User:Sj/Design chats/Project grants

Reminder: This is a wiki! Edit and refactor at will.

Having funds to cover materials for common tasks (books for research, first cameras, laptops for coders | data plan for editors) can be transformative.

Having funds / in-kind help to cover the incidental costs of events (light food + drink, brainstorming materials, swag as prizes, banners) makes event organizing easier and avoids draining the planners.

Having too much funding for these things builds anti-collaborative norms and attracts people who don't get / can't pass on the spirit of the projects. It can also drive out good contribution from community members who are already contributing (and taking time to get things right), and are frustrated by those who spend most of their time trying to win prizes or get funding for sporadic + casual editing (that meets some crude metric).

Ideas

Invest heavily in things that streamline common hurdles + tiny costs for contributors

1. Getting books.
2. Getting access to journals or other databasers (WP:L)
3. Access to cameras, scanners, computers: in the form of partnerships or hardware grants
4. Access to swag, in the form of event kits
5. Access to workspaces, in the form of a global events network that helps build local contact database

Invest heavily in editor-intro tools that make running editathons and helping people do focused editing work, before investing in events.

1. Most small events produce little outputs.
2. Most small events complain of common ailments: the 6-account-creation limit per IP, difficult interactions w/ other editors (on large wikis), no easy way to see a summary of common problems with newly created articles (on small wikis, w/o the critical mass for even basic mistakes to be caught)
3. Counterpoint: this does not mean building complex multi-step tools and workflows. Just fix the huge, persistent, simple gaps in current process.

Help groups focus on learning to repeat + automate efforts, and to complete lists of open tasks.

1. Teaching people to work with scripts + bots is fun, useful, and generative.
2. Work currently going into translating text and descriptions could be better balanced by more going into translating tool-tips and docs

Avoid distorting or poisoning local volunteer communities.

1. Avoid grants that are more than a week's wages in areas that don't have long-standing community networks already doing routine support + coordination without funding.
2. Avoid grants for a local group to hire salaried staff before there's a long-standing community network. Build on models of lightweight part-time admin help, e.g. from regional community support centers
3. Avoid paid editathons (beyond the very simple basics above re: streamlining unavoidable costs) -- any prizes should be nominal + for fun, judges shouldn't be paid, don't have costly meals or rental halls: work with partners who can offer space)
4. Avoid paid contributions or photowalks. (rule of thumb: if measuring output against total cost of an event, more than 10c/edit is not sustainable.)

Be careful with reimbursements for things like travel + lodging. The goal should be helping communities find a tempo of self-guided and self-funded events, not creating a standard that can't be met without an approved grant.

Challenges

1. In some regions / countries / languages we have built a new community of contributors who spend most of their time planning and executing grant-funded editathons. There is little organic unfunded contribution. Approving a raft of grants for events has added few organic community members, but has added many people who self-identify as Wikimedians but may see 'voluntary contribution' as optional rather than central to the projects.
   • One side effect is that in these groups, new WikiProjects don't spring up on a wiki, they take shape as a grants proposal and only happen if a grant comes through / for the duration of the grant. There is not always a community of peer review and collaborative practice to give feedback on the results, which are again rarely updated or revised after their grant-spurred creation.
2. In some places, people form User Groups solely to qualify for community grants. In some parts of movement-governance, talking to local User Groups is considered necessary and sufficient to reach the editing community. In those cases, many of the people invited to governance discussions have been introduced to the movement through grant-funded events, mostly interact with grants staff and movement-roles conversations, and see the movement through the eyes of "pursuing the WM/WP Agenda, by developing WM-supported projects and events".
3. Community norms propagate through their organizers. A community of passionate volunteers recruits more of the same; a community of enthusiastic funded-event-organizers likewise. This should be accounted for in planning and forecasting.
4. Grants Ecosystem Failure [GEF]: Looking at the submissions to microgrants programs, in recent years they've become flooded with low-impact grants for $1-2k. This seemed fine at one point esp where there was a dearth of any projects asking for support, but a) sometimes happened in regions where that was a lot for an event and may have skewed who engaged, and b) often produced little output that was never cleaned up.
   • In addition to being a practice that one would not want to continue year after year, in the past year I've seen more that are pressing up against the maximum that can be requested for various CfPs ($5-10k). These are drafted by teams w/ members who have been part of smaller past grants. Some are poorly written, with very vague goals, suggesting the author viewed the process as a way to get funds rather than a way to support existing active work. This last is a trope in the broader grant-making and -seeking world that we have avoided by being a community of shared practice, and may wish to continue to avoid.

Examples

Yoruba editathon - ~20 articles, >$1k

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