Grants talk:Project/Rapid/AWM/Joint Mathematics Meetings 2020

Application received

Hello, LittleDart; thank you for submitting this grant request. We will be reviewing it in the coming days; please keep an eye on this talk page and on your email inbox as we may be communicating with you about the proposal. If you have any questions in the meantime, please email us at rapidgrants@wikimedia.org. Best regards, MMontes (WMF) (talk) 09:48, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Comments from WMF

Hello again, LittleDart. I have now had a chance to read through your grant request. I have the following comments:

1. Even though the new funding guidelines communicated to you by email come into effect on August 1st, Rapid Grants started moving away from covering travel and conference expenses in the last few months. This means that Rapid Grants has stopped funding airfare/transportation, accommodation and conference registration costs for organizers or for participants, as well as room fees for events happening within conferences. We also understand that you worked on this proposal before these changes were obvious to everyone. To be fair both to other grantees with similar requests who have been asked to modify them, as well as to you, I can think of the following possibilities:

- Rapid Grants can fund the room fee, coffee break and promotional materials for this conference.

- If lack of Rapid Grants support to cover registration fees and travel for organizers and participants means this editathon can no longer happen, you can withdraw this proposal and we can discuss a reallocation for editathons you can run locally, or the return of funds to WMF.

Best regards, MMontes (WMF) (talk) 13:11, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Thank you MMontes (WMF), I will need to talk with some other people and get back to you on this which could take a few days. For the future, are there other grants from Wikimedia that would cover those type of expenses? LittleDart (talk) 23:20, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Hello, LittleDart; I am afraid that I am not in a position to give you a certain answer for that because other grant programs within WMF are still working to align their new funding guidelines with the Movement Strategy 2020 process. (Rapid Grants got aligned earlier because of the monthly deadlines and turnaround; other WMF grants have less frequent deadlines). Once the new funding guidelines are announced for the other programs, their pages on Meta will be updated and emails will be sent to grantee communities.

That said, I can share my general intuition: the scope of the project you propose (traveling to an academic conference and hosting an editathon there) is unlikely to fit the scope of the larger grant programs. Conference and event grants are for Wikimedia affiliate-hosted events, not for attending others'. Project grants require sustained work beyond a single event. Up until recently, Rapid Grants was the only grants programme (outside of the Annual Plan grants with long lists of items for more established movement entities) that funded conference travel to host editathons. However, after the Movement Strategy discussions and an in-depth analysis of the last years of Rapid Grants, WMF has decided to move away from travel and equipment grants to focus all efforts on local initiatives.

Please ping me and/or the Rapid Grants Program Officer WJifar (WMF) when you and your colleagues have decided on the best way to move forward.

Regards, MMontes (WMF) (talk) 07:54, 18 July 2019 (UTC)

Thank you MMontes (WMF) for giving me time to talk to others. It looks like we can still do this without the travel/registration coverage. 13:27, 23 July 2019 (UTC)

Grant request approved

Hello, LittleDart; thank you for addressing our comments and requests. We are approving a grant for 750 USD to cover the room/equipment/internet fee at the conference center, the coffee and snacks for participants, and the printing of advertisement material. 322.09 USD of this grant will be covered by the underspend from your Symposium 2019 grant. We are looking forward to reading the contributions from your editathon, MMontes (WMF) (talk) 02:26, 1 August 2019 (UTC)

== Thank you. LittleDart (talk) 14:37, 9 August 2019 (UTC)