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>
