Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Wiki Loves Monuments 2021 in Malta

WCM was contacted by Davit from the Rapid Grants team on Aug 4th told that unless we submit a report for our pending Wikipedia 20 grant, we would be ineligible on this for grant application for Wiki Loves Monuments 2021 in Malta. We immediately took action on this that same day and emailed Davit as well as rapidgrants@wikimedia.org.

We completed our Wikipedia 20 grant report the next day on Aug 5th and posted this to Davit with a cc to rapidgrants@wikimedia.org too.

Today, Aug 16 we received another email from Davit saying that if we don't respond by Aug 19 he will have to mark our current proposal for WLM in Malta (i.e. this grant application) as ineligible for funding. I again responded immediately (today) with a cc to rapidgrants@wikimedia.org. Either our emails are not coming through or the whole things is one big miscommunication between emails and Meta wiki talk pages etc.

We believe that we are now eligible for this application to be considered as expected, because we are fully compliant. Thanks. --ToniSant (talk) 15:53, 16 August 2021 (UTC)

Comments from DSaroyan (WMF)

Hello ToniSant, thanks again for submitting this grant application and for running this contest in Malta. We have reviewed the grant proposal and have only one comment:

• We think that the prize budget is high for this local contest. However, we also acknowledge that we have funded a similar prize budget in the past. That's why we will be funding the same budget for the WLM in Malta as last year (~1,700 USD). We kindly request to reduce the total requested budget by 300 EUR. You can perhaps do it by reducing the "Printing & framing of top ten entries" expense, printing photos for top three winners only.

Looking forward to hearing from you. Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 14:11, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

@DSaroyan (WMF):Thank you for your comments. We appreciate your concerns and have taken onboard the suggestion to only print the top 3 rather than the top 10. This is reflected in the new figures now on the grant application. Mindful of the Euro currency exchange rates, we believe that the new total requested in close enough to the ~1,700 USD budget you're proposing, and hope that you agree. -- ToniSant (talk) 15:07, 23 August 2021 (UTC)

Final decision?

@DSaroyan (WMF) - would it be possible to get a final decision on this grant before the contest starts on Wednesday September 1st? Many thanks. -- ToniSant (talk) 12:58, 30 August 2021 (UTC)