of funds on projects aiming to directly impact this gap and less than ? of our grantee project
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 10:59 PM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Actually, the experiment is whether such a campaign would drive more successful grants, as I understand it. It works from the assumption that such grants would have a positive impact. I'm happy to go with that assumption though. I still strongly disagree with this initiative, but especially the way it is executed. I'm glad to hear that all time-sensitive requests can still apply during this period - that would probably be quite a few requests. I'm still in the dark as to why this has to be a three month program (that is a very long period of time to put everything on hold for an experiment) and not just 2-4 weeks. Then you could actually commit to quicker run-through times in the program, etc. Reducing the time frame would reduce the damaging side effect significantly. The campaign itself will only run for a month - in my experience with past open calls for IEG, you really do need more than 2 weeks to get the word out and get new ideas not only started but also developed w/ enough community input that we rely on to assess which grants should move forward. But in addition to the actual campaign itself, we need to bake in enough time to prepare for it beforehand and get funded projects started afterwards. There is significant staff effort behind the scenes for any grantmaking we do, and in my experience even quick pilots take time to prep and wrapup. I'm hearing your concerns loud and clear, still, and agree it will be interesting to see how many truly time-sensitive requests will come up during this period. If the campaign is deemed a success worth repeating and we also find we're over-stretching those involved (staff and volunteers) because many non-theme focused projects need to be concurrently considered (this is a big concern for me, and something we'll be keeping a close eye on), that could be data-driven rationale for resourcing grantmaking differently in next year's annual plan. Siko Lodewijk On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:47 AM, Peter Southwood peter.southw...@telkomsa.net wrote: Did you not see the bit about experimental? Cheers, Peter -Original Message- From: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bjoern Hoehrmann Sent: 06 January 2015 05:48 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason * Siko Bouterse wrote: Why the gender gap? Although we’ve committed to supporting and increasing gender diversity, so far these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale. In the first half of this year, IEG and PEG have spent only 9% of funds on projects aiming to directly impact this gap and less than ? of our grantee project leaders have been women. Without taking time to focus on increasing gender diversity in our content and contributors, this trend is likely to continue. What evidence is there that spending more on gender gap will have any measurable impact on gender gap? I also note that you say projects have not emerged. That sounds like people do not actually have ideas how to impact gender gap with money. Could you identify a couple of projects that would have considerable impact on gender gap but that have been refused funding in the past due to a lack of focus on gen- der gap? -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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 - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2015.0.5577 / Virus Database: 4257/8874 - Release Date: 01/05/15 ___ 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 -- Siko Bouterse Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. sboute...@wikimedia.org *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 2:37 AM, Anders Wennersten m...@anderswennersten.se wrote: Thanks Siko, also from me. I do hope that you use this time to really learn of the dynamics of grants/impact, by following up of earlier experience and also in defining expectations targets etc in a specific area For me an eyeopener was a program run in Sweden by WMSE to get more female contributors. It was funded from outside WMF and primary involved workshops for Wikipedia writing, in a form we are all familiar with. The workshops was run in different middlesized towns and got a very limited attendance, 3-15 persons, whereof only a tiny fraction stayed on as Wikipedians after the workshop. I got annoyed at first noticing it cost something like 100-200 dollar per participant, and 20 times as much to get the one among them who stayed on but only making some 50-100 edits. I saw it as a truly waste of money (not WMF though). But then I learned that those activities attracted more media attention than any other program having been run by WMSE, there must now be between 30-50 coverages in local and nationwide papers and radio stations. And the funding body saw this as a thundering success, and has given even more funding for a second year. And then something happened as a result from this media coverage, more female editors has now a year later turned up! Anders Thanks for sharing this example, Anders. We're definitely going to learn a lot from this experiment, as I am from this discussion, and will be sharing back findings too :) Your point about media interest as well as longer term impact is super important. While we do need to be able to demonstrate some short-term impact, I also think that for many of the grants we make the impact can really only seen much more clearly in the longer term. So following up well after the pilot is over will also be important. I don't usually think that media coverage alone = thundering success (like you, I'd probably have been disappointed at first with the early outcomes you mentioned). But I do see that one possible outcome for campaigns like this is increased media coverage which in turn could result in longer term impact by bringing in more people to the projects. Will be on the lookout for this - glad you mentioned it! Siko Chris Keating skrev den 2015-01-06 10:53: Thanks for the details Siko! Going back to the original message in this thread - I would indeed be concerned if the WMF was shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no good reason. However that's not really what's happening. It's more that non-urgent grantmaking is being postponed; and there is a good rationale for it (one more about wanting to experiment with grantmaking styles, than about the gender gap being a special case). Makes sense to me. Chris On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:59 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Actually, the experiment is whether such a campaign would drive more successful grants, as I understand it. It works from the assumption that such grants would have a positive impact. I'm happy to go with that assumption though. I still strongly disagree with this initiative, but especially the way it is executed. I'm glad to hear that all time-sensitive requests can still apply during this period - that would probably be quite a few requests. I'm still in the dark as to why this has to be a three month program (that is a very long period of time to put everything on hold for an experiment) and not just 2-4 weeks. Then you could actually commit to quicker run-through times in the program, etc. Reducing the time frame would reduce the damaging side effect significantly. Lodewijk On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:47 AM, Peter Southwood peter.southw...@telkomsa.net wrote: Did you not see the bit about experimental? Cheers, Peter -Original Message- From: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bjoern Hoehrmann Sent: 06 January 2015 05:48 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason * Siko Bouterse wrote: Why the gender gap? Although we’ve committed to supporting and increasing gender diversity, so far these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale. In the first half of this year, IEG and PEG have spent only 9% of funds on projects aiming to directly impact this gap and less than ? of our grantee project leaders have been women. Without taking time to focus on increasing gender diversity in our content and contributors, this trend is likely to continue. What evidence is there that spending more on gender gap will have any measurable impact on gender gap? I also note that you say projects have not emerged. That sounds like people do not actually have ideas how to impact gender gap with money.
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 12:17 PM, MF-Warburg mfwarb...@googlemail.com wrote: Sorry if this was already answered and I overlooked it, but will there be something like a special form of advertising this campaign in order to attract many requests that propose to do something about the Gender Gap? Great question. Current thinking is to do the usual announcing on mailing lists, blog/social media, village pumps, etc, as well as experimenting with running Central Notice banners. Would like to attract folks from various wikis who have interest in this theme and ability to lead a project in their community, beyond the usual (relatively small) slice who regularly participate in lists like these or in the usual grantmaking discussions on meta-wiki. And although outside media could help bring total newbies to contribute ideas, discussion, and other forms of participation, it is pretty darn important to have at least 1 experienced Wikimedian on a funded team in order to lead and execute a useful community project, so in-movement (particularly on-wiki) promotion is a priority. Any thoughts/suggestions would be welcome! 2015-01-06 21:11 GMT+01:00 Siko Bouterse sboute...@wikimedia.org: On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 2:37 AM, Anders Wennersten m...@anderswennersten.se wrote: Thanks Siko, also from me. I do hope that you use this time to really learn of the dynamics of grants/impact, by following up of earlier experience and also in defining expectations targets etc in a specific area For me an eyeopener was a program run in Sweden by WMSE to get more female contributors. It was funded from outside WMF and primary involved workshops for Wikipedia writing, in a form we are all familiar with. The workshops was run in different middlesized towns and got a very limited attendance, 3-15 persons, whereof only a tiny fraction stayed on as Wikipedians after the workshop. I got annoyed at first noticing it cost something like 100-200 dollar per participant, and 20 times as much to get the one among them who stayed on but only making some 50-100 edits. I saw it as a truly waste of money (not WMF though). But then I learned that those activities attracted more media attention than any other program having been run by WMSE, there must now be between 30-50 coverages in local and nationwide papers and radio stations. And the funding body saw this as a thundering success, and has given even more funding for a second year. And then something happened as a result from this media coverage, more female editors has now a year later turned up! Anders Thanks for sharing this example, Anders. We're definitely going to learn a lot from this experiment, as I am from this discussion, and will be sharing back findings too :) Your point about media interest as well as longer term impact is super important. While we do need to be able to demonstrate some short-term impact, I also think that for many of the grants we make the impact can really only seen much more clearly in the longer term. So following up well after the pilot is over will also be important. I don't usually think that media coverage alone = thundering success (like you, I'd probably have been disappointed at first with the early outcomes you mentioned). But I do see that one possible outcome for campaigns like this is increased media coverage which in turn could result in longer term impact by bringing in more people to the projects. Will be on the lookout for this - glad you mentioned it! Siko Chris Keating skrev den 2015-01-06 10:53: Thanks for the details Siko! Going back to the original message in this thread - I would indeed be concerned if the WMF was shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no good reason. However that's not really what's happening. It's more that non-urgent grantmaking is being postponed; and there is a good rationale for it (one more about wanting to experiment with grantmaking styles, than about the gender gap being a special case). Makes sense to me. Chris On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:59 AM, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Actually, the experiment is whether such a campaign would drive more successful grants, as I understand it. It works from the assumption that such grants would have a positive impact. I'm happy to go with that assumption though. I still strongly disagree with this initiative, but especially the way it is executed. I'm glad to hear that all time-sensitive requests can still apply during this period - that would probably be quite a few requests. I'm still in the dark as to why this has to be a three month program (that is a very long period of time to put everything on hold for an experiment) and not just 2-4 weeks. Then you could actually
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Actually, the experiment is whether such a campaign would drive more successful grants, as I understand it. It works from the assumption that such grants would have a positive impact. I'm happy to go with that assumption though. I still strongly disagree with this initiative, but especially the way it is executed. I'm glad to hear that all time-sensitive requests can still apply during this period - that would probably be quite a few requests. I'm still in the dark as to why this has to be a three month program (that is a very long period of time to put everything on hold for an experiment) and not just 2-4 weeks. Then you could actually commit to quicker run-through times in the program, etc. Reducing the time frame would reduce the damaging side effect significantly. Lodewijk On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 6:47 AM, Peter Southwood peter.southw...@telkomsa.net wrote: Did you not see the bit about experimental? Cheers, Peter -Original Message- From: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bjoern Hoehrmann Sent: 06 January 2015 05:48 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason * Siko Bouterse wrote: Why the gender gap? Although we’ve committed to supporting and increasing gender diversity, so far these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale. In the first half of this year, IEG and PEG have spent only 9% of funds on projects aiming to directly impact this gap and less than ? of our grantee project leaders have been women. Without taking time to focus on increasing gender diversity in our content and contributors, this trend is likely to continue. What evidence is there that spending more on gender gap will have any measurable impact on gender gap? I also note that you say projects have not emerged. That sounds like people do not actually have ideas how to impact gender gap with money. Could you identify a couple of projects that would have considerable impact on gender gap but that have been refused funding in the past due to a lack of focus on gen- der gap? -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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 - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2015.0.5577 / Virus Database: 4257/8874 - Release Date: 01/05/15 ___ 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
BumpingI do not see any response on this mailing list from the Grantmaking team, and I can't actually find very much about this entire plan on the Grants portal at Meta (which may say more about the grants portal than about the dissemination of the plant). However, since this is something that has the potential to affect a lot of Wikimedians (individuals, chapters, and other affiliated groups)...as well as women (apparently)... it would be really nice to see what is going on. Some people have mentioned that they received an email. Perhaps it could be forwarded to this mailing list? Risker/Anne On 3 January 2015 at 13:35, 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:
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
First day back from vacation, I'm drafting response as we speak, just haven't sanity-checked enough to hit send yet :) Will soon! On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 5:35 PM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote: BumpingI do not see any response on this mailing list from the Grantmaking team, and I can't actually find very much about this entire plan on the Grants portal at Meta (which may say more about the grants portal than about the dissemination of the plant). However, since this is something that has the potential to affect a lot of Wikimedians (individuals, chapters, and other affiliated groups)...as well as women (apparently)... it would be really nice to see what is going on. Some people have mentioned that they received an email. Perhaps it could be forwarded to this mailing list? Risker/Anne On 3 January 2015 at 13:35, 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:
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
Hi all, This is not exactly how we were hoping to announce the Inspire Campaign on this list, but now that I'm back online, let's try this again... First, to clarify some key points: *Yes, we are taking a 3 month break from funding regular all-kinds-of-proposals in both IEG and PEG programs during February, March and April. *Time-sensitive funding needs that are not focused on the gender gap will NOT be ignored during this period. The plan is not to ignore critical community support requests that cannot wait. If there is a valid reason that you cannot seek funding for your project/program/plan before February or after April, please contact myself in IEG or Alex Wang in PEG and we'll continue to work with our committees to assist you. Our experience has been that many of the requests we receive CAN happen at any time of year, however, and so we're simply asking you to propose those during the other 9 months of 2015. You are still welcome to continue drafting them during this period, even though we won't have capacity to review all of them during this time. *The reason for taking a break from other non-urgent requests during this time is so that we can run an experiment in proactive grantmaking, to see if we can provide meaningful community support and significantly increase impact on Wikimedia projects in a single strategic area.[1] *We don't have enough staff to support all of our usual grantmaking work in both of these programs AND try something new like this at the same time, so we're going to focus our limited energy on 1 new experiment for a brief while. *The first Inspire Campaign will focus on the gender gap, future campaigns could indeed focus on any other topic. Ideas for future campaign topics are welcome! Our intention is not to shut down community ideas outside of themes. Rather, we'd like to learn whether using a theme could actually help drive participation in grantmaking and other areas of Wikimedia projects, as it has for events like WLM. *Like other experiments, we'll measure the results, and then decide if it is worth repeating, or doing something different in the future. If WLM wasn't such a great success, you wouldn't repeat it each year. If this campaign isn't a success, we'll do something different instead. To help us all get on the same page, I'm including below the email that was sent to the IEG and PEG committees just before we went away for Christmas. That has some more background information that may be helpful to folks just learning about this experiment. And I'm happy to help clarify additional questions as they come up here. We're starting a FAQ where I've added answers to a few questions that came up in this thread so far.[2] Please feel free to add more questions to that page and we'll try to answer them in coming days/weeks. Finally, about communications: Like many folks in this movement, our grantmaking team at WMF surely has some room for improvement in terms of timing and communications. Sometimes as plans develop with lots of stakeholders (even just within one organization, let alone a whole movement!) it takes time to get the news out to everyone in an orderly fashion, and we're later than we'd like to be on this one. More details for those interested in the meta-history of how this developed: The idea of running thematic campaigns to experiment with proactively asking for new ideas, reaching more individual grantees, and increasing focused innovation around solving strategic issues was included in our 2014/15 annual plan. [3] (I don't expect you to have read this long and dry document, just noting it was public). Part of the plan was an ask for additional staff to help take on new initiatives like this in grantmaking, so that we could continue existing programs as well as try something new along thematic lines. In August I started the planning page on meta-wiki.[1] Again, although we didn't formally announce anything on this list because the details about staffing and execution were still so unclear, it was public, and we started getting some initial positive feedback on it at Wikimania etc. Over the past 3 months, it became increasingly clear from conversations within WMF that grantmaking should indeed experiment with proactive thematic focus, but that no additional resources should be expected to assist with this. So, in December, we gathered a team of existing staff to sort out what kind of first experiment we could conceivably execute on in time for a campaign aligned with WikiWomen's March. We started communications first with some key stakeholders - both committees and a list of PEG grantees that Alex knew might be working on new proposals in early 2015 who needed as much notice as possible. And believe me, we definitely wish we had more time too. We'd planned to announce more broadly to this list and others as well as updating the PEG and IEG pages once all involved staff were back from vacation in January and could do this right. Many of us don't
Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason
* Siko Bouterse wrote: Why the gender gap? Although we’ve committed to supporting and increasing gender diversity, so far these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale. In the first half of this year, IEG and PEG have spent only 9% of funds on projects aiming to directly impact this gap and less than ? of our grantee project leaders have been women. Without taking time to focus on increasing gender diversity in our content and contributors, this trend is likely to continue. What evidence is there that spending more on gender gap will have any measurable impact on gender gap? I also note that you say projects have not emerged. That sounds like people do not actually have ideas how to impact gender gap with money. Could you identify a couple of projects that would have considerable impact on gender gap but that have been refused funding in the past due to a lack of focus on gen- der gap? -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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
Did you not see the bit about experimental? Cheers, Peter -Original Message- From: wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Bjoern Hoehrmann Sent: 06 January 2015 05:48 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF is shutting down grantmaking for good projects for 3 months for no reason * Siko Bouterse wrote: Why the gender gap? Although we’ve committed to supporting and increasing gender diversity, so far these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale. In the first half of this year, IEG and PEG have spent only 9% of funds on projects aiming to directly impact this gap and less than ? of our grantee project leaders have been women. Without taking time to focus on increasing gender diversity in our content and contributors, this trend is likely to continue. What evidence is there that spending more on gender gap will have any measurable impact on gender gap? I also note that you say projects have not emerged. That sounds like people do not actually have ideas how to impact gender gap with money. Could you identify a couple of projects that would have considerable impact on gender gap but that have been refused funding in the past due to a lack of focus on gen- der gap? -- Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjo...@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de D-10243 Berlin · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de Available for hire in Berlin (early 2015) · http://www.websitedev.de/ ___ 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 - No virus found in this message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 2015.0.5577 / Virus Database: 4257/8874 - Release Date: 01/05/15 ___ 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
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] 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