Grants talk:TPS/Sky Harbor/FOSSASIA 2017

Request not funded

Dear Sky Harbor,

We really appreciate your dedication to the Wikimedia movement and your continued commitment to educating others about the opportunities and challenges of our projects and our volunteer communities. We also recognize that you have a particular strength in the area of conducting outreach, so we see your participation efforts as potentially a good fit for the TPS program. However, after reviewing a total of five previous requests you've submitted through TPS, and funding two of them, we have reservations about continuing to fund your participation and so we are providing some more in-depth feedback about the reasons for that. Our intent in providing this feedback is to give you clarity about what you can do, going forward, to better meet the goals of this program and demonstrate improved impact over time--which we hope to see with repeat grantees.

• Inconsistent record of impact: Your talk at Open Source Bridge 2013 had only 2-3 participants. Though your talk at Open Source Bridge 2015 jumped up to 20 participants, there is little indication in your report to indicate substantial outcomes from your session, and our sense is that this was not a high impact investment relative to the cost of international travel.
• Inconsistent record of engagement with program requirements:
  • Requests: This current request was submitted on March 1 for an event scheduled to occur just over two weeks later. We still do not have evidence that your talk has been accepted, though the event begins tomorrow. When reviewing requests from veteran grantees, we like to see more attention to program requirements, not less, and we would appreciate it if you would submit future requests at least a month in advance. Since you are a longtime participant in our grantmaking programs, we would like to see clearer indicators that you have an event-specific, audience-specific plan for impact. Ideally, this means something more than a summary of the content you will present--especially given that the outcomes of your participation have been inconsistent in the past (suggestions about this below).
  • Reports: Your report for the Open Source Bridge 2013 was not transparent about the low turnout for your event (though we appreciate your honest response to Siko's direct questions about attendance). The next time we funded you for Open Source Bridge, in 2015, your report was very sparse, providing very little information about your impact, and, as you know, it was completed over 8 months past the deadline. These reports are a concern because they suggest there may not be adequate reflection happening, post-event, about where your strategies for outreach are and are not working effectively. We consider a report very successful if it openly reports where failure has happened and demonstrates an effort to understand what went wrong and improve in future iterations. It is concerning that there is an absence of such reflection in either of your reports.

We have decided to decline this request. We recognize that you have much to offer as a long-time Wikimedian well-versed in our projects and our communities, and we would be happy to work with you to support your participation in future events. Should you decide to submit future requests, we hope to see greater evidence of advance preparation to maximize the impact of your participation. You can provide this evidence in many ways, including the following:

• Submitting your requests at least a month in advance
• Providing a more detailed plan for impact (beyond a summary of the talk you will give)
  • For example, you could plan for multiple strategies for engagement (in addition to giving a talk: creating handouts, collecting names of people you meet for later follow-up, hosting an editathon, creating social media spaces to support further engagement after the event, etc) and you can set targets for what you hope to achieve (for example, I hope to get 20 new participants to follow my social media account about Wikimedia, and in response to my follow-up communication, at least 3 will participate in an editing event)
  • You can always reach out to us (well in advance of an event) to ask for support in coming up with a plan.
• In addition, once a request has been funded, you can indicate diligence and preparedness by submitting a complete, thoughtful report on time--including reflection on what worked and what did not and indicating a specific plan about how you will be following up with contacts from the event.

We are always happy to support you in any part of this process. Just ask!

Thank you again for this request, Sky Harbor. We hope this feedback will be helpful in planning for any future participation requests. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Warm regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 19:09, 16 March 2017 (UTC)