Grants talk:PEG/Ada Initiative, Inc./AdaCamp DC Funding

This may seem an odd question, given that my chapter sponsored the AdaCamp in Melbourne and I was an enthusiastic proponent of the idea, but the sponsorship was much less than the $10k being requested here. Put simply, what is the expected payoff for the Wikimedia movement here? I'm all in favour of bringing people together in our movement, but is holding a conference alongside ours really the most efficient and cost effective way to do that? Craig Franklin (talk) 09:06, 24 May 2012 (UTC).

This is a good question. The payoff for Wikimedia that is specific to AdaCamp and can't be replicated at Wikimania is learning from the experience of people working to increase the participation of women in similar fields. (The rest of the attendees will learn from Wikimedia community members as well, but that's a benefit to us, not Wikimedia.) For example, we will have around 10 attendees from the successful majority-female open source communities Dreamwidth and Archive of Our Own, who can tell us what they did to encourage and support women that worked, and what was a failure. This will allow Wikimedia to speed up development of its efforts to recruit and retain women.

One of the goals of the Ada Initiative is to bring down the silo walls between different projects to increase women in open tech/culture communities and get in the habit of sharing our knowledge and experience so we don't have to learn everything from scratch each time a new community starts trying to attract more women. Other benefits unique to AdaCamp include building friendships between women Wikimedians as well as those who support them, a greater sense of belonging for women, renewed enthusiasm and commitment - in short, all the elements of recruiting and retaining women.

On cost-effectiveness, it appears to me that Wikimedia is getting the majority of the benefits of this AdaCamp (due to its co-location with Wikimania) at the same time that the majority of the cost is covered by AdaCamp's other corporate sponsors. A large number of attendees at AdaCamp will be Wikimedians, and we expect many of the sessions to be focused on Wikimedia projects. Additionally, a large number of women attending AdaCamp will be attending Wikimania who would not otherwise have done so. AdaCamp is large enough that this may raise the proportion of women at Wikimania by several percent. If Wikimedia Foundation were to try to replicate the benefits of AdaCamp to Wikimedia independently, it would be significantly more expensive. Valerietai (talk) 19:30, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

GAC members who have read this request but had no comments

• Looks fine. Polimerek (talk) 22:16, 22 May 2012 (UTC)
• Abbasjnr (talk) 14:11, 28 May 2012 (UTC)