Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2012-2013 round1/Wikimedia Israel/Proposal form

Wikimedia Israel received a funds allocation in the amount of 141,172 in 2012-2013 Round 1. This funds allocation was recommended by the Funds Dissemination Committee on 15 November 2012 and approved by the WMF Board of Trustees on 1 December 2012.

Please note that the proposals are now closed to community response. Thanks to all for your engagement with the Community Review process, and for your questions. FDC members, FDC staff, and entity representatives will still be communicating on these discussion pages over the next few weeks, but entities will not be responding to questions from anyone other than the FDC or FDC Staff.

This page should be used to discuss the entity’s submitted proposal. This includes asking questions about the content of the proposal form, asking for clarifications on this proposal, and discussing any other issues relating to the proposal itself. To discuss other components of this proposal please refer to the discussion links below.

• This proposal has not yet been created.
• This proposal form has not yet been created.
• Staff proposal assessments have not yet been published for this round.
• FDC recommendation discussion page: discuss the recommendation that the FDC gives to the Board regarding all requests.
• Board decision discussion page: discuss the board's decision.
• An impact report has not yet been submitted for this funds allocation.

Summary of staff expenses

Why is the sum rpesented not the sum of its two components?Anders Wennersten (talk) 14:43, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

"↑ The numbers do not add since the projects coordinator was only working for 6 months during 2012 and is expected to work for 12 months in 2013" --Itzike (talk) 14:46, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Clarifying questions from the FDC staff

Hi Tomer and the rest of the WM Israel chapter! The FDC would like to ask a few questions to get clearer on WM Israel's proposal.

First, a few pieces of information that we are trying to collect / confirm from each entity:

• Please confirm the following amounts (in USD):
  • Current year budget (spending) $53,957
    • Yes, According to current exchange rate. Tomer A. -- Talk
  • Proposed year budget $145,026
    • Yes Tomer A. -- Talk
  • Current year grants received $0
    • No, this statement is not 100% accurate. We started the year with cash reserves of 381,474 NIS from two sources: Reserves from previous year (2010 fundraising) and leftovers from Wikimania. Due to the changes in funding principles between 2011 and 2012 we submitted a work plan which was approved by Barry. It was decided that instead of returning leftovers from Wikimania and then recieve it back as grants, we will keep this money to execute our 2012 program plan. Tomer A. -- Talk
  • Proposed year funds requested $145,026
    • Yes Tomer A. -- Talk

• Please provide your entity’s cash reserve position
  • How much do you have in your reserves now?
    • 152,488.31 NIS (39,180 USD) due to 17 Oct. 2012 Tomer A. -- Talk
      • Tomer, can you help me to reconcile these reserve, revenue, and spending numbers? From above, you said you started the year with 381,474 NIS, and then now you have 152,488 NIS. This means there was a net outflow of ~229,000. According to your "Year-to-date" progress, there was an additional 84,000 NIS of revenue received to date and spending of ~104,000 NIS, meaning a net outflow of 20,000 NIS, which would make it seem like the reserve should be closer to 381,474 - 20,000 = ~360,000 NIS. Can you help us to make sense of this? Meerachary TBG (talk) 19:27, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
        • You are right. I accidentally used the 2011 balance. We started the year with 263,492 NIS and spent (by the time I filled the proposal) 104,000 NIS. This gives us a projected reserve of 159,492 (which is pretty much where we are, modulu expenses we had since filling the proposal). The 84,000 NIS of revenue was not received to date (transactions in Israel are registered when they are promised rather than when they are actually recieved). Tomer A. -- Talk

          Please explain here how WMIL defines defines "cash reserve". Thanks, Wolliff (talk) 21:48, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

• • How much do you expect to have by the start of the planning year period?
    • About 90,000 NIS (23,124 USD) Tomer A. -- Talk

• Detail on initiatives.
  • Can you provide more information on the metrics for success of the initiatives listed? For example, how many participants do you expect at editor events? Are there other measures that tie more closely to the initiative objectives (e.g., event assessment, participant satisfaction)?
    • It is very hard in this early stage of planning, where we didn't even start planning the events themselves to give "on-the-ground" figures. Mind you that the work in Wikimedia Israel is done by volunteers. We do not take consulting firms to advice us on our activities, hence we are to develop the metrics ourselvs. Tomer A. -- Talk
      • Tomer, we appreciate the fact that volunteers are doing most of this work, but we would like the chapter leadership to be thinking about the goals and objectives of key initiative. Therefore, we would like to see projected metrics for success of these initiatives, understanding that they might be directionally correct. (The Impact Report, which entities will complete at the end of the funding cycle, will be the place where you can look back on the year and talk about what WMIL did achieve with these initiatives.) Meerachary TBG (talk) 19:13, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
        • This is not about who does the actual work rather than the time frames. We know that we're going to have an editors event but we still don't know how it'll look. If we'll decide to hold it upnorth (e.g., in Haifa) then this would probably mean less participants but more attention to editors which are usually not considered. Another example is that we know we are going to hold GLAM cooperations, we have a general idea about the institutes we are going to do this with but we haven't spoke with them about the exact details (including success metrics). The easiest way out of this question would be to underestimate. Tomer A. -- Talk
  • For the key initiative "releasing content under free licenses", no information is listed on how WMIL will accomplish this. Can you provide a little more detail on this?
    • Some of the projects, those which cost money (as per this committee charter) can be found in our program plan. Tomer A. -- Talk
  • For "governance and internal procedures" you did not list how you would measure and track success -- can you provide additional information there?
    • This is a qualitive measure rather than a quantitive one. Due to troubles having an accurate, up-to-date, understandings of the chapters resources we replaced our accountanting firm. We have appointed a legal counsel and are planning to hire a secretary general. We are also struggeling to implement the CiviCRM in the chapter. All of these are means to improve governance. Tomer A. -- Talk
      • Thanks Tomer. Qualitative measures of success are fine here. Does this mean that implementation of CiviCRM would be a success indicator for WMIL? Are there other things you would want to see to know that governance has improved? Meerachary TBG (talk) 19:13, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
        • No. This does not mean that. This was an example of the things we do. When talking about goverance, the right approach is "identify and fix" meanning that we should pay attention to the way we do things and imporve them whenever necessary. The only indicator I can identify at the moment is finishing the writing of our annual reports and hold the AGM on April-May rather than the last day of June. Tomer A. -- Talk 11:13, 18 October 2012 (UTC)
• Current fiscal year finances. Can you provide additional detail on the sources of current year revenues?
  • To confirm, it looks like current year "revenues" are leftovers from Wikimania being drawn down. Meerachary TBG (talk) 19:13, 17 October 2012 (UTC)
    • I am not sure I understand the question. This year's revenue is due third parties sponsoring our activities (mainly Wiki-academy and the WLM competition). Tomer A. -- Talk
• Budget alignment with initiatives. A grants program is mentioned in the budget-- can you expand on this program (objectives, alignment with movement goals, key activities / milestones, etc)
  • Translated from here:

Vision: Wikimedia Israel will assist free content activists in starting their projects.

Idea: Sometimes, free content activists have ideas for half-baked projects. According to the need, the chapter will allow these activists to ask for an initial grant to start the project (seed-funding). With this, the chapter will support grass-roots free content projects and will be a greenhouse for such.

Tomer A. -- Talk

We understand that WMIL is having a strategic planning seminar in November, but hope that you might be able to provide some additional detail in advance of that.

Let us know if you have any questions related to these inquiries. Otherwise, we look forward to getting your responses here on the talk page. Thank you!

Meerachary TBG (talk) 00:09, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

Question about volunteer participation

Hello WMIL, These are some general questions that I am asking to all the EEs regarding volunteer participation. All the entities have stated in their proposals that low turnover of volunteers in both online and offline activities have been a major obstacle for them. Most of them have also expressed concerns that reducing number of volunteers is a threat to their organizational effectiveness and to the movement as a whole. I feel we need to have short term, midterm and long term plans to tackle this problem.

Does your organization have -

1. Any short term plan to recruit new volunteers for both online and off line activities?
2. Any midterm plan to train, motivate and convert them into regular contributors?
3. Any long term plan to retain them and continue the growth?

If you already have any such plans, please mention them and elaborate how your plan/s is (are) going to achieve the goal of recruiting new volunteers, converting them into regular contributors and retain the volunteers as well as maintain the growth? - Ali Haidar Khan (Tonmoy) (talk) 17:36, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

In the past we have tried several means to attract new volunteers to the chapter. With that expereince and after running several projects we learnt that volunteers are attracted to success. Following every successful project we see an increase in the number of volunteers for future projects. We do however believe that building a good, longstanding relationships with the editors community and good domestic reputation is an important factor in turning one time visitors (for example in a conference or an edit-marathon) into volunteers.

As a side note I would like say that while I believe these are legitimate question, which should recieve the appropriate focus, I believe that they are outside the scope of the FDC and are orthogonal to the distribution of funds. Tomer A. -- Talk 12:54, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Tomer for sharing your thoughts. Actually, the basis for FDC recommendation is to consider whether the requested funds are going to be used in line with the strategic goals of Wikimedia movement. I've found that, most of the entities have expressed concerns about volunteer participation which is directly related to strategic goals. That's why I wanted to see how the entities are tackling the issue. Hope I made my point. Thanks once again for replying. - Ali Haidar Khan (Tonmoy) (talk) 19:03, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Staff

It says you employ 0.5 staff? Half a staff member? Please clarify... Oaktree b (talk) 01:27, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

A part time staffer. Matanya (talk) 06:41, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

and it was not clear what their current salary is, nor was it clear what the salary would be for the full time general manager. is that his/her gross or cost to organization? and if cost to org, how much is the person's gross? Soosim (talk) 13:28, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

How much work is being performed for that salary? Is there a shekel-per-hour estimate or anything like that? Rickyrab (talk) 16:37, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

The exact numbers were not asked and hence were not filled. See here for future employement costs. The current salary for the projects' manager is 3,000 NIS for 50% position (22 work hours a week). This is a bit over mininum wage and is considered appropriate for such a position. All numbers are gross salary, the net salary is dependant on different factors. Tomer A. -- Talk 13:02, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

I attempted to update the "0.5" to "0.5 (that is, one part time staffer)" as per Matanya, but the text visible to the public remained "0.5". How come? Rickyrab (talk) 16:42, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

I will answer all questions tomorrow (Israel time). Until then, I reverted the edit as per the timeline that prohibits editing the proposals after the submission date. Tomer A. -- Talk 19:24, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Tomer -- you can make changes to the proposal form using strikethrough to indicate that something has been deleted. To clarify the staff costs -- the 0.5 (part time) FTE is your current staff, at 3,000 NIS / year. Then why are current staff costs 18,000 NIS when you only have one person on staff at 50%? Can you clarify? Meerachary TBG (talk) 19:13, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Because she started to work only on July. 6 months X 3,000 per month = 18,000. I didn't understand the numeric problem. And I think we need to correct the "Number of staff" to 1. --Itzike (talk) 19:54, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Got it, thank you Itzike. I'm used to salary meaning annual salary -- that makes sense! Meerachary TBG (talk) 20:21, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Re: Hard work :)

Would you mind clarifying what you mean by "hard work :)"? Rickyrab (talk) 16:33, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Of course. "Hard work" is the expectation that volunteers (including but not limited to the chapter's board members) will continue to contribute a large portion of their time (and as usualy happens, money) for achieving the chapters' goals. The smiley at the end of the sentence is my way of expressing my feeling that the question cannot be answered in the frame of a single cell on this table. Tomer A. -- Talk 13:09, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Table 4 - Measures of success

In the final column of Table 4 is a summary of measures of success for each project. Perhaps this is the same question asked above, but I'd be a lot more comfortable if there were specific goals. Otherwise I have little idea of what you're really planning to do.

e.g. "Each project will have a success tag, describing the amount of content it contributed and new editors participating." refer to numbers to be given AFTER the fact. Couldn't you at least try to estimate what types of numbers you could use to say "this was a success" BEFORE the year starts, i.e. now. After all, the money is given before the project, so an estimate (and just an estimate) should also be given beforehand. Smallbones (talk) 00:59, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Obviously the success criteria should be given before the projects starts. However, what you're asking us is to give a criteria 8 months in advance. That is waaaay too early. As for what we are planning to do, it is in our annual program plan, I do not understand how does people expect us to know if our glam cooperation with the library of the University of Haifa will release 50 images or 75. Tomer A. -- Talk 20:05, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

WCA and Misc

Wikimedia Chapters Association and MISC is budgeted at 12,333 USD. What kind of role does WM Israel play in WCA and how is the fund worked out? --Arjunaraoc (talk) 18:25, 20 October 2012 (UTC)

WMIL signed on the WCA charter in Berlin, and our boards members are very involve in the establishment steps of the WCA. As the WCA hadn't decided yet on his budget, WMIL decided to save about 5% of her budget to support the association. If anything will be decided else regarding the WCA, of course this money will be return. --Itzike (talk) 14:31, 21 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks Itzike for the response.--Arjunaraoc (talk) 02:24, 26 October 2012 (UTC)

Questions about current cash position and monthly spending patterns

Please clarify WMIL's cash position and usual monthly expenditures.

1. What is WMIL's current cash position (as of 30 September 2012)? In other words, what is the total balance in all of WMIL's accounts (including operating reserves and cash for WMIL's programs and operations)?

   About 152,000 NIS (+-). --Itzike (talk) 21:57, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

2. What are WMIL's typical monthly expenditures? We would like a sense of about how much money WMIL spends in an ordinary month during the current fiscal year.

   Can't answer this question. Most of our expenses this year are for projects - mean that there are months when we have a lot of expenses (WLM, GLAM) and others when not. Since July we have one employee, and together with some other basic operations costs I can ASSUME about 1,5000$-2,000$ basic for each month. This will be change next year when we plan to professionalize our work, hiring projects manager\ED, office, legal, and ext.. --Itzike (talk) 21:57, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Let us know if the questions above require any additional clarification. Thank you, Wolliff (talk) 21:29, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Ratio salary/non salary cost

In 2013 budget you intend to spend 55 KUSD on salaries in a total budget or around 145 KUSD (ie 38% of your cost is related to salary). Could you elobarate what the other type of costs (?office space, travel?) is intended to be spend on?. Anders Wennersten (talk) 08:05, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

the information can be found here --Itzike (talk) 21:51, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Timeframe

The current timeframe for the funds request is '01/01/12-12/31/12' - presumably that's a mistake and should be 01/01/13-12/31/13 (i.e. 2013 rather than 2012)? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 16:04, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, of course. Tomer A. -- Talk 16:13, 30 October 2012 (UTC)