Grants talk:PEG/WM US-DC/Events 2012

The grant application seems to me well prepared and I generally support it. However, I have some minor questions:

Embassy outreach: - there is no clear explanation for what exactly you need money - for renting a room? for travel? or for catering?

It's for catering. The events would be hosted by embassies in Washington, the space provided in-kind, and allows us to outreach to a new audience here. (beyond the tech crowd) Aude (talk) 15:04, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Coworking space: - what it is exactly? A kind of office? Why not, for example to meet from time to time in coffe-shop, or any other public place? Polimerek (talk) 10:54, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

It's shared office space, with other small organizations. We'd also get access to use conference rooms and have meetups or events there, as we need. We've been meeting at coffee shops before, but they tend to be too crowded and noisy, and importantly they are not conducive to conference calls which we do often. (we had a very much failed wikimania meeting planned at starbucks!)

We've also met at the library, but meeting rooms are in high demand, hard to get (especially to get them often and at times we need -- evenings and weekends), among other issues and the library is not undergoing renovation so space is even more scarce now. When we can, we'll continue to do meetups at the library but we can't rely on that reliably.

Having some space we can reliably have access to would do a lot for us to be more productive, and especially when we have an intern helping. It also has the benefit of networking, interacting and learning from other small organizations and cool people. One of the coworking spaces, for example, has OpenStreetMap people there. :) Aude (talk) 15:04, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

• OK. Your explanations seem resonable. Polimerek (talk) 20:31, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Measure

May you quantify (as possible) the measure or define a rank? --Ilario (talk) 08:43, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I am not sure what this question is in reference to. To the extent that our work will be quantifiable (and it will indeed be so), I would consider improvement to be undertaking substantially more work than we are now. harej (talk) 12:05, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I mean to clarify what is you expectation, for instance how many people you think to contact and how many editors you think to recruit (for instance the grant of Argentina Grants:WM_AR/Wikigenero_GroupLens_Participation defines 50 womens). It's not required the exact number but it would be important to understand if the community of editors of Washington DC is dormient, if it is growing and how you activity will have an impact on that. Honestly there should be a "post-mortem" analysis of the GAC in order to check the success-insuccess of the grant, but it doesn't happen. A measure more detailed will help you to define some objectives to analyze the success/insuccess by yourself ate the end of the event and to have your own "post-mortem" analysis. --Ilario (talk) 17:07, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

I can speak to this in terms of the outreach we're doing at Embassies. Our Embassy Outreach Events are designed to 1) attract professional and academic groups, who often utilize Wikipedia but do not contribute, and are often unaware of other Wikimedia Projects, 2) engage the international community through culturally- and thematically-focused events, which would not only raise awareness of the importance of Wikimedia activities on- and offline, but could also possibly allow us, in the future, to coordinate events with other Wikimedia chapters abroad, and 3) given the international scope of Wikimedia projects that we can tie into embassy events, allows us to reach out to a professional, engaged, and involved donor base in Washington, DC, of whom many often become loyal and continuous donors and, with proper outreach, would likely support Wikimedia projects in various ways, not the least of which is financially. Courting these types of contributes and donors requires building personal relationships and gaining name and brand recognition within the DC community, which starts with our embassy outreach events --AutoGyro (talk) 21:45, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

GAC members who have read this request but had no comments

This one is well conceived. Some of the amounts were high to me at first, but given the price level and benefits that you offer with the projects it's completely reasonable.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 09:38, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

• A detailed and extremely well-written proposal, probably, can be shown as an example of ongoing outreach and grant applications. I think it should be fully funded, including the meet-up space - in my experience cafes are noisy and unsuitable for really productive meetings. Plus some chapters have to pay for office space just to keep valid registration and still have to look for places to meet.--Victoria (talk) 10:52, 10 April 2012 (UTC)