Grants talk:Conference/Diversity Conference 2017

Hi John Andersson (WMSE). We are happy to see you are working on this proposal! Please note that one of the possible weekends, September 22-25, is the same weekend as the CEE regional meeting in Warsaw. I'm guessing there will be a number of folks from the CEE communities who would like to attend the diversity conference. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:05, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Alex! I have now removed those dates. Best, John Andersson (WMSE) (talk) 22:19, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

Eligibility Review Questions

Hi John Andersson (WMSE), the grant request looks great so far. It is not clear whether you did any surveys or online discussions to gather input about what this event should focus on. I do see there are a few endorsements, but it would be good to provide more information about how you gathered community input, and what you learned from that input. Please also check with your APG program officer Delphine (WMF) to confirm that you have submitted any outstanding reports or financial documentation required through that grant program. I look forward to working with you during the review process. Cheers, --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 21:32, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Thank you for the question, and sorry for the delay in answering. Yesterday was a bank holiday in Sweden.

The decision that Wikimedia Sverige should work on this application (for the Diversity Conference) was decided during our work with the FDC application. The discussion included our board, staff and members. During those discussions we defined what was our chapter’s internal priorities regarding different issues around diversity. Furthermore, this has also been an ongoing discussion with community members during our three year long externally funded project around diversity.

When we initiated the work on this application we contacted people in the movement that are actively working with projects around diversity, for early feedback. The discussions before initiating the grant application and the initial feedback work led to the defined focus of the conference. As we are involved in the gender diversity mapping project and aware of the Wikiwomen camp taking place in July in Mexico, we are proposing the broader scope of diversity for this conference so that results from the mapping project can be presented to a wider audience.

We are currently putting the program team together (Netha Hussein, Rosie Stephenson-Goodnight, Anna Torres, Jason Moore (yet to confirm availability)) who will help inform the decision making of the program.

When the program committee is developing the program the first step will be to define the more detailed scope, and request wider feedback through online discussion on the portal we have started to develop on Meta for the event.

I have a meeting with Delphine (WMF) tomorrow and will ask her to confirm reports and financial documentation.

I hope this answers your questions.

Best, John Andersson (WMSE) (talk) 15:07, 7 June 2017 (UTC) adjusted 16:18, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

Just to state it here: Delphine (WMF) confirmed that everything with our reporting were in order. Regards, John Andersson (WMSE) (talk) 01:51, 13 June 2017 (UTC)

Hello KHarold (WMF), we're updating the Reports page with the last iteration of the documents and I'll update Fluxx, but yes, WMSE is up to date with its reporting requirements. Cheers. Delphine (WMF) (talk) 09:56, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

WMF Comments

Goals, activities and outcomes We are pleased to see that you have several goals and outcomes that you would like to see as a result of this conference. I organized those goals in the table below and added recommendations for how to track and report on progress toward those goals immediately after the event and later, six months after the event. We understand that it can take time to see the longer term impact of conferences, which is why we are asking grantees to do surveys and update their reports six months after events. Please look at the table below and let us know if it seems to be an accurate reflection of your goals. You are welcome to edit the content to make goals more specific, and if there are different ways that you would like to measure your progress towards them.

	Goal	Activities during the conference	2 months after the conference	6 months after the conference
Strategic Discussions: Are there issues affecting your community that need to be discussed in person?	Identify challenges and set goals for increasing diversity on Wikimedia projects	Interactive sessions to identify challenges and set goals	Report on the progress that has been made 6 months after the conference.
Capacity Development: What skills do participants want to learn?	Help diversity advocates develop skills they need need to raise awareness of inclusive actions on Wikimedia projects.	Capacity building workshops or trainings	How many people participated in the trainings?	Survey participants to find out if they have used the skills they learned, and how those skills have been helpful. Ask if there are ways the trainings could be improved.needed to achieve those goals, identify leaders who will be responsible for following up on these priorities.
Working groups: Are there joint projects that need to be planned in person?| Organizing working groups for different issues and creating action plans	Formalizing networks working on different diversity issues and supporting them after the conference to continue to collaborate and communicate. What networks were established, what will they collaborate on, and what channels they are using to communicate, and who is	Strengthen the network of people and organizations working on diversity issues.leading each group.	Provide an update on projects that were started, or changes that were made as a result of work done at the conference. How many of the networks/working groups are still active? What achievements, activities, projects or lessons have been learned so far?
Sharing projects:	Build awareness of and get feedback on diversity tools and projects that WMSE and other affiliates have been working on.	Sessions/workshops presenting new tools.	How many people participated in workshops or feedback sessions? How many tools or projects were presented, or received feedback?	How many people who participated in workshops are using the tools or begun to participate in or replicate projects? Have tools or projects been changed based on feedback at the conference?

Thank you for the suggestions and the helpful table! The suggested tracking and reporting is well aligned with our plans, and with our hope that this conference will give us valuable insights for future events. So, yes, we would be happy to work on this.

Budget

• One member of the grant committee asked why the cost of this event is nearly two times the cost of the Wikidata Conference planned by WMDE with half the number of expected participants. We understand that the cost for food, accommodation and conference venue is higher in Stockholm, and appreciate that you have worked hard to find low cost venues and/or negotiate lower prices for meals and services.
  • Thank you for understanding the differences in costs. Stockholm is indeed an expensive city, but we also hope to showcase its many benefits for international conferences. When we compared the two conferences mentioned here the budgets seem to be of similar size, the difference being that we apply for double the sum. WMDE has been fortunate to be able to add 40,000 euro in own funding, which is awesome!

For the Diversity Conference we also decided to limit the number of participants, as we believe this size is more suitable for the type of activities we are planning for and for us to be able to give each participant the support needed. This increases the cost per participant, but we believe it will improve the outputs and outcomes we aim for with this conference. Another difference seems to be that WMDE has not included the staff costs for the organization of the event in their budget (which we have), as they seem to cover that cost themselves. WMDE’s team is also extremely competent in this field. As this is our first big, international event, we expect that we will be less efficient. For us, though, being able to host this event is also a valuable learning experience, and we are committed to use it to improve future conferences. For that reason we had originally planned to have the core organizing team at our office to be actively involved in as many steps as possible. Based on the budget changes presented below we will now adjust that.

• Based on the budget, it seems you will be able to offer scholarships to 80 people, which means most if not all participants will receive some kind of financial support to attend the event. We would like to review the criteria that you will use for selecting scholarship recipients, and approve the list of scholarship recipients before you make official offers.
  • Sounds like a reasonable request. Do you have a preferred format for how to do the review?

• Given the level of financial support you would like to offer to all participants, we think it would be good to ask participants to commit to supporting your team during conference planning or follow up work after the event.
  • Yes, absolutely. We are planning to create a list of volunteer tasks shortly.

• We are not able to approve the full amount of funding you have requested for conference planning. According to the conference grant Budget Guidelines, we can approve funding for travel agent fees, administrative support for tasks such as sending visa letters and processing payments to scholarship recipients. Many of the tasks you listed in the staff support budget table include tasks that are generally done by volunteers, such as organizing scholarship and program committees, designing materials to be used at the conference and setting up the venue. The conference goals do include a lot of follow up work to help working groups and networks established at the conference continue to work toward their goals after the event. We understand that this is often difficult for volunteers to do, and so we will approve $6,728 in staff funding and encourage you to the funded staff time to do administrative tasks covered in the budget guidelines and to focus on the follow up work.
  • We had a meeting yesterday to go through what is still to be done, what tasks we think we can approach volunteers about, how we can limit our ambitions in some regards, and what other funding we can add to this. Our conclusion is that it will be tough – but that we will make it work. We will make sure to focus on the administrative tasks and the follow up work.

• We are able to approve a total of $50,000 for a conference of this size. The only other change to the budget is to eliminate the t-shirts for conference participants, our budget guidelines suggest only creating low cost swag for participants so that more funding can do toward scholarships. WikiCon North America offered participants the opportunity to purchase a t-shirt during registration or at the event. This might be a solution that your group considers.
  • This is fine. We will look into options for on-site purchase.

Thank you for the hard work you have put into developing the plan for this event. Please let us know if the clarification of of the goals and outcomes and the changes to the budget proposed above fit with your expectations for the event. --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 21:35, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

Thank you Kacie and the grant committee for the valuable feedback, and for this significant grant! We really look forward hosting this conference. John Andersson (WMSE) (talk) 09:47, 30 June 2017 (UTC)

Change in budget

The facilitator at the conference has generously offered to work pro-bono, and we intend to use this budget line (of 20,000 SEK) to cover travel costs for the program committee. Best, John Andersson (WMSE) (talk) 12:57, 4 September 2017 (UTC)