2 Place or category for grant requests open to community comment?
4 How does the WMF grants team feel about saying "no"?
Place or category for grant requests open to community comment?
Suppose that volunteers wish to review or comment on grant requests. I think the grants process has always been imagined to be open and to solicit community endorsements, critiques, and review.
@I JethroBT (WMF): Parental leave?! Wow, congratulations!
How does the WMF grants team feel about saying "no"?
I am not sure what I have been experiencing, but recently I assisted some individuals in making small WMF grant applications (less than US$2000) and I got responses from the WMF grants team which are challenging for me to understand. From my perspective, it seems like the WMF team might have some motivation to avoid telling an applicant "no", and instead communicates a "no" response in an indirect way. I wanted to share the situations here to open a conversation, and to advocate for quick clear answers from the WMF grants team. A "no" answer can be a good thing and there is no shame in giving one!
I want to start by saying how happy I am with service from the WMF grants team. This entire online grants application process is a crazy experiment which has brought lots of successes and amazing opportunities. What follows are some reflections and not a criticism.
For the rapid and travel grants, the pages say something like a person can apply for a grant and get an evaluation and answer in 2 weeks. That is fine - if an application can be accepted, great, and if not, then I hope that the WMF grants team will clearly say "no" so that I can have closure and move onto something else.
WMF response on 12 January - "Since this request is not eligible, that means that it will neither be declined or accepted", but also, the WMF reviewer marked this as "not funded"
As an applicant, the response that I wished that I would have gotten from the WMF grants team would have been a strong "no" on 30 November at which time I could have completed the correct form instead of having to wait for a response.
WMF response on 14 March - since the WMF cannot fund this right now, the WMF marked this as "draft". "Draft" is the user indication that a user is in the process of completing a form and has not yet submitted it to the WMF. Strangely, WMF grants team uses it here to indicate that the WMF grants team is drafting a response to the grant or that the response is pending.
WMF response on 9 March - WMF will not fund this grant, and marked the application as "voluntarily withdrawn by the proposer". This is strange because the denial is coming from the WMF side. Why mark not just say "no", instead of indicating that the user withdrew the request?
As an applicant I could have accepted a "no" on 27 February. If for some reason the WMF wanted to pursue this, then the grants team could follow up with me, just because I think even at 27 February the answer was "no". It is challenging for me to keep the community team doing outreach in this area in limbo with an uncertain answer. I feel like WMF staff had a clear understanding of this situation at the beginning, but for whatever reason, has an aversion to giving a clear "no".
WMF response 30 November - WMF insists that rapid grant application is a travel grant request, but says that the WMF rapid grants evaluator will review this. This is confusing because it seems apparent to me that in the URL this is in the "rapid" grants space.
The response that I think I wanted was a clear "no" by 7 September, then a rapid grant evaluation within two weeks from 23 September. If I got a "no" then fine but the closure is useful.
To what extent are these experiences typical of exchanges with the WMF grants team?
How often do travel or rapid grant applications have a wait time of more than one month for the final evaluation?
How can users have better communication with evaluators?
To what extent are the evaluation outcome labels meeting the needs of applicants and evaluators? For example, why is "draft" used for both user draft and WMF drafts, why is "not funded" an indication of "neither be declined or accepted"? I am a native English speaker and I have trouble with this.
What are typical wait times for evaluations?
What behind-the-scenes motivations exist for WMF evaluators to avoid giving a direct "no" answer when the response to a grant application is much closer to "no" than "yes"?
Hi Blue Rasberry. Thanks for reaching out and we’re sorry your recent experiences have been confusing and frustrating. We want to be clear that the grants team does not have any ulterior motive for not saying a definitive “no” to a grant proposal. If a grant proposal is clearly not eligible for funding or the project does not merit funding, we will decline. However, often times a proposal is not eligible for funding in TPS but is eligible for a Rapid Grant. Sometimes we are not sure ourselves if a project is eligible due to either U.S. or foreign funding restrictions and need to do more due diligence with our legal/finance teams and outside counsel to understand what we can and cannot fund.
Since Rapid Grants was launched in May 2016, the average time from submitting an application to receiving a decision from the grants team has been 14 days. For TPS, it is 16 days. Since this is an average, some grant proposals take a shorter time and some longer. The end of the year (November/December) is always the busiest time, plus there is a break for the holidays. This year, we closed Rapid Grants from December 18-January 14 to accommodate the year-end rush and Program Officer travel schedules.
Offline Internet Resources for Rural Schools in Peru: It looks like Marti determined that this proposal was not eligible for TPS, but may be for a Rapid Grant and pinged our new Program Officer, Woubzena to review. Unfortunately, my guess is that since Woubzena only joined the foundation November 13th, she either did not see the ping or was not sure what to do next. We should have followed up with her directly. She was also still on break on January 3rd when you pinged her. However, from Marti’s first response on November 30th it looks clear that it was not eligible for TPS and should be submitted as a Rapid Grant. For future reference, if a grant is not eligible for TPS but is eligible for a Rapid Grant, it needs to be submitted as a Rapid Grant to be reviewed and show up in this list of Rapid Grant Open Proposals. The proposals are reviewed by different processes and different people. Now that the proposal is a Rapid Grant, we will prioritize review this week.
Offline Wikipedia deployment in Syria: This was a case where we were unclear on the eligibility and needed time to receive guidance from our Legal team and outside experts to understand if we could fund activities in Syria. Getting the research done to determine eligibility can often take a long time in cases like these. It is not true that we knew a definite “no” for this case early on. “Draft” does not necessarily mean that we are waiting for the applicant to improve the proposal. We often use the “draft” status for those proposals that will not have a decision in the near term, but may be eligible in the future in case an applicant wants to re-open the request. However, when we realized we would not be able to fund activities in Syria in the foreseeable future, we should have moved to “not funded”. It’s clear from this experience that we do not have a strict protocol for when we apply the different grant status terms. We will work to align our team on when to use “draft” vs. “not funded” vs. “withdrawn”.
Offline Wikipedia in Greece: Looking through the two discussion pages, there was a lot of mixed communication! When the original TPS was moved to Rapid Grants, only the page name changed, but not the template of the grant so it still showed up as a TPS, which is why Marti was confused. The portal on the info box needs to be updated to Rapid Grant. I have updated the page and now it shows up in the correct place for Rapid Grants Open Proposals. Please let us know if the applicant still wants to pursue the project despite the delay. If yes, we will prioritize review.
Based on our average decision-making time for TPS and Rapid Grants, I do believe these cases are an exception. The fact that two are TPS--> Rapid Grant cases and the other is related to grantmaking in a difficult legal context make me hope that they won’t be repeated in the future. We are also considering merging TPS and Rapid Grants as there is a lot of overlap between the two programs.
If you or a grantee are waiting on a response, you can always email us directly. While we strive to respond to all pings on discussion pages, there are times when we either miss them or they get buried in the masses. This can happen with email as well, but it can be a more direct way to get a response.
@AWang (WMF): I am satisfied with your attention and response. I appreciate the rapid pace at which everything in the Wikimedia movement changes and I know that the grants team does everything they can to both meet needs and innovate.
This page was last edited on 4 August 2018, at 19:32.