Grants talk:IdeaLab/ARWP small individual grants pilot

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Past experience[edit]

I don't see a mention of Wikimedia Deutschland's past microgrant work here, are you building on past experiences? --Nemo 09:12, 25 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, we were inspired by WMDE's book purchases program and took it as a novel approach for The Wikipedia Library to give access through more than just journals. WMDE's program is run by the chapter, however, and the big difference with the ARWP pilot program is that it's microgrants funded by WMF, run by an IEG grant in The Wikipedia Library, and locally coordinated by Arabic Wikipedia Volunteers. So it's a similar outcome (book purchases) but a different model. This model has the benefit of scaling nicely across multiple communities because it leverages local organizers to make purchases. Most importantly, while the book purchase idea wasn't novel, it was exactly what the Arabic community requested when we asked them what kinds of microgrants they would find most useful. We are testing this model in ARWP and , if it is successful, aspire to expand it to other communities. In doing so we would approach existing programs like WMDE's and see if we can collaborate and join forces. Cheers, Ocaasi (talk) 19:43, 25 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I've spent time talking w/ WMDE's staff about that program (which is mainly conducted via email), and it's worth pointing out one key difference here is that we're playing with the idea of not having staff be the ones responsible for buying/shipping things, because that isn't really scalable internationally, although it probably works ok for a chapter that can focus on just 1 country/language. The idea will be to share what we learn from this pilot back to WMDE and others too, of course. Siko (WMF) (talk) 20:58, 25 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Double shipping[edit]

Ugh.[1] I don't want to enroll as coordinator, but feel free to email me for especially difficult cases: Amazon shipping to Milan is very fast and cheap, and Italy is historically in good terms with most Arab countries so there is always a way to ship something from here. --Nemo 12:50, 20 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]