GAC it up: Introducing the Grant Advisory Committee
In my presentation on the new Wikimedia Grants program, at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin last March, I mentioned the intention to create a Grant Advisory Committee (its friends can call it the GAC) to help the movement generate effective program plans and bring community experience and perspectives to bear on the evaluation and assessment of funding requests.
Today we announce the formation of this Grant Advisory Committee, and thank all the Wikimedians who volunteered their time and good will to help the movement in yet another way.
The committee’s goals are twofold:
1. Encourage and mentor chapters and other groups to:
- Learn about and understand the Wikimedia Grants program
- Draw up compelling project plans with an emphasis on strategy alignment and measures of success
- Request funding, i.e. submit a grant request on Meta
2. Help the Foundation evaluate requested grants, not by a yes/no vote, but by deliberation and evaluation of strengths and weaknesses of individual proposals in public, i.e. on the Talk pages of the proposals. The aggregate experience and know-how represented by the committee should be able to provide excellent feedback and assessment of proposed projects and plans, and thereby help the Foundation decide how the movement’s resources may best be allocated.
I think an important aspect of the Wikimedia Grants program in general, and of the GAC’s work in particular, is the fact that it is done in public. Grantmaking, like most activities involving money, tends to happen behind closed doors: money is a sensitive topic, real names need to be used for the actual transactions, there are legal aspects, etc. But the Wikimedia way is one of public conversation, and I intend to devote attention to ensuring as much of the debate about grants and grantmaking does indeed happen in public.
I am pleased to be able to introduce this new avenue for community involvement in strategic decisions, and I look forward to working with the GAC to strengthen chapters and groups worldwide, and further our mission through judicious use of funds.
Your suggestions and feedback are most welcome. Please don’t hesitate to submit a grant request, comment on this post, or contact me directly.
Asaf Bartov, Head of Global South Relationships, asaf@wikimedia.org, User:Ijon
First – you could make it easier to leave a comment. This site is tweaked to look like mediawiki but I have to get a wordpress login to comment – I can’t use my Wikimedia login!
Second – In all grant making the problem is that, if you aren’t careful, grants go to people who are good at making grant applications rather than the people who will do most with the money; on the other hand having a good idea isn’t enough – I come up with lots of good ideas but I’m crap at implementation. I suppose being organised enough to make an application could be a good basic threshold for being organised enough to trust with the money.
So, Process:
Site where people can draft a new proposal. This should be a wiki so a team can collaborate on drafting the proposal, with a discussion page where others can comment and make suggestions. I don’t think the division between the proposal team and the commenters needs to be coded into the software – the proposal team should be able to police this using the standard wiki tools. The GAC will need to evolve best practice for their members – when should they comment here?
When the proposal is ready for first submission a the fixed version url is sent to the GAC. GAC discussion happens. No reason why this can’t be on the Proposal discussion page (If there are problems with doing it that way then look at the problems, after they happen, and figure out how to cope with them).
The proposal continuosly evolves until approved with URLs listed for ‘frozen’ versions (and diffs between these) if needed.
Where a project has a number of stages with approvals for each stage then a Project team page can be created.
My guess at things a Proposal should include:
* Team list and responsibilities
* what you have done already
* What you are proposing to do if you only had some money
* Budget
* metrics – Is there something we can measure to see how successful you are?
I understand your sentiments and Wikimedia’s Grants program is becoming more and more transparent as time moves on. As you suggested, the GAC team is reviewing the open grants and have actually commented on the respectie grants pages. Regarding your point of having good ideas but poor implementation, we have started up a Grants Bakery page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Bakery where we will try our best to (fully) bake your half-baked ideas.