Hoi,
I have done a project and there were two parts to my project. There was the
delivery of an input method and a font for a script that did not have any
UNICODE font. At that time there was functionality for fonts. So it should
have been a shoe in. The cost of the project was relatively large. This was
because of the cost of producing a new font. In real world terms the font
and input method were provided for a very low price..
Because of whatever internal issues, the font did not become available in
MediaWiki. While waiting the partner for the project lost his subsidy and
as an organisation the Royal Institute for the Tropics ended and the
Tropenmuseum was merged with two other museums. This was duly mentioned at
the time. I even blogged about it.
As a consequence of this all my project was gone. The money was spend, the
goods were available but not available to a project. I am no longer
involved in Batak and have no leads to revive it. I have no intention
either.
Now a long time after all this I was hassled for a report. As far as I am
aware I have attempted multiple iterations of a report. It did not fit the
mold or whatever was wrong with it.
With more reporting you get less project and more irritation. I loathe the
notion that more reporting will lead to anything positive. If anything it
makes sense to project manage the reports, keep a finger on the pulse. But
this is a personal affair and very much NOT an administrative affair.
When I am getting involved in another project I will very much try to stay
away from administrative bullshit while I am very much available for
personal contact.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 31 July 2014 23:50, Jessie Wild <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks for listening to the presentation, Pine!
>
> There will be a more comprehensive analysis posted on Meta, but in the
> meantime to answer your questions:
>
>
> > 1. I'm aware that Program Evaluation is examining the outcomes of
> > conferences this year, and Jamie and I have discussed this in at least
> two
> > places on Meta. I'm curious about if and how you plan to measure the
> online
> > impact of conferences; not just what people and groups say they will do
> in
> > post-survey conferences, but what they actually do online in verifiable
> > ways in the subsequent 3-12 months.
> >
>
> Jaime and I and the others on the Grantmaking team are working together on
> this, and experimenting with some different ways of evaluating the work in
> the few months following the conferences. One way to do this in a small
> experiment, for example, is to run a cohort of users who received Wikimania
> Scholarships through Wikimetrics at different increments throughout the
> year following. This is something I have been curious to do for a long
> time, but never had the tool to do it on an aggregate level!
>
>
> >
> > 2. You said in your presentation that there is no direct correlation
> > between grant size and measurable online impact. From the slides at
> around
> > the 1:13-1:15 minute marks, it looks to me like the correlation is
> > negative, meaning that smaller grants produced disproportionately more
> > impact. I can say that within IEG this occurred partly because we had
> some
> > highly motivated and generous grantees who volunteered a considerable
> > amount of time to work with modest amounts of money, and I don't think we
> > should expect that level of generosity from all grantees, but I think
> that
> > grantmaking committees may want (A) to take into account the level of
> > motivation of grantees, (B) to consider breaking large block grants into
> > discrete smaller projects with individual reporting requirements, and (C)
> > for larger grants where there seem to be a lot of problems with reporting
> > and a disappointing level of cost-effectiveness, to be more assertive
> about
> > tying funding to demonstrated results and reliable, standardized
> reporting
> > with assistance from WMF. What do you think?
> >
> > Well, there are definite outliers, and the slides aggregate by program
> type rather than by size. So, for example, several of the IEG grants were
> much bigger than than the majority of PEG grants. So - not exactly negative
> correlation (at least, we can't definitively say that).
>
> I absolutely agree with your (C) suggestion, and your (B) suggestion is
> very interesting too - we haven't discussed that one. It may be worth
> considering if there are larger project-based grants. For the annual plan
> grants, we have this in terms of quarterly reports (and midpoint reports
> for IEG), so we do try to do interventions with grantees if it looks like
> they are off-track. As for (A), based on what we saw through our
> evaluation of IEG[1], motivation is definitely important but the key
> difference for outlier performance was from those grantees that had
> *specific
> target audiences* identified, so they knew exactly who they wanted to be
> working with and how to reach those people. So, I would want committees to
> take into account grants with a specific target audience or specific target
> topic area (for quality improvements, for example; we saw this for
> successful outreach in PEG grants[2]). More explicitly on motivation, while
> it is difficult to measure for new grantees, you can see a lot about
> someone's motivation and creativity based on their past reports if they are
> a returning grantee. I would definitely encourage our committees to look
> back on past reports from returning grantees!
>
> - Jessie
>
> [1]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Learning/Round_1_2013/Impact
> [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Learning/2013-14
>
>
>
> --
>
> *Jessie Wild SnellerGrantmaking Learning & Evaluation *
> *Wikimedia Foundation*
>
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