Grants talk:Project/Hjfocs/soweego/Midpoint

Midpoint Report approved

Dear Hjfocs,

Thank you for submitting this Midpoint Report. I apologize again for the delay in review. I am approving it now, with the following comments:

• I appreciate your efforts to take privacy concerns seriously, and I am pleased that you have two people on board whose role is to think through this aspect of the project. In addition to sharing the names of the people who are fulfilling this role, would it be possible for you to provide a brief summary of the ethical issues at stake and how decisionmaking in the project, under the guidance of the advisors, has been influenced by ethical considerations about these issues?
  • In your Final Report, it would be great if you could include a section that reflects on this aspect of the project in greater depth.
• In your grantee reflection, you said that "the community review was an incredibly challenging step, due to the impressive amount of feedback" you received. We consistently hear from grantees that this is both a source of support, and also a burden. When the amount of feedback is as extensive as your project received, it can quickly become overwhelming, because of how much additional work it requires to make sense of and respond to comments, many of which are serving the community's need to better understand the project, not directly improving the project design. You are always exceptionally diligent in responding to community comments and I can imagine it can be very draining to do so. I'm curious if you have any thoughts about how we might be able to improve this aspect of our grant review process to make it less burdensome? (I wonder if we Program Officers could set expectations better, perhaps, by letting the community know that not all comments will receive a response, for example.)
• Thank you for how diligently you are tracking the technical aspects of this project both in this Midpoint Report, and also in your Monthly Updates. I am going to ask Lydia Pintscher to add any comments she has about the technical aspects of this project, since I'm not qualified to add much value in this respect.

Thank you for all of your work, Hjfocs! Our grants administrators will be in touch with you shortly to finalize your next disbursement.

Warm regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 18:42, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi Marti (WMF),

Thank you for approving this report and for the valuable feedback. Please find below my replies.

• would it be possible for you to provide a brief summary of the ethical issues at stake and how decisionmaking in the project, under the guidance of the advisors, has been influenced by ethical considerations about these issues? In your Final Report, it would be great if you could include a section that reflects on this aspect of the project in greater depth.

Of course, with pleasure! It's noted, and will be there in the final report.

• I'm curious if you have any thoughts about how we might be able to improve this aspect of our grant review process to make it less burdensome? (I wonder if we Program Officers could set expectations better, perhaps, by letting the community know that not all comments will receive a response, for example.)

Nice question. I think your example is indeed a first step. Besides that, I believe that the community notification part of a project proposal is crucial: in a nutshell, it's where community reviews are elicited. I find really vital to focus on specific communities in order to gather the most precious feedback for the project design.

My suggestion is to highlight and detail this aspect as much as possible both in proposal templates and during the hangouts you usually hold when the call is open.

I hope this helps!

Best regards,

--Hjfocs (talk) 17:48, 14 March 2019 (UTC)