Grants talk:Simple/Applications/Open Foundation West Africa/2019

Feedback on draft budget and plan

Cross-posting comments from Email here so we can keep track of why and how changes are occurring. We've set a deadline of 6 November for the revisions.

Hello Raphael and Felix!

I've had some time to review your draft plan in depth, and I wanted to offer you some feedback. I very much appreciate the work you have done to develop this fine plan.

Each of your activities is very well-structured, and you did a good job of providing both the context behind your work and specific measurable objectives for each of your programs. Yet, this program plan reads like a long list of unrelated activities. What we want to move toward, as you are growing in APG is a plan that includes 3-4 distinct programs (which may have many or several activities included in each). This is part of a shift to becoming a more strategic organization.

A program is defined as a group of activities that share a similar theory of change. That is, the activities grouped in the program all share a common goal and a common way to achieve that goal.

For example, a typical program plan might be structured as follows: 1. Community Building (includes all meetup activities), since the aim of these activities is to provide support to new and existing editors so that they remain involved in the projects, and this is achieved by holding regular events with various themes, partners, and participants. 2. Content Creation (includes WLE, WLF, WLAf, and castles) , since the aim of these activities is to add new content to the Wikimedia projects and to attract new contributors, and these are all done by providing a structure that motivates participants to contribute about a specific theme within a specific time period. 3. Education (includes Ahesi WikiClub & SoS), since the aim of these activities is to train and involve ambassadors who can organize activities related to Wikimedia as part of campus life. 4. AWMD, which seems like a distinct program in and of itself.

Developing a more coherent program plan will not only help to better communicate your strategic vision, but it should also make monitoring and reporting much easier in the long term. Including this in your plan would just involve structuring your current activity descriptions into different sections and adding an overall goal for each program that explains how the activities are related and what you hope to achieve overall.

What do you think of that suggestion? Does that make sense?

Finally, have we received a copy of your staffing plan yet? Having a detailed staffing plan is a requirement if you want to get your staff position approved.

If you need some additional time to consider how to do this, I am happy to extend the deadline by a few days or a week.

Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 17:59, 5 November 2018 (UTC)

Request

Please update the metrics worksheet to reflect your current program structure:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_qZxJ7B9U_Eo6pMG55ox-zCHppM9-lubQm0jKI2tn6g/edit#gid=1105069948

Thank you! Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 17:40, 20 November 2018 (UTC)

Feedback on staffing plan

Hello, colleagues! Thank you for creating your staffing plan. It is still missing a lot of information that's needed before you bring on your staff person. Here is what is needed:

• Add information about how your staff will be supervised and who that person will report to.
• Your staffing plan contains a lot of activities normally done by volunteers in other parts of the movement, so it would be helpful if you add more context about why a paid person is necessary in your context.
• Please add what expertise and qualifications you will be looking for in this person.
• Add a section with links to your policies around staffing (hiring, termination, etc.)

Please let us know when you are able to respond. If you can't get this ready by Friday, one option is to move forward with the approval of your grant, but to make approval for the staff person conditional upon meeting these requirements before you start the hiring process. This may be possible since you are not planning to hire the staff person until later in the grant.

Thank you! Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 17:57, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

Hello Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer),

As mentioned in our email thread we will like to move forward with the approval of the grant while we agree to improve the staffing plan for a future decision. Thanks --Rberchie (talk) 03:49, 1 December 2018 (UTC)

Still not eligible

We will move forward with a decision in January once eligibility concerns are resolved. Best, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 04:23, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

OFWA’s grant is approved in the amount of 42,589 US Dollars for 9 months

Congratulations! OFWA’s grant has been approved in the amount requested, for nine months in order that OFWA may align their funding period with their fiscal year. As part of this approval, OFWA will be permitted to hire a staff person in the last three months of their grant. However, the approval of these funds will be placed immediately into a contingency fund, and their use for paying staff will only be approved once OFWA has revised their staffing plan and put acceptable policies around staffing in place.

It is important to note here that OFWA has informed us that they will have a significant underspend from their previous grant due to their inability to complete a cross-border project during the time planned because of circumstances beyond their control. This means they have been required to budget for this initiative in the upcoming grant period, and this in part accounts for the large amount of funding they require with respect to their spending on their current year’s grant.

We do appreciate that OFWA is pursuing a great many diverse program activities, and is requesting staff support to increase their organization’s capacity. We would like to note that an ongoing focus on strategic planning and program planning may also yield effective strategies for prioritization. OFWA is experimenting with and developing many initiatives, but may not be able to continue to expand and develop every initiative that they start. While OFWA is skilled at articulating the importance of each of their initiatives, it has been more challenging for them to come up with a coherent program plan that does not read like a long list of activities. We hope to see OFWA’s interest in and capacity for annual planning expand along with their program work.

We admire the program plan that OFWA has put together, which includes several innovative initiatives that are quite unique among organizations in APG, including their Africa Wikimedia Developers Project and their Summer Open School project. The cross-border nature of their work in an under-funded region has particularly high potential to benefit the Wikimedia movement as a whole. We are looking forward to learning from OFWA’s expertise in the upcoming year, and continuing our partnership as they embark upon their second Annual Plan Grant.

We regret that eligibility issues have delayed the approval of this grant, and we will work closely with OFWA to make sure they are adhering to the terms of all future grant agreements, in order to avoid issues in the future.

Best, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 21:52, 2 January 2019 (UTC)

Requesting Reallocation of Remaining Funds

Dear Grants Team + VThamaini (WMF),

As per our follow-up discussion with your team, we wish to make a request to reallocate the remaining funds of $4,474.34 to our 2022 grant request.

Thanks --Rberchie (talk) 08:53, 22 December 2021 (UTC)