User talk:Gnangarra/proposal:WikiTown Townhall

WikiTown Townhall

The idea is very enticing - a specific town as a wiki oriented town - with qr codes to explain the town, and the administration of the town, where ever it might be - on side, supporting and even providing facilities for the town and the wikimedia community to interact and for both to benefit. It is an excellent opportunity for wikimedia projects to have a specific focus like this. SatuSuro (talk) 23:35, 16 October 2013 (EST)

Nice idea, but will we get the money?

I like the idea of sharing the experiences and helping others to establish similar projects. It would be great to replicate your Freo experience around Australia and more widely.

But, given Sue Gardner's recent comments on FDC, the commentary about FDC on that YouTube of the Metrics/Analytics meeting, the "signals" to WMAU to not apply for FDC but go instead for GAC (which appears to give out much smaller amounts, $5K rather than $50K), I can't see us getting $45K from WMF. I suspect we would be told to add this activity into an existing event, e.g. Chapters conference or Wikimania, to leverage the travel expenses already being incurred for those events anyway. I suspect the argument will also be made that Monmouth has lead the way in this area as an argument against holding it in Freo. So that is one option (I'll call it Plan A) that we could pursue; the cost to WMAU would be to send you and maybe 1-2 other people($10K would probably cover that).

Plan B would be to run an Australian-event co-located with some Australian local government conference to bring the idea to the attention of our local governments to get them onboard as partners (which I guess we need). We could advertise the event to the Chapters and say they are welcome to come along and let them either find the travel funds from within their own chapter budget or apply to WMF for one of those participation grants. If we did that, we could reduce the budget down to the costs of the travel for you and some other local Wikimedians to attend the event, for which WMAU could probably cover the costs out of existing funds (we could probably get several Wikimedians to attend if it was an Oz event). We could ask for GAC for additional funds and, if we get them, that would allow us to have more Wikimedians and more resources for the event, but if we failed with GAC, it would not prevent us getting something to happen.

Of course, if we have to go where Australian local government is meeting, it could be anywhere in Australia, and probably not anywhere near Freo (unless we were really lucky). So Plan C is to just reach out to LGAs in WA, where our chances of a close-to-Freo meeting would very much improved (I bet a lot of those sort of things are held in Perth). Maybe we could start with a WA-event and if that is successful (leads to more LGAs coming on board or whatever), we then go back to WMF for GAC to do the event on a grander scale (either in other states, or Australia-wide or internationally). This would fit the WMF's stated preference for starting small and growing an activity. Kerry Raymond (talk) 19:40, 22 October 2013 (EST)

Plan A would devalue the work of partners in the process as the TownHall wouldnt be the priority of the event, this is as much about taking on board their experiences as well so for them to consider it of value in attending they would be looking for it being the sole/primary purpose of the event.

Plan B & C both miss the purpose altogether of sharing experiences within the Wikimedian community, additionally SatuSuro's IEG [1] grant is about funding to reachout to LGA's in WA already, which he also tried to garner WMAU interest with User:SatuSuro/Wheatbelt_Project. Gnangarra 19:55, 22 October 2013 (EST)

Hi there! Asaf from WMF here. Craig has asked me to chime in, and I'm happy to:

I find Kerry anticipated my thoughts on this -- the cost does not seem commensurate with the expected utility. While exchanging experiences and learnings from Wikitown projects is desirable, it is not clear that a 5-day conference in Australia is the best way to achieve that. I will indeed recommend that this be proposed as a topic for the upcoming Wikimedia Conference in Berlin (the program team is accepting ideas right now!), and/or Wikimania 2014 in London. Alternatively, take some time to demonstrate the need: for example, what efforts at experience sharing have been undertaken so far? e.g. have you and other Wikitown practitioners shared reports, questions, ideas, on Meta, on mailing lists, etc.? Was there an attempt to distill best practice from any such reports? What are the shortcomings of this process (if it exists) so far?

P.S. a factual matter: while it's true that most Program and Event Grants (previously known as "WMF Grants") are in the $5K-$15K, it is certainly not the case that you cannot obtain $50K (and more) from the grants program. Ijon (talk) 11:41, 5 November 2013 (EST)

Funding

Hi Gnangarra, as I've said, I support the concept of bringing together the movement to discuss best practices for Wikitowns, as it's obvious that chapters are going to continue to engage in these sort of projects and it's in the entire movement's interests to come up with ways to avoid the sort of problems that occurred in Gibraltar.

With that said, can I assume that the WMF portion of this funding will be sought through the WMF Grants Programme? Do you anticipate putting in the request yourself or getting the chapter to do it? Either way, I think it will take some convincing to get the money out of the Foundation (although I'd love to be proven wrong). I don't want to sound discouraging, but I do want to be realistic. Lankiveil (talk) 23:36, 22 October 2013 (EST).

Would think that the Chapter would do the application, as it already has the necessaries in place Gnangarra 10:56, 23 October 2013 (EST)