Grants:IEG/Learning/round 1 2013/post-grant

This page documents some findings about the overall grantee experience in the IEG program, after 1 round of grants have been completed.

As round 1 2013 grantees complete their 6 month projects, they were asked to take a brief survey to help us understand what's working well and what could be improved in the program. These findings are based on responses from grantees who took the survey in January 2014.

What's working well

Leadership development

The IEG experience helps individuals develop expertise and confidence to achieve their goals.

Wow, it's deepened my involvement in Wikimedia tremendously, given me a great sense of confidence, helped validate my methods and improve my understanding of all phases of research, testing, and execution. I can't imagine having accomplished the same amount--not nearly--without it.
It gave me the opportunity to work in a more professional way to projects I really like, and in the end it gave me more expertise and experience and "hope" issues can be solved. It offered solutions, and it taught me that solutions can be built, if you work on them. I "used" the IEG for working on certain issues I knew from a long time, and it proved effective and useful. Overall, it deepen my already high involvement in Wikimedia world.
If there are many road you can choose, you can finally find one best. And this experience is the best map for me to find these choices.

Reporting

Grantees see reporting as useful for their own projects & appreciate flexible style of monthly reports.

IEG reporting includes monthly as well as midpoint and final reports. Grantees all said they were satisfied or very satisfied with reporting requirements. More interestingly, though, their comments suggest they saw the reporting structure as helpful for their own projects, rather than simply a requirement to fulfill in exchange for funds.

I like the lightweight nature of the monthly reports, and the ability to switch from a simple list of activities completed to a blog post or other outward facing piece. Midpoint and final reports are both tough, but after such a long time of working they really help to frame the experience and distill the core achievements and learnings. As always, IEG staff gives great clarity and focus to the process.
Monthly reports help me to fully review what I did last month, and make it easy to find the problems and how the project is progressing. Also Monthly reports help me to save many details that some of them I already forget when writing final report. The midpoint report and final reports provide chance to organize own experience, and a full view of the project.
I like that, using Siko's word, we could "choose our adventure" for the monthly report. This proved valuable, as we decided writing blog posts for the Wikimedia Blog, and this was useful and gave us attention and visibility. I also liked that in Final and Midterm reports we could write what we thought was going good, we were free to express our insights. Siko was always very attentive and responsive about our feedbacks, and that is rewarding per se. In the end, I enjoyed very much writing those reports, and I think they are good :-)

Staff support

Staff support and non-monetary resources are highly valued by grantees.

Grantees were satisfied or very satisfied by the staff support they received in areas like grants administration, communications, and research.

Winifred is great with prompt reminders and helps us keep track of everything going on.
An experienced driver knows the problems of the car by only hearing the sound of the engine, that's what the experienced staff means to the whole project. Not only provide the sense of security, but also the problem detector.
I gave the Technical support a "Very satisfied" because they gave us the opportunity to use Qualtrics, which proved a very powerful asset for our IEG project.

Open and varied lines of communication are useful.

WMF staff is very responsive to questions and reachable through a number of channels. They also help grantees like me to promote my work using tools like the WMF blog. That's a really nice way to share what's going on.

Opportunities to attend events

Attending Wikimania was useful for grantees and their projects

All round 1 grantees were offered funding to attend Wikimania, and those went reported high satisfaction with their experience.

When you share your project, or hearing others' experience, it definitely extends your own thinking.
Well, Wikimania is always awesome, and this time, for the first time, I went there to "work". Going there sponsored by the IEG gave me a responsibility, so I tried to work on the project all the time, focusing less on the conference and more on the possible collaborations.
Basically, I appreciate the fact that I got to go! Events are amazing networking opportunities and they are the best way to jumpstart skill development in new areas--much harder to do remotely and solo. In person is great and refreshingly useful!

Areas for improvement

Recommendation 1: Increase non-monetary support offerings

Mentorship and other non-monetary resources add value; more human support would be welcome.

Human support is seen as an area of particular value to these individuals and their projects. A suggestion echoed by several grantees is to increase the non-monetary offerings that we provide to grantees.

Perhaps my biggest suggestion to improve IEG is to just make sure that more people know about it. It's been such an amazing and invaluable growth and learning experience, but I think many editors don't quite grasp its potential or that it's for them too. Programs that harness individual editor talents to broad impact and so important to our movement. IEG is where I would instinctually send our most talented and creative people to take the next step in the scale of their contributions, especially where project management is involved. There's a whole skillset around program/project management that we should continue to nurture and teach. It's not learned easily without patient and thorough help, and I very much appreciate the IEG program for being that mentor.
Well, maybe finding a effective way to "accelerate" projects (startup-like), and providing competence and technological infrastructure to grantees. Issues can emerge during the IEG, as solutions, insights, intuitions. Counting on a network of competences can be extremely useful for the project.
What are one or two things that we at the Wikimedia Foundation could do differently to help you do your work better? Give me some software developer staff time for few months, and actually set some sister projects in the Priority list :-)

IdeaLab and other on-wiki spaces and tools are useful resources; more investment is needed to fully realize their utility.

Self-service tools are one type of scalable solution that can help grantees develop ideas, share skills, learn from past projects, measure outcomes, and more. These tools still have room for further development in order to meet grantee needs.

Make it easy to post an idea, and improve it as a proposal if many people like it (that's just what idea lab does). But maybe make it more easier.
IEG staff is great and dedicated, but there is only a limited number of them. I think we need a way to scale the advisory and mentorship capacity for grantees who haven't yet been through the project management rodeo.
I'm really encouraged by learning dissemination tools such as the Learning Patterns Library. I'm also anxiously waiting for WikiMetrics to be robust enough for me to use so I don't have to rely on database queries from research staff alone.

Community attention is appreciated, but committee and community involvement varies.

Grantees fell on a spectrum between neutral and very satisfied about the level of committee and other community support or involvement in their projects. This may be due to varying levels of committee and community involvement in each project.

People were interested in our IEG project, and that is very rewarding. I also think that they liked the outcome of the project, which is even more rewarding :-)

Recommendation 2: Vary communication methods according to context

For some grantees, text may be preferable to voice.

Well, Hangouts and Skype are very useful, provided you don't have connection issues, in which case they are frustrating. I always had bandwidth issues, so this always drives me crazy :-D Moreover, English is not my native language and it's not really easy to speak it in front of people you don't actually see. But this is not a real issue, or something that can be easily solves if you all live in different continents.