marked the launch of the Individual Engagement Grants program - a program designed to support individual contributors to Wikimedia projects, with a particular focus on experiments driving online improvements.[1] The first round of funding distributed ~US$60,000 to support nine projectsto Wikimedians in six different countries, focused on experimentation on various Wikimedia projects attempting to increase the reach, participation, or quality of the projects.[2] This report compiled by the WMF Grantmaking Learning & Evaluation team is a first look at the results of the six months of project execution. The goal is to better understand the collective work of these nine experimental grants, identify some commonalities in the exemplary grants, and identify areas for future research and/or development to further extend the impact of the grants program supporting individual grants.
Overall, we believe this first batch of projects shows indications that supporting individuals and small groups through the IEG model can have direct impact on the strategic goals of the Wikimedia movement: to increase the quality of the online content, increase the number of people participating in knowledge creation, and to increase readership. Individuals who have idea for experimenting with scalable programs seem to thrive in the IEG program, which provides high levels of resources beyond money.
All the grants had useful elements, but from our analysis, the best IEGs seem to be the ones that build some sort of platform -- a social media group, a curriculum, a libary, a strategy -- and have demonstrated the possibility for that platform to have impact on a micro-level. These projects were explicitly designed to meet an expressed need within the community: they have heard this need (e.g., through past experience, through surveys) and designed a creative solution to resolving the gap. The next step, ideally, is to see if the designed solution does in fact affect the desired outcomes.
