Commons:Wiki Loves Monuments 2017/Meetings/2017-07-25

2017-07-25

Meeting with WMF grants

Attendees

Lodewijk, ilario, Marti, Alex, Ido

Discussion items

• Fiscal sponsorship
• Practical matters?
• Reporting
• Goals...
  • We have to reduce our efforts to support (new) participating countries. Therefore, we have to reduce our goal of participating countries from 40 to 30.
  • We drop our commitment to organize a Wikidata-thon in August to enrich the monuments data via Monumental (another tool the team is heavily invested in developing)
  • We reduce the partnership activities to levels that do not require travelling which means a much more limited scope as sometimes closing deals with partners (especially the bigger ones) do require a personal visit.
  • Most of our evaluation activities will become part of a separate grant for the international meeting.

Notes

Lets make sure we're on the same page. Budget cuts: need a bit more detail to be able to provide those types of budget. They won't approve 'unspecified travel'. They don't like the inconsistency. They don't want to add a lot of burden. Lodewijk clarifies that we will have a burden still. It is not clear that they will fund the meeting btw, it is an edge case from their end. They may very well not fund it again - although it is also not clear that they can't fund it. They can't decide to fund it without we finish the evaluation. There might be flexibility how to fund that meeting (through which channel), but the burden will always be higher. For them it's also questionable if they can keep funding Wiki Loves activities in general at the same level (they can no longer fund everything). It is uncomfortable when costs are going up, and the impact is remaining the same.

Cutting Wikidatathon not a big problem. They are open to funding it though, to the same amount. We can make travel requests one by one, or in a group. The amounts seemed reasonable. Marti will send one or two change requests.

For the meeting: the work burden is very inconvenient re: timeline. Marti will look into what can be arranged around the timeline. She's confident that the timeline can be adapted. Evaluation work is tied to the international meeting? Complex. That is to them the trickiest part.
Lodewijk clarified that we had international team meetings before, it was not a unique scenario. Marti: Cost benefit analysis needs to be made. They want to see measures what the impact of a meeting was. Seem sceptical. What is the benefit of the meeting? Ilario: replication vs innovation. Two years before: No innovation. No Wikidata migration because only replication only, no reliable tools.
Marti: migration to Wikidata is a good reason for her, jury tool improvement not (need to make the case)? They only want to fund is the question is specific enough - 'how to improve the Wikidata integration' would fit, but 'how to make it easier for national organizers' won't? Quite confusing. They want us to pitch more...

They need to have us evaluate. We must report on what we did and accomplished. They are happy to approve stuff, but need more specific points for that. We can request changes here: m:Grants:Project/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_international_team/2017_coordination/Finances
We can request additional funds up to the amount we originally requested.

Fourth point: reduce to a minimally required level to evaluate the grant (which include some impact evaluation). They would love us to do more work on that end of course, the question is now what is 'sufficient'.

Marti suggestion: write down every opportunity to take advantage of that require the meeting, so that we have the list.

Reporting: progress reports.

There was some internal deadline for the contract with regards. Either budget situation would not impact our timeline.

Take aways from the meeting

• It is OK to change our goals in the three first points mentioned. The fourth, we can reduce to a minimum evaluation that is required for the grant evaluation.
• We will need to be more specific about our goals in the future, and the impact it will achieve. Apparently they are far from convinced of the added impact value that the international layer is offering by spending these funds. The low activity in the previous two years (replication only) has become their benchmark.
• Wikidata migration is especially considered a good reason to spend additional funds.
• We can request the additional funds for the cut budget areas as discussed before, with low administrative burden. They are willing to fund it, if we provide the requested details.
• Marti explicitly stated she's uncertain if the meeting will be fundable. They will try to shift the deadline such that it will be a lower burden for us. We're however reading between the lines that the odds for funding it are not in our favour, based on her estimate.
• Marti offered to have another discussion later about the additional grant request for the meeting.

Action items

• Marti: look into timeline
• Communicate fiscal sponsor & start/end date with Janice
• WLMi: send budget change requests for additional expenses.
• Ilario: make changes to goals on project grant description?