Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Pine/Continuation of educational video and website series/Report
Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)[edit]
Thank you for this report on your activities, Pine. Apologies that it has taken a while for our team to review your report. I am accepting this report with the following comments:
- Thanks for your work developing the framework for the NavWiki project space. While your targets have not been met, I appreciate that you are willing to continue developing this space voluntarily to achieve some of your original targets. Please feel free to provide updates here as more resources are added to the space.
- I appreciate the level detail you have provided in reflecting on this project overall, such as learning about existing resources through your community outreach. It's great that you took some time to engage with these materials, and that they helped provoke new ideas for the current project. This was a good and unexpected outcome of your community engagement and communication efforts.
- I found it a bit confusing to have a somewhat carefully defined project concept and a somewhat demanding set of off-wiki instructions from WMF regarding the grant, and then after the signing of the grant agreement be given significant discretion by WMF regarding how to design and to execute the project including making modifications as I think best. I would prefer that the styles of management be more consistent from the beginning to the end of the grants process, or that this shift in management style be planned and communicated earlier. I understand why this would have been disorienting and confusing. Our general approach is to provide grantees significant discretion in the implementation of the grant, as it is our belief that grantees usually have better information on what is needed to execute their projects than we do. Our team is also not large, so our time to engage with grantees during the course of their work is limited. Conversely, we are (sometimes) more involved in the proposal or project plan. In this case, there was a need to make sure the scale of the project to fit the budget. While we worked together with you on what we believed was a small scale, it is clear there were still aspects of this work that were hard to estimate early on and took longer than expected-- which is OK. I agree it would have been helpful to articulate this style of our involvement early on to help you anticipate this differential approach to engagement.