Re: [Wikitech-l] Technical expertise needed for Individual Engagement Grant proposals!
Useful points as always, thanks! Marti and Quim have partnered on improving processes for technical IEG proposals and there's no doubt still room for improvement, but always good to have feedback as they're building changes into each round. Having separate application templates for different kinds of proposals may be an option, but it will need significant thought to implement well so we haven't yet gone that route (more choices before a user can get started isn't always a good thing). Templates aside, writing a great grant proposal or project plan isn't a skill everyone has (no matter how good the form/guidelines are), and there is a delicate balance to find between expecting an applicant to have everything prepared up front and creating so many barriers to entry so that good ideas are killed before the community has a chance to see them. We've found the IEG community comments period to be a useful time to help some folks improve their proposals significantly, get confirmation on those that are already in good shape, and also to flag issues to the committee which may seem obvious to you, but not to everyone. On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 5:40 AM, Andre Klapper <aklap...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > On Tue, 2015-10-06 at 21:05 -0600, Brian Wolff wrote: > > It would be nice if before asking for general review, the proposals > > were vetted to have sufficient detail. Some of these seem to be "I > > want X$ to do Y, and I'm not going to tell you how I plan to do Y, or > > how I determined X$ is needed, or even give a detailed definition of > > what Y is". > > > > For a grant proposal, I'd expect to see budget justifications, time > > estimations broken down by rough sub tasks, a general plan of attack, > > potential risks and how the grantee plans to mitigate them, user > > acceptance criteria, etc > > Thanks Brian. These sound like very valid points. > > I'm curious if application templates of other (technical) programs have > already been looked at for IEG and which conclusions were drawn. Seeing > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_programs/Application_template a > nd > > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_programs/Life_of_a_successful_project > I can imagine there's knowledge to share (*if* that hasn't happened > yet). > > andre > -- > Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler > http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/ > > > > _______ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > -- Siko Bouterse Director of Community Resources Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. sboute...@wikimedia.org *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. * *Donate <https://donate.wikimedia.org> or click the "edit" button today, and help us make it a reality!* ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] [Wmfall] Welcome Frances Hocutt
Hooray! Frances, you've been wonderful to work with during Inspire and beyond, and I'm so glad you'll be sticking around on this new team :) On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 9:34 AM, Sati Houston shous...@wikimedia.org wrote: Welcome Frances!! On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Edward Galvez egal...@wikimedia.org wrote: Welcome! On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 8:48 AM, Alex Wang aw...@wikimedia.org wrote: Congrats, Frances! You've been an awesome addition to our team and I have really valued your thoughtfulness, especially during the Inspire Campaign. On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 7:33 AM, Patrick Earley pear...@wikimedia.org wrote: Wonderful, Frances! Glad to have you here! On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 7:31 AM, Floor Koudijs fkoud...@wikimedia.org wrote: So happy to hear this Frances! Floor Koudijs Senior Manager, Wikipedia Education Program Wikimedia Foundation +1.415.839.6885 x6806 (landline) +1.415.692.5289 (cell phone) fkoud...@wikimedia.org education.wikimedia.org On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 6:51 AM, Heather Walls hwa...@wikimedia.org wrote: Great news! I'm so excited to hear this! Heather On Tue, May 26, 2015 at 5:43 AM, Dan Duvall dduv...@wikimedia.org wrote: Welcome to WMF, Frances! I'm looking forward to working with you (more)! On May 25, 2015 9:39 PM, Bryan Davis bd...@wikimedia.org wrote: I'm excited to announce that Frances Hocutt has been hired as a Software Engineer on the Community Tech team starting 2015-05-26. She has gotten a good start on getting things done by writing a great introduction blurb for me to forward on: Frances is looking forward to starting on a [new team doing cool but unspecified stuff]. Frances has been with the WMF for most of the last year, first as an OPW intern and then as a developer for Community Resources. Frances has primarily worked in the MediaWiki API ecosystem: she wrote the standard for API client libraries, evaluated a number of them, and developed wiki bots to support this Inspire campaign and the Co-op mentorship project on English Wikipedia. She also has contributed patches and product management to Wikimetrics. Before starting work in F/OSS, Frances worked as a medicinal chemist, studied organic chemistry and materials science, and founded a hackerspace. She moved to the Bay Area in January. She enjoys giving talks, mentoring new programmers, and practicing various fiber arts. Frances can be found as fhocutt on IRC, Fhocutt as a volunteer, and Fhocutt (WMF) officially. -- Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation bd...@wikimedia.org [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software EngineerBoise, ID USA irc: bd808v:415.839.6885 x6855 ___ Wmfall mailing list wmf...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wmfall ___ Wmfall mailing list wmf...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wmfall -- Heather Walls Wikimedia Foundation 149 New Montgomery Street I San Francisco, CA 94105 annual.wikimedia.org ___ Wmfall mailing list wmf...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wmfall ___ Wmfall mailing list wmf...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wmfall -- Patrick Earley Community Advocate Wikimedia Foundation pear...@wikimedia.org ___ Wmfall mailing list wmf...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wmfall -- Alexandra Wang Program Officer Project Event Grants Wikimedia Foundation http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home +1 415-839-6885 Skype: alexvwang ___ Wmfall mailing list wmf...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wmfall -- Edward Galvez Program Evaluation Associate Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wmfall mailing list wmf...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wmfall ___ Wmfall mailing list wmf...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wmfall -- Siko Bouterse Director of Community Resources Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. sboute...@wikimedia.org *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. * *Donate https://donate.wikimedia.org or click the edit button today, and help us make it a reality!* ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Tech- and Tools-related IEG proposals
of what I am going to fix, not how am I going to do it. They mostly don't have mock-up screenshots for the one's who propose new user facing things, there is largely no schedule of milestones, or even concrete minimum viable product specifications. If they were GSOC proposals, they would largely be rejected gsoc proposals. For example [[meta:Grants:IEG/Tamil_OCR_to_recognize_content_from_printed_books]] you can't even tell that they intend to create a website instead of a desktop app, unless you read the talk page. Second, its hard to comment on the appropriateness of scope, since there's not really any set criteria (That I've seen). In particular its unclear what is considered an appropriate asking amount for a given amount of work. For example, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Global_Watchlist asks for $7000, which seems excessive to essentially make a user script that has a for loop to get the user's watchlist on various wikis. That's the sort of thing which I would expect to take about a week. A very experienced developer might be able to pull it off in a day provided the interface elements were minimalist. (Although that proposal has a small little note about being able to mute/unmute (non-flow) threads on a per thread basis, which depending where you go with that, could be the hardest aspect of the project). Similarly, people asking thousands of dollars so they can get computers to test the user script in different OS environments seems like an odd use of resources. No libraries available that have both Mac and windows available (Guess there's a lot of libs that only have windows computers). Even still, is multiple OS's really necessary to do browser testing? Almost all modern browsers are cross platform. Even IE can be run in wine on linux afaik. Then there's proposals like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Dedicated_Programming_Compiler , where it appears the grant requester isn't entirely familiar with the meaning of the technical jargon that is in use in the proposal. Which should raise instant red flags. Now that I've complained a lot, I should say its not all bad. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service for example is a fairly well written proposal. Hmm, not entirely sure where I was going with all this. Looking at all the proposals takes time. Maybe there should be some sort of minimum quality standard (e.g. Having a roadmap) to advance to the next step of proposal selection, and only ask the larger Wikimedia community to review those proposals that were sanity checked to have at least enough information on them that one could reasonably evaluate the proposal. --bawolff ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- Quim Gil Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil -- Siko Bouterse Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. sboute...@wikimedia.org *Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. * *Donate https://donate.wikimedia.org or click the edit button today, and help us make it a reality!* ___ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Re: [Wikitech-l] Tech- and Tools-related IEG proposals
I don't think that copying comments made on a mailing list over to a proposer's page is exactly the right strategy here, Pine - there's a difference between talking *to* and *about* people and I see that bawolff has done a lovely job of doing some of each, using both channels. But if your question is really will this feedback from the mailing list get fed back to the scoring committee: Yes, it will be, along with all perspectives we gather from various threads and conversations all over the place. On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 1:12 PM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Siko, are you planning to copy the relevant comments to the grant application pages? The Committee will likely want to read them. Pine On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 10:04 AM, Siko Bouterse sboute...@wikimedia.org wrote: Echoing Quim's thanks to you, bawolff! And I really appreciate the comments you've made directly on proposals in past weeks, which does help them improve. Good proposals take time to develop, and I expect that incubating them longer in places like IdeaLab, where they can get more advice to help them mature, is one way to ensure they contain all info needed for assessing them as a grant proposal. I'm not sure this is something we could ever do well without the community. I'm seeing more and more proposals for technical projects in IEG each round (for the first time, nearly half of the open proposals are for tools). As there seems to be increasing interest in using IEG to build tools, I agree that we'll want to start thinking about better guidelines for this type of proposal in particular. Will keep your suggestions in mind for this, and happy to hear more as we work on improving systems each round. Siko On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 5:56 AM, Quim Gil q...@wikimedia.org wrote: Brian, I just want to say Thank You for the time you took going through the proposals and writing this insightful email. CCing Siko because, even if you particular comments about certain proposals are interesting, they can be taken as samples, and what really matters are your meta observations. On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 7:08 AM, Brian Wolff bawo...@gmail.com wrote: On 10/10/14, Patrick Earley pear...@wikimedia.org wrote: *(cross-posted to wikimedia-l)* Hello all, For our second round of Individual Engagement Grant applications in 2014, we have a great crop of ideas. Wikimedians have dropped by to offer feedback, support, or expertise to some of the proposals, but many proposals have not been reviewed by community members. Over half of these proposals involve new tools, new uses of our databases, or have other technical elements. Some will be hosted on Labs if approved. Members of this list may have key insights for our proposers. If there is an open proposal that interests you, that you have concerns about, or that involves an area where you have experience or expertise, please drop by the proposal page to share your views. This will help the proposers better hone their strategies, and will assist the IEG Committee in evaluating some of these fresh new ideas to improve the Wikimedia projects. Working with an IEG proposal may even inspire you to serve as a project advisor, or to propose one of your own for the next cycle! Comments are requested until October 20th. Tools IEG proposals: - IEG/Semi-automatically generate Categories for some small-scale medium-scale Wikis https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Semi-automatically_generate_Categories_for_some_small-scale_%26_medium-scale_Wikis - IEG/WikiBrainTools https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/WikiBrainTools - IEG/Dedicated Programming Compiler https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Dedicated_Programming_Compiler - IEG/Gamified Microcontributions https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Gamified_Microcontributions - IEG/Enhance Proofreading for Dutch https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Enhance_Proofreading_for_Dutch - IEG/Tamil OCR to recognize content from printed books https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Tamil_OCR_to_recognize_content_from_printed_books - IEG/Easy Micro Contributions for Wiki Source https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Easy_Micro_Contributions_for_Wiki_Source - IEG/Citation data acquisition framework https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Citation_data_acquisition_framework - IEG/Global Watchlist https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Global_Watchlist - IEG/Automated Notability Detection https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Automated_Notability_Detection - IEG/Piłsudski Institute of America GLAM-Wiki Scalable Archive Project https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Pi%C5
