Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2016-2017 round 1/Wikimedia Serbia/Staff proposal assessment

Comments

Firstly, thanks for the evaluations. I'd like to comment on some of the parts of this assessment.

It is worth noting that in effect we plan on having 4 FTE staff, while having 5 FTE staff on our payroll: 1 person is on a maternity leave, which lasts for about a year after childbirth, so it's likely that she will be absent throughout 2017; all of her expenses will be covered by the state, as it's paid maternity leave.

As for fundraising locally, in order not to rely exclusively on APG funding, it is indeed hard to do so in this environment. We are however doing some basic work in that department, having recently applied for a state grant. We are looking into ways to diversify our income (it turns out that it's nigh impossible to set up donations for people abroad, ie in diaspora), but it's nonetheless hard to come up with a certain figure that we can place in our APG proposal for the share of non-WMF income. What we have started doing is listing in-kind donations of all kinds and we will continue to do so.

Gender-related work is something we might tackle again next year (after having put it on pause, when the leading volunteer in that field left the organization), but it's not strategically all too important to us, and as it has already been outlined numerous times before (and now again), we need to focus on several big things, instead of spreading our work "all over the place", so in those terms, I don't think it's fair to expect us to have major activities with gender-related issues at this point.

We are aware that our current strategy expires in about a year and we will definitely devote some time to creating a new strategy document that we hope will be better, more ambitious and for a longer time period. If definitely is in the plans, but we have admittedly omitted it from the proposal and I apologize for that.

I would like to point out that, while the increase in budget has been spread throughout our projects, it is worth mentioning that we have also budgeted for increased salaries for most of the staff, as per the custom of staff appreciation and motivation. Some other expenses have been tweaked according to "reality".

The perennial comment of our plans not being focussed enough could perhaps be explained by our efforts to incorporate as much as possible the people and groups willing to be a part of our movement. Namely, we always create a process for submitting grants before our annual plan is submitted, so that we could hear new ideas and find interesting people that are willing to help our movement. That is the main reason why you can always see a myriad of activities that are loosely related. And we think that even though those activities might not be tied together, they are equally important, because we are introducing new people to our community, expanding our reach to new demographics, spreading the idea of Wikimedia to people who have never been exposed to our mission before etc. And the point is that they are doing these projects within Wikimedia Serbia, but we are there only to help them with resources, trainings, and similar stuff, but it's the volunteers who are doing all the work and that doesn't require much staff investment on our part, especially in contrast to GLAM and Education work, where we have many staff hours invested. That's why we believe it's worth having many smaller loosely related projects — they don't require much human resource investment on our part, but can be quite beneficial to our impact and movement as a whole.

As for underspending in previous years, I'd also like to make a quick comment about that. Somehow, as I understand it, gross underspending seems to have a negative connotation in our movement. Surely, it might be a reflection of bad estimations and projections, but it can also mean failed projects and less than anticipated activity. Of course, like others, we have had some of that in recent years, but I daresay we've been doing better with each year. However, I would also like to point out that we, as a board and more recently as an office, have been quite meticulous about spending. For more than two years now, we have been scrutinizing all our expenditures and have tried to make efforts to cut costs wherever necessary. We are firm believers that, since we are using donors' money (and we're talking about millions of small donations here), we have great responsibilities to spend adequately and without splurging and in many cases, especially in the current year, we have made many savings in our budget. With that, we are giving back to the Foundation the money we saved by smart decisions and hopefully, that could be used to fund other great projects around the world. In other words, we implore you to take into consideration the fact that we take spending WMF money very seriously and that underspending could be well explained with that in mind, and especially since we don't really have failed projects this year.

Again, thanks for the review. It's important to reflect on what we have done and what needs to be done better in order to be a more efficient and more impactful organization. But it's also important to understand our context and reasoning behind some of our decisions, so I hope that this set of comments on my part have made things at least a bit clearer, so that you better understand our grant proposal. Of course, we are here for additional questions or comments. --FiliP ██ 23:41, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Hello Filip! Thank you for this information, that I will be reviewing more thoroughly tomorrow (SF time ;)) as I've been travelling the past two days. Delphine (WMF) (talk) 08:35, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Delphine, I feel this has been totally ignored, in lieu of the recently announced recommendations and I can't say that this is a sting to our operation and I feel disappointed. --FiliP ██ 06:45, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Hello Filip. It hasn't been ignored. I understand your frustration and I am sorry you are disappointed. Let's try and connect soon? Delphine (WMF) (talk) 06:49, 22 November 2016 (UTC)