Hello dear all,
this is not a response to any specific mails on this thread, just a few
thoughts from my side.
I am not very heavily involved in the FDC process, what I did was, well,
as one of the board member decided to create this process and one of the
advisory group member observed the feedbacks, and I read a few of the
mails in this thread. By all means, I would not call myself expert in
this matter. I have a very high respect for those people who apply for
funds throw the FDC process and I have a very high respect for the FDC
members. I know most of these people (both the applicants and the FDC
members) and I believe in their good will, their honest, their belief
that what they are doing is helping the movement and the effort they
invested.
Now back to the matter.
One of the issue that the advisory group reviewed in May this year was
that the FDC is a very hard and, because of this, a very expensive
process. Every partner organization that apply for FDC has an annual
planning, this alone is an organizational effort that eat up fund that
do not go into program. I know from the WMF that the annual planning is
very expensive. The whole organization is involved and the entire
process lasted (anyway when I was in board) half a year. One can do a
rough estimation of manhours invested into this process and then put a
price on it. My rough estimation would go into 4 digits, maybe five.
Partner organizations have less (alone because they have less C-level
management), but I believe the proportion would be the same. Atop of
this partner organizations who apply for FDC have to do an extra effort.
I cannot say how much this extra effort is, but from my remote
observation and my impression from the frustration and accounts in the
list I would say it is not a small one. I have a guess, but it is
totally subjective. Maybe one of the chapters can provide an example of
insight? All these costs go into organization and off from program. The
anual planning part is unavoidable, the FDC part is atop. This makes a
malignant feedback: More organizational cost makes the efficiency worse,
and that makes it more necessary to make more effort in the presentation
and reasoning, which means more FDC effort.
We need to break up this circle. The advisory group made two
recommendations this spring: The first one is to make repeating
applications easier, and the other is to allow applications for more
than one year. My impression from this thread is that either these
recommendations didn't catch, or they were not implemented in this
round. If the last case is true (not implemented) I would like to ask
FDC to take these recommendations seriously and implement them. If the
first case is true (implemented but doesn't catch), then I would think
that we need to think about this again. Can someone clarify which case
is more the reality?
One of the critics about the fund dissimination as a total that catchs
my eyes again is "how unbalanced the distribution is". As I said I know
most of the people who expressed their frustration here. I know that
they are all reasonable people. So, if let's say the total funding is
declining, I believe that the outcry would not be so loud as that we
currently have the situation that the total sum of the funding is
increasing and the partner organizations feel that they are being cut
off from that increase. The total amount that the FDC can distribute is
not determined by FDC. So, since as I said most of the people are
reasonbale and rational, I would like to call the Foundation to take
this point really really seriously. It remains one of the biggest
problem between the Foundation and the partner organizations.
Greetings.
Ting
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