Talk:Individual Engagement Grants

Non-rolling applications

Hi, I object the implementation of accepting applications on a non-rolling basis. Most prospective grantees, especially individuals, have limited time, and may not necessarily have the capacity to undertake a project within the required time frame of WMF. Abbasjnr (talk) 21:04, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Hi Abbas! I understand your objection. What we learned with fellowships, though, and I think have seen with other programs in the movement as well as grants programs elsewhere, is that we get a lot more volunteer submissions when we put a deadline on proposals and actively invite people to get involved a couple of times each year, instead of just leaving them as an always open, submit whenever you want kind of thing. I can tell you with fellowships that we got almost 0 applications during "rolling-basis" periods, which surprised me at first because, like you, I tend to think doing things on flexible volunteer-friendly schedules as much as possible is a good practice. It just turns out that those people who want to apply only on a rolling basis mostly don't end up applying at all. Request for proposal periods also help to organize a process for evaluating and deciding who gets these grants, making sure that we're making the best use of volunteer reviewer's time. Because we would accept proposals 2x per year, I would hope that this would be often enough to accomodate varying volunteer capacities. But I wonder if we could bring the flexibility that you're looking for into the start-date rather than the submissions process, though. Meaning, if someone's grant application is accepted but they aren't available to undertake their project in the standard time-frame, I don't see why we couldn't delay the grant start-date to accomodate this a bit. Do you think that would help address the issue? Siko (talk) 21:38, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Improvements

Some quick thoughts off the cuff about possible improvements: (& Many more positive thoughts, I'll try to collate those later. I'm very glad this is being tried out.)

• It seems to me that the best grants that go unfilled are non-reimbursement project costs in the range of $100 - $5000. We are a volunteer community, and generally when someone feels a pain it's an expense they can't justify paying for out of pocket, not a sudden decision that they can't continue to do great things unless they are paid a wage-equivalent. (that's true for some people, but not the majority of cases). For instance: someone needs enough to bring on an intern for a $500/mo stipend, or to buy a small computer or big set of hard-drives to keep doing a series of development projects. For instance: a small community in bolivia need to cover the daily bus and cellphone costs of travelling to various towns to run a history- and local-knowledge project. For instance: it costs $1000 to build and staff a small computer- and phone-charging center in Chad that works as a useful hook to get people downloading and editing wikipedia.

• It would be good to see an explicit focus on getting more smaller grants out to places with smaller communities and quieter local economies.

• It would be good to see a focus on low-overhead simple process, because every step of bureaucracy makes it that much harder to translate (this page is still only in English), that much harder to communicate across language barriers, that much harder to evaluate. (cf. some of the greatly-extended back-and-forths we have had with grant recipients over a few thousand USD in the past.)

• There's an implicit assumption that each grant is high-overhead. I think that there can be great low-overhead grants. I don't see finding them through the iterative process discussed here: if the program starts out with the idea that it is only for such intensive proposals, (rather than, e.g.: an iterative discussion process among many participants, where the best ideas get support independent of the proposer and then everyone works out who and what needs ths upport and finalizes the amount requested.) I would guess think that smaller, lower-overhead grants would work better for a first half-year, and be easy to scale up. If there are people who need $30K for a project, they could apply for a smaller grant to get started, then potentially follow up with a larger grant in the next period (when on reflection that might be allowed.

And again: as we've seen with the fellows program one of the side effects of desigining a process with complexity is: Only people interested in jumping through those hoops apply. Only people good at hooping succeed. That group tends to form a community, which naturally is positive towards the process they a) thought was worth pursuing and b) succeeded at. Feedback on the second round comes mainly from those with a stake in the process, or those who worked at it but didn't quite make it, who are all in the same boat. So any significantly different points of view never really get heard again. In contrast, starting with smaller low-overhead grants would highlight that layer of interests and possibility, without alienating projects that need larger-chunk commitments of support.

• Anything our movement puts this much effort into that can't scale past ~20 people a year seems like a missed opportunity to me :-) Is there some way to encourage the community of people who want/need engagement grants to pick up some of the overhead and coordination involved? so that it gets easier to maintain as the number of people involved grows, not harder? Like the wiki itself...

An ideal system would be one that anyone could pipe funds into to support more global grants.

• Having a 'lower bound' for grant requests encourages the bulk of people whose needs fall somewhere below that line to ask for more than they need if they want support at all. Rather than the normal mode of community participation which is to ask for only what you need and to try to minimize that by getting local and regional support.

• Some found the fellows program to be a bit exclusive: the arbitrary cutoff: both in terms of commitment demanded and amount of compensation and expectation thrust upon recipients. Everyone fellow was a) treated a bit like a star, b) expected to do great things and have implicit community support c) getting lots of cash by community standards, sometimes for work that done to a lesser degree by others, who didn't apply or weren't as lucky, d) name-checked as representing a whole Sector of the Community (including those people who were just on the other side of the cutoff, who might have mixed feelings about the whole thing; or people whose identity and pride in the community is precisely that they didn't need external funding to do the extensive and tireless work they do), e) drawn into a narrative about needing 'a bit of funding to support spending enough time to have a lasting impact', even if that's not where they were coming from.

Most all of this potential awkwardness goes away if there is a long tail of smaller levels of support.

Thanks for posting these details and throwing them open for suggestions! –SJ talk  21:54, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for these thoughts, SJ! Definitely see your point about the lower bound, I don't know that we necessarily need to have a lower limit at all. But, in terms of having a long tail for smaller grants that don't include paying people for their time, several of the projects examples you mention seem to me could already be potentially funded via the Wikimedia Grants Program, no? A small community in Bolivia who needs funds to cover the daily bus and cellphone costs of travelling to various towns to run a history- and local-knowledge project should already be able to apply for a WM Grant, as far as I understand. If not, I'd be curious to hear more explicitly why not - is the issue only whether the grant funds are disbursed before or after they're spent? We should try to deal with that w/in the existing grants program, if so. If the issue is more that people don't know about these types of grants or that the level of bureaucracy makes them difficult to access, as WMF gets more focused on grantmaking in general, I expect we can and should focus on making it easier for individuals to access all types of grants available to them...we'll get better at communicating about the grant types and processing requests and disbursing payments and all sorts of fun operational things. Agree with you that aspiring to scaleabiliy and low-overhead grants is a really good thing, and these are perfect reminders to have now. A main reason WMF's grantmaking team thinks that engagement grants should be separated out into another program from Wikimedia grants that can be made to orgs or individuals is because it was felt that the community would want separation of grants that can include payment for people's time from grants that don't pay for people's time. I feel like this makes some things simpler and some things more complex, personally, but I'm willing to experiment and see what comes of it. Looking forward to hearing more of your thoughts whenever you get around to posting! Siko (talk) 00:07, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Defining criteria

In one of your criteria, you say that projects are expected to aim for having an online impact. Could we make this more broader, and say that projects should be mission-aligned? I'm saying this because, given that WMF is narrowing its focus (and dedicating most of its resources to editor retention = online impact), then I think that the Grants should give room for other movement entities to undertake other mission-aligned activities (e.g. Offline Wikipedia, which hasn't been receiving a lot of support). Abbasjnr (talk) 07:03, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Nice catch, thanks! I've updated the language a bit based on this point, wonder if that helps at all. We do intentionally want to encourage online impact somewhat, because most WMF grants today focus on in-person activities (workshops, edit-a-thons, etc) and we'd like to experiment with ways to make increasingly diverse kinds of project grants. But something like Offline Wikipedia makes great sense as a potential grant, we wouldn't want to prohibit someone for proposing something like this. Hope we can find a balance between encouraging new things and also picking up activities again that haven't been receiving enough support. Siko (talk) 19:27, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks :-) Abbasjnr (talk) 12:24, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Generalizing and streamlining microgrants

Hi Siko, Asaf et al.,

I agree with SJ above that there are lots of important opportunities that I would qualify as "microgrants" in the <$500 range. I'd like to better understand what your long-term take is on these types of grants, and how you see the scope of the program evolve. Right now it looks like the primary microgrants process are the participation grants for participating in a non-Wikimedia event. The primary grants process has a lower bound of $500 in the criteria. The individual engagement grants process on the other hand appears to be explicitly targeting larger projects with a duration of 6 months or longer.

At the same time, some chapters have structured microgrants processes of their own, sometimes funded by larger WMF grants. The one that I'm thinking of here is for example the Wikimedia CZ mediagrant project funded by WMF (Grants:WM CZ/Mediagrant; most recent report). Looking at their report, I'm impressed that relatively little money (<$7K) appears to have been spent to support expenses related to the acquisition of >10,000 photos on priority topics.

I'm also noticing that they're using a dedicated open source tracker (code) for tracking requests. This seems like a more streamlined and optimized process for microgrants than wiki pages, especially considering that some data needs to be made private (digitized/attached receipts) but should nonetheless be accessible to trusted volunteers who approve the reimbursement.

This process reminds me of other successful large scale processes for reimbursing volunteer expenses. For instance, the Fedora project (which served as inspiration for the online/campus ambassadors of our own Education Program) has a lightweight reimbursement procedure for their ambassadors networks. See for example the reimbursement guidelines for the EMEA region. They too use a request tracker for this purpose (example for EMEA).

Are there plans/goals to expand/generalize the existing participation grants program further, or to offer other types of microgrants? Here are example categories I can think of:

• travel for photography and research;
• reimbursement of expenses for literature and research;
• equipment purchases, especially for low-income contributors.

Certainly each new area carries risks and needs to be carefully assessed. Incentives like this can have a distorting effect, to be sure. Looking at the mediagrant example, have there been negative effects of having such a microgrant program in place? Perhaps it would be worthwhile to bring together some of the practitioners from chapters who've developed these programs, as well as other open source organizations, with WMF, a sort of grantmaking summit?

My personal intution is that scale of both impact and engagement will come when we can say that we've disbursed funds to support >1,000 volunteers, rather than >10 long term projects.

Relatedly, are there infrastructure needs, such as the further development of an expenses tracker, which we should clearly identify as we go into the 2013-14 Annual Plan cycle?

I look forward to seeing these programs evolve.--Eloquence (talk) 07:26, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

Useful questions, all. We have talked about microgrants, and will be keeping that discussion going and these ideas in mind, though I don't feel like we're ready to commit to a clearly defined path here just yet. Asaf, Winifred, etc likely will have more thoughts as they've got much more experience in these particular grantmaking areas to-date, but my general sense is: there are a few operational pieces of the puzzle that need to be put in place before we're able to do microgrants really well. With the narrowed focus on grantmaking and a growing team, we can now start working down grants operational debt (just as WMF is making great strides in the technical dept dept, yippee)! Microgrants only have impact to the degree that you're setup to scale them, obviously. One piece is tracking, as you've identified - FLUXX, our new grants tracking system that Asaf is working towards, may be part of the solution to this, so getting that setup is the first step to see what else is needed. Then there is the payments piece, operationalizing our systems so that we're able to disburse funds quickly and easily - disbursement is still a non-negligible staff cost at this point. Then there is a communications aspect. When the Participation Support Program was setup, it was expected that there would be a lot of requests but in fact the program appears to be somewhat underutilized. This may simply be because most people don't know about it, or there may be other reasons related to what people really need funds for. I'd like to see us improve our communications about grants availability to Wikimedians in general, which would be important for growing any microgranting system. As the team is evaluating effectiveness of all WMF grantmaking, we'll be looking at the participation support program, and out of that we'll likely learn a good deal more about what the impact of these grants as an aggregate are and where there is most room to grow in microgrants. And at that point we should be better setup operationally and as a team to be able to make good budgeting decisions to try more things for the coming year. So, lets keep this conversation going :-) Siko (talk) 19:01, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

I second everything Siko said above, including thanking you for the feedback. :)

1. An easier process is very much a concrete goal we have been working towards, and one we expect to improve greatly in 2013. There have been a number of boring administration tasks (essentially an admin debt stretching back several years) that we have only just finished paying down several weeks ago, so we have a little more resources to make progress on those process improvements now.
2. As for extending grants to a thousand individuals -- as you note, we have been supporting a number of microgrant programs within chapter grant budgets, and that still seems the preferred model for countries with functioning chapters, for both technical and cultural reasons. Equipment purchases, in particular, pose a difficult due diligence problem, in scale. We may certainly experiment with changing or removing the minimum grant amount, but have no more details to share at present.
3. One thing we know we will be doing is an easier, more streamlined process for supporting small events (meetups, workshops), via a simple (perhaps form-based) application process, checking off items from a template (e.g. got free venue, need funds for refreshments, and 10 T-shirts), much like the Fedora and Mozilla SWAG programs. After a little more planning, we will share our plan publicly for discussion.

All of the above would be out of scope for this proposed program. Asaf Bartov (WMF Grants) talk 19:44, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

Differences to fellowships

After re-reading this page and part of the talk, I still don't understand what are the substantial differences from this system and the fellowships: the page gives only formal explanations on how the WMF is less responsible of what these individuals do, but doesn't address the real issues, that is:

1. how this spending for WMF's money is consistent with its mission (the fellowships were supposedly shut down to "narrow focus", but despite some appreciated effort I don't see a shift to activities benefiting all Wikimedia projects rather than a single wiki or little more);
2. why the WMF should throw its weight in internal community processes by nominating some sort of of plenipotentiary/"commissario ad acta" tasked with "reforming process X" or whatever, potentially (or necessarily) giving more power to a side of some community conflict and in general "rewarding" some users doing so-called "community management" work over others.

In short, this seems the very same thing as fellowships, with the implementation of some legal clarifications (which e.g. Anthere suggested on the very first day) on fellow's not being staff, and a sprinkling of committee supervision.
Additionally, it's unclear why "participation support" should be separate from this program, or what are the differences. A "participation support" is the very same thing as an "individual engagement grant", except that the time span is more limited, so that expenses reimbursements have a bigger share of the grant and "wages" a lower one (per diem can be considered a mere reimbursement or not, depending on context); moreover, that project is even more lacking about problem (1) above – while not having big problems with (2) because of the lower overlap with community's activities –: so this seems a very confusing multiplication of names and processes which can only decrease their transparency. --Nemo 10:18, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

there is very little that a grant of this size could address that would benefit "all" WMF projects; on a small scale, all that can be done is to benefit something specific

I don't think the money involved is enough to bias the direction of the movement, especially since there are are now a number of other funding sources within the movement.--and, as is highly desirable, some of these are from parts of the movement with divergent views about priorities.

That is is similar to fellowships is exactly the point: I hope is was intended to be. The withdrawal of fellowship was, imo, an unbelievably foolish and short-sighted decision that would cause substantial detriment to the part of the movement we want to develop the most-- individual initiatives. (the argument that it interfered with staff work is topsy-turvey: the staff should be working on things the volunteers think important; it is the staff-devised projects which have been more likely to have problems.) Almost all important parts of our activities have been initially individual small scale initiatives, and many continue to be that way. Most are done without funding, by the volunteers, and that should continue. Not everything can be, and it is highly desirable there be something between being an unpaid volunteer and a WP contractor or staff member. I see the purpose of this as carrying on that practice, and I commend Siko very highly for developing this.

At the same time, there is also a place for microgrants, as SJ suggested above. These should be handled separately and informally--I hadn't seen the Fedora system before, but it seems a very good one, requiring the absolute minimum of red tape and bureaucracy. Something on the order of $50,000 a year could go a very long way here, and that is considerably less than 1% , not just of the foundation's funds, but of the foundation's unspent annual surplus. DGG (talk) 02:46, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

I didn't really speak of bias, it's more about effectiveness. And I disagree on your point, something specific can still be something across all wikis (or many wikis). Also, I've no idea who said that "it interfered with staff work".

Let's see what WMF staff thinks about this new scheme being just a "continuation of fellowships by other means" as you say... --Nemo 20:36, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Hi Nemo! As just one staff perspective, I don't think I have anything substantially different to say beyond what's posted on the main page, but I'll try to offer some clarification of those thoughts regardless. I have never heard it said that fellowships were shut down because they were considered inconsistent w/ WMF's mission. Sue said in her recommendations to the board that all programs being taken off the table were not being taken off because they weren't thought to be valuable or because they were off-mission. As I've understood it (and I've spent a fair amount of time talking with Sue and other staff about this, as you can imagine), the main issue is that WMF needs to focus staff time on key focus areas: Tech (visual editor, mobile, editor retention), and Grantmaking. In Sue's recommendations and meta discussions, she also said that the hope was that some of the kinds of projects that the community members we funded via fellowships used to take on might be supported via grantmaking instead. WMDE has a Community Project Budget that accomplishes something similar in this grantmaking capacity for German editors, but many other chapters do not, and so we still think that it is within the scope of WMF's grantmaking focus to help support individual editors to accomplish some good projects that they might not otherwise be able to accomplish. It is from that rationale that the idea of Individual Engagement Grants comes.

I don't think this new program is just the same as fellowships, there are some clear differences. For example, at WMF, fellowships were not structured as grants. This new program will be structured as project-based grants to individuals. This is intentionally done to avoid the issues that fellowships were believed to have had. A grantmaking strucure should also open up new horizons for different kinds of projects and different ways of choosing projects than fellowships. Whether you think they are large or small differences may be a matter of opinion - if Nemo and DGG seem to fall on opposite sides of the spectrum of this issue, I guess I might be somewhere in between. Fellowships are a known type of individual grantmaking in many foundations, though, so of course there are also similarities as well as differences.

In terms of who chooses these projects: We would like to see as much community involvement as possible in selecting grantees, hence the importance of a community discussion piece and the committee piece of the review process. If you see this as WMF nominating henchmen or giving added power to one side of a community faction, that worries me. I'd like to have an example of when a fellowship project that we funded in the past actually did this - which factions were supported to the disadvantage of other editors? Let's learn from whatever concrete examples you can provide and make sure it doesn't happen again. I'd also ask you to consider joining the committee, Nemo - please be bold and sign up to help ensure this does not happen :-)

The participation support program is an existing type of grant that has its own specific criteria, scale, and scope, and was established in partnership with WMDE. It solely funds expenses related to attending a non-Wikimedia event. There is no one-size-fits all approach to grantmaking, and depending on a grant's size and purpose, one review process may be more appropriate than another. I do very much share your concern that as we grow our grantmaking programs, it is going to get more confusing. It is already confusing. We should think carefully about how to make things simple and easy for grantseekers and grantmakers, though, and I'm not sure that just lumping everything into 1 program is the best way to begin.

Finally, while small-ish grants can't, and shouldn't be expected to, impact every wiki, and they should aim for impact somewhere specific, they can also have learnings or adaptability across wikis. So why don't we, together, try to choose projects whenever possible that might have adaptable impact for several wikis? I'd also like to think that we're looking at grantmaking as a whole as a movement strategy for having impact across many projects at once. If you add up many little grants and many different grantmaking programs, each funding projects in many different areas, it starts to make a fabric that can cover the movement and all wikis. Or, at least, that's where I imagine we're going, anyway :-) Siko (WMF) (talk) 22:05, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Hello Siko, thanks for your answer.

As for your first two paragraphs, yes, I understand the formal reasoning but I'm wondering about what's the substance. On "large or small differences", DGG wasn't on the opposite side of the spectrum, he said "That i[t] is similar to fellowships is exactly the point".

I don't want to even start checking if any of the previous fellowships gave more power to one side over another, and as a committee member I wouldn't know where to start, because there are currently no evaluation criteria for this. What I'd like to see is some criteria to say that work X is heterogeneous to normal (say) "community management" work done by volunteers, and hence "deserves" or even requires to be compensated. If there are no such criteria, by definition the decisions will be discretionary and grants will be benefiting a part of a community (the individual in question, in the simplest case) over another (all the others doing homogeneous/equivalent works).

Finally. Yes, maybe in the end we'll have one grant per wiki and "benefit" all of them... As for the criteria, "potential [...] to [...] be adapted for other projects" is nice, but fellowships required the same and we've only seen extremely specific work, or jobs whose conclusion was "you should do the same on your wiki" where "the same" was what, another fellowship? Being of general use is just one criterion among others, and it's even somewhat in contrast with the pre-eminent goal #2, "Support community leadership to solve community issues", because leadership pushes people to do something, while serving many communities would mean doing a service to them by producing something all/many/several of them can and want to use. --Nemo 17:13, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

• Nemo, for me as an outsider, I also had a hard time trying to figure out what Sue intended to accomplish with the change from fellowships to grants. But Siko has touched on something that I think is potentially very helpful. It seems that the community will have a far greater role in deciding which grant requests are funded. This is different from the fellowship program in which WMF decided which fellowships were funded although the community did have some input. One advantage of this change is that grant recipients will be less attached to WMF and therefore have less potential for being perceived as colluding with WMF against community interests. Also, since the community or some committee of community members will have a vote on what grants are funded, I think the theory is that the grants will be more tightly focused on what the community perceives as being beneficial to its interests at a particular place and time. Am I correct in my reading of this, Siko? --Pine^✉ 08:45, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

  Yes, that's what I called "a sprinkling of committee supervision" above, sorry for being cynical as usual. --Nemo 17:13, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

  @Pine, I think that's a reasonable assessment, and @Nemo I hope that feedback and evaluation of the process will show whether it turns out to be a "sprinkling" or actually meaningful. I expect that it will take people who really care being willing to step up and get involved in meaningful ways. One challenge ahead that keeps me awake at night, based on discussions with the folks working on WMDE's Community Budget program: selection by committee consensus can take a very long time, and potential grantees lose interest/availability if selection takes several months. We're going to try a fairly tight timeline and I'm thinking about a somewhat structured review process involving ranking of applications and then some sort of shortlist recommendations for WMF to do due diligence on before grants are finalized, to see if we can avoid losing grantees in the selection process. At the end of the pilot, I trust those involved or watching will tell us how well that worked or what should be changed for future rounds :-) Siko (talk) 18:18, 7 January 2013 (UTC)