Grants talk:TPS/Eridah/WWW2017

Feedback requested

Dear Eridah,

Thank you for your interest in representing the Wikimedia movement at the Wiki Workshop 2017 at the World Wide Web Conference. Prior to our review of this request, can you provide evidence that your talk has been accepted? You can email it to participation wikimedia  · org.

We will post a decision on this request once we receive confirmation.

Kind regards, --Marti (WMF) (talk) 17:34, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Comments about the request

I've been asked by the Grant Administration team to answer two questions about this grant request. Below you can find the questions and my answers.

Q. Can you confirm that the paper mentioned in the grant has been accepted to Wiki Workshop?
A. Yes. I just double-checked the list of all accepted papers and this paper is one of them.

Q. Do you have any other comments about the paper, the requester of the grant, or her participation in the workshop?
A. Given that I'm one of the organizers of the workshop, I will refrain from advocating for grants for one participant versus others, just to make sure I can stay neutral if you ask for my input for another participant. :) I do want to point out that our general Workshop custom is that the research will only be published on our workshop website if at least one of the authors attend the workshop and present their work in person. Beyond this point, below you can find the general response that I've shared earlier as well (with minor updates since some information has changed), about the importance of researchers who do research on Wikimedia projects to attend academic conferences and workshops, as well as what the value of their attendance can be in the specific case of Wiki Workshop @ WWW2017 when they have an accepted paper.

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​I want to emphasize that I'm not intending by any means to direct the decision of the committee about this specific case one way or the other. I would provide the following response if you were to ask me about funding any other very active Wikimedia volunteer researcher, and I'm happy to put this response in a public page if you see fit.

​It is critical for our Wikimedia researchers to submit work and attend academic conferences such as WWW not only to share their work on Wikimedia projects with researchers in other fields, but also to expand their research network for future collaborations with (now) outside of Wikimedia researchers, and also to provide input to research presentations with the experience and perspective of Wikimedia in mind.

You can think of highly praised academic conferences such as WWW as platforms that any researcher working on problems related to the Web will need to contribute to and learn from if they want their work to stay relevant. Attending these conferences are key in the success of Wikimedia research and the researchers we as the Foundation support.

And a few more facts:

• Every year, around 1000 people attend WWW conference. more than 95% of these researchers are not Wikimedia researchers. It is important for Wikimedia researchers to present their work to this relevant and yet disconnected-from-Wikimedia audience.

• Wiki Workshop ​is one of many WWW2017 workshops. You can see the full list here. There is a lot of benefit for [volunteer_name removed] and us if [volunteer_name removed] attends one of the workshops in the first day (Wiki Workshop is on the second day), for example, Temporal Web Analytics Workshop and share what he[/she] learns with the Wikimedia community.

• The attendees of Wiki Workshop are a mix of Wikimedia and non-Wikimedia researchers. The current list of invited speakers for the workshop shows you highly respected researchers who are leading research in the fields of information retrieval, bias on the web, and so on. Some of our speakers are not Wikimedia researchers but their research is highly important for Wikimedia, and those people will bring a non-Wikimedia researcher audience to the workshop.

• The conference itself has also a full set of tracks on topics that are related to Wikimedia projects and having voices such as [volunteer_name removed]'s in those tracks are important. Many tracks are run in parallel and I (the sole staff member attending) alone won't be able to be present at all times in all rooms. :) You can see the full list of tracks in here (Note tracks on topics such as Search, Crowdsourcing, Security and Privacy, Semantics and Knowledge, etc., topics that are completely related to Wikimedia and yet, there is very little Wikimedia representation/presence in the sessions that these topics are discussed.). (The full conference program) --LZia (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 16 March 2017 (UTC)

Request funded

Dear Eridah, Thank you for your interest in representing the Wikimedia movement at the Wiki Workshop 2017 at the World Wide Web Conference. We apologize that for the delay in our review of this request, which falls into a gray area for our program. If you still intend to participate in this event, we are happy to reimburse your participation costs in the amount of $1,500.

Should you choose to accept this support, please review the next steps for your grant as described in "How the program works". Note that your post-event report must provide a link to an outcome from your participation. We recommend that you plan your outcome in advance of the event so you are prepared to submit it as part of your report, which is due 14 days after the event. An outcome does not include the materials you prepare to present at the event (though we’d like you to link to those, too), but something that is created during or after the event because of your participation, such as a link to something new that was co-created by you and your fellow participants at the event, a blog post you wrote to share your experience with others after the event, or a learning pattern to teach others something you've learned at the event.

Our Grants Administrator will be in touch with you. Thank you for work on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Warm regards, --Marti (WMF) (talk) 17:11, 30 March 2017 (UTC)