Grants:PEG/Grant Advisory Committee/Revamp

GAC Revamp

The GAC is an important mechanism for ensuring community evaluation of Project and Event Grants (PEG). The GAC supports grantees by identifying strengths and weaknesses in individual proposals and provides experience and perspective in areas of strategic planning, measurement and evaluation, and project and financial management. Over the last 3 years, the GAC has strengthened the PEG program and provided invaluable input to the WMF grantmaking team's decision-making process.

However, there are aspects of the GAC process that hinder the effectiveness of grant evaluation and efficiency of the grants process. We have been gathering input from GAC members through discussion pages, email, and in person, and think it is the appropriate time to revisit the process as it currently works. We hope to identify the main challenges, discuss them collectively, and implement concrete changes in the coming months. Below is our proposed process and timeline for the GAC revamp.

1. Send survey to all GAC members on current process – end of April
2. GAC members complete survey – mid May
3. WMF provides analysis of survey on meta with a set of recommendations and options for moving forward – end of May (please see GAC Revamp Discussion)
4. Discussion on meta by GAC members and any other interested volunteers – June (please see GAC Revamp Discussion)
5. Conference call to finalize decisions and next steps – June 27th
6. Execute decisions – early July

Please feel free to comment on the above. Looking forward to a productive discussion and an improved GAC. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 20:47, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

GAC Survey

Here are the results from the 2014 GAC Survey.

Preliminary thoughts of GAC members

• Sounds good. Some aspects of the GAC's process can be looked at in isolation and improved. Other aspects would appear to need to fit into the big picture of grantmaking as a whole, including the FDC and IEG programs. What might useful at this early stage is to receive suggestions from GAC members on the areas they'd like to see discussed, so that a list might be produced for discussion. Tony (talk) 11:53, 27 April 2014 (UTC)
• To increase engagement, I suggest a hangout/Skype session between steps 4 & 5, to discuss the findings and propose solutions. This will fuel the decisionmaking process and perhaps allow gathering informal feedback. (I find questionnaires are hardly a suitable solution for creativeness). NLIGuy (talk) 08:19, 1 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, NLIGuy. We'll definitely consider a hangout(s) between the discussion and execution phase. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 5 May 2014 (UTC)

• Good idea for this revamp. Keep us up to date! MADe (talk) 12:05, 1 May 2014 (UTC)
• This is indeed a good idea :] --3BRBS (talk) 01:37, 2 May 2014 (UTC)
• I wonder whether I could list (on the talkpage, to avoid clutter) some broad areas that could help to structure input in stage 4 listed above – "Discussion on meta by GAC members and any other interested volunteers - June". It's such a complicated task to revamp GAC that just having a template for members' and staff comments/exchanges might be of assistance. If I do this, I'm hoping that other members and staff will come in edit, remove, insert, as a group effort. I'm expecting that at this stage it would be too early to start putting actual comments within these sections and subsections. Tony (talk) 14:22, 2 May 2014 (UTC)