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
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