Grants talk:PEG/WM AR/Annual Program Plan 2012

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First of all, it is a very well written grant. Since is a Annual program, my first question is why that wasn't already approved along with all the others annual plans?

Well - assuming that is a normal request - let's review it (I'm placing the section I'm referring to help the answers).

1. Federalization: The two events outside BA are already scheduled? We have dates or places?
2. Gender Perspective: There are an event planned to March 2012 (Maybe to day 8? ), there are already the program, or any other info about it?
3. Intellectual property and free licenses: What is the law 11723 of Argentina? Can you please explain what is wrong with it?
4. Outreach: You mention an institutional video? Where is it? ;)
5. Education: Did you plan to have some kind of "National education program" to Argentina? I know that Canada, United States and India have one. Are you planning in launch one in Argentina?
6. GLAM: If possible (I understand lots of GLAM projects have confidentially agreements before get signed) can you describe the agreement with RT?

And - again - I need to congratulate again WMAR for IberoCoop. I personally think is the best idea we had in the wikimedian movement since the creation of the 1st chapter. :) Béria Lima ^msg 13:24, 4 November 2011 (UTC) Reply

Thank you Beria for your comments and questions!

Here some short answers, we could add more information if needed.

1. Federalization: We are thinking about two places, in fact the two biggest cities in Argentina, after Buenos Aires: Rosario and Córdoba. As the first places for this initiative, we choose them because we already know a few wikipedians in these cities, who could actually help in the organisation, but also could keep things working in these cities after the events as well. We do not have a confirmation of the dates yet, but in our timeline we scheduled these events during march, April and may. (we do have a timeline not yet published in meta, but if you want to check it, It is available at Wikimedia Argentina wiki or I can send it to you as well).
2. Gender Perspective: Your proposal sounds like a really good idea! March 8th could be then! We didn't think about that but sounds really like a good plan. We don't have a program yet, but we are thinking about including an expert from Heinrich Böll Foundation to help us improve our gender perspectives within our projects. We do also have a Gender Strategies which we are implementing in our projects. You could find the document here http://wikimedia.org.ar/wiki/Categorizaci%C3%B3n_de_g%C3%A9nero_de_HBS
3. Intellectual property and free licenses: We have a lot of problems with our Intellectual Property Law (11723). For example we do not have freedom of panorama as such and that means a lot of problems for GLAM projects and directly affects Wikimedia Projects. But that is not the only problem. If you want to explore a little bit more about that, we suggest reading "Argentina Copyleft" (available at http://vialibre.org.ar/arcopy.pdf ) and Consumer's International Annual Report available at http://a2knetwork.org/reports2011/argentina We usually take part of events aiming to promote the debate on Intellectual Property issues like Open Access Week, and now we are invited to attend an event on Intellectual Property and Human Rights. We usually work together with other organisations in the field like Vía libre Foundation, Consumidores de Argentina, Librarians organizations and other. As we are also the local chapter of Creative commons in Argentina, promoting free licenses, public domain and IP debates is one of our main areas of interest.
4. Outreach: The videos are not ready yet. Our promotional videos will be ready in march, 2012. We already received a grant for them. You could check that at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:WM_AR/Video_instructivo (we've asked for an extension for this, so, it will be ready in march 2012).
5. Education: We are moving on that direction. We are already working with National Ministry of Education in the "Conectar Igualdad" Framework (Conectar Igualdad is the digital inclusion national plan aiming to distribute 3 million netbooks to students all over the country). We are members of the Advisory Council of Conectar Igualdad. We are also working close to Buenos Aires City digital inclusion iniciative (Plan Sarmiento) and we've signed an agreement with the Ministry of Education of the State of Buenos Aires.
6. GLAM: We cannot make much announcements on this topic yet. but now we are planning to have a resident wikipedian working together with the digitization team at National Public Television Station (Chanel 7). They are digitizing historic archives including hundreds of pictures already in the public domain. We are dealing with legal issues right now, but some of their historical materials could be considered under public domain in Argentina, like presidencial speeches, news of the day and other historical archives. It's hard work from the legal perspective, but we are trying to figure out how to deal with this right now. We'll make an announcement asap!

If you want to know more, just let us know! thank you very much for your interest and your comments! --MotherForker 12:09, 7 November 2011 (UTC) Reply

To answer Béria above, the reason this plan was not approved with the ones that were recently approved without involving the GAC is that those other plans were by chapters who had signed the fundraising agreement before the Board's August resolution on fundraising. Beside those particular chapters this particular year, all annual plans will be reviewed by the GAC, and WMAR just happens to be the first one that's ready. Ijon 12:28, 14 November 2011 (UTC) Reply

Well. I paid special attention to this grant, because WMAR is one of the of the locomotives of the Wikimedia movement, specially in the Iberoamerican area. Perhaps the amount of the grant can be surprising to somebody (100K US$), but we must think that this is an annually grant, not for one event or something.

Agree wiht Beria about the well-writting, I think it's clear and well scheduled. I think it's not very much money, if we bear in mind the great quantity of projects that they handle and that Argentina is one of the biggest countries of South America.

I hope that they pass this grant, and WMAR can give us a great wikimedia movement year, since already they have us used....theyhave the ideas, give they the money ;-)--Marctaltor 22:28, 17 November 2011 (UTC) Reply

Thanks for the detailed submission. You really have very nice projects that make the impression for capturing leading place within the Wikimedia Movement, but my hunch is that a more simple method to grant emerging projects yields more efficient results than to allow a macro grant for all the programs in a year. You must have a program for the upcoming year, but the discrepancies between the planned and actual programs are not as same as the discrepancies between the finances required for the planned activities and the finances spent for the actual projects. Even if we consider the global overview of the things that should be done as a key advantage, it's hard to say that all the things will be done properly to justify the sum requested. I hope you've already discussed the creation of a special fund to budget separate projects internally, and to send only the report at the end of the year. This will surely amend the professionalization in the chapter by restricting the role of the Wikimedia Foundation to fund projects in tight time gaps. As far as I know this is the largest sum ever requested, so by no means it's a valid topic of discussion, that may take more time than usual. Best regards.--Kiril Simeonovski 21:18, 21 November 2011 (UTC) Reply

Dear Kiril, we did it this way because that's how we've been asked to do so. We are now working on annual plans instead of single projects. In this annual plan we include our projects in order to reach our goals. On the other side, this is not the largest sum ever requested considering annual plans. --MotherForker 11:23, 30 November 2011 (UTC) Reply

Thanks.--Kiril Simeonovski 22:26, 6 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

Congratulations for your plan. It seems coherent with objectives and reasonable with previous experiences. I have several comments and a suggestions:

1) First of all I see an unbalance between administrative expenses and expenses directly addressed to perform the activities. If I understood it right you are planning to expend 65,121.95$ in administrative expenses and 5,854.66$ in international meetings to manage 26,757.31$ in activities.

Administrative expenses include Staff salaries, which also covers lots of the activities and tasks for the projects: for example, our ED is also our legal expert, so in her salary we include the legal work for GLAM, licenses, and so on. Our ED is also the person who runs all the lobbying and public relationship issues, like talking with local authorities, press contacts and the academic world. She is in also in charge of maintaining our website, organizing events, conferences, events, etc.

So, the salaries are not only for administrative issues, but also include a big part of the activities like events, writing articles, Public Relationships, Media, Lobby. We do organise conferences and that also requires a lot of work (we organised wikimania in 2009 and Iberocoop in 2011). Most of our actions do require people's efforts so, salaries are important to keep thing running and not only money for the expenses of those activities, our projects are mostly work intensive.Patricio.lorente 11:19, 5 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

2) This is an annual plan and it seems that you are requesting 100% of the costs. I think you should ask only for the costs not covered by the regular chapter incomes. For example if you have 70 members paying 25$ each then you should subtract 1,750$ from your request.

We are not requesting the 100% of the costs. We have monthly meetings that are covered by our own funds, as well as part of the office equipment and burocracy. If you need the details, we can provide them.

But is worth to mention that our membership fee is around USD 20 per year, because our priority is having more members, i.e. the fee is mostly a proof of good will. We cannot count on that to do our projects. We have around 70 members (with different levels of membership). Considering memberships, we do have an income of around ARS 5000.- per year,which is a little bit more than USD 1000. That is not enough money for our activities.

On ther other hand, we are also preparing submitions to other donors, but as there's lots of cultural projects here in Argentina, we can't count on that yet. We'll be working in that kind of issues in the future.Patricio.lorente 11:19, 5 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

3) Although it is an annual plan you are asking money for 24 months office rent and services.

This is just because in Argentina, rent contracts are for 24 months. Of course, if we receive this money this year, that will also be covered for the next one and we wouldn't require that money for 2013.Patricio.lorente 11:19, 5 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

4) You have not presented yet your financial report. This makes difficult to evaluate if the proposed budget has a reasonable growth regarding the previous one. Furthermore I think you should take into account the expected 2011 final balance and subtract it from the money you are requesting.

We do have our financial reports, and you can check them here. Sorry, they are in spanish and in legal form. We are working to publish a summary more readable. And we are now working on our financial report for 2011. We'll be able to publish it in january, after the end of this year.Patricio.lorente 11:19, 5 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

5) According to your report of the Ibero-American Wikimedia Summit 2011 you have 975.36$ under spend. Have you reimbursed it? Or it is to be subtracted from the present grant?. You also received a 3,350$ grant for "Video instructivo" (2,850$ original grant plus 500$ added from under spend grant Frankfurter Buchmesse) whose provisional completion date was May 2011. So the report is due from August 2012. Is this money spent?

We are still checking that, we will not reimburse that money because that would be a bureaucratic nightmare. So, one of our options is to subtract it from the grant. The other proposal is to use that remaining money to cover other expenses, like food and accomodation, which we did not originally include in the Iberocoop grant. Those costs were covered by our chapter. It's up to the Foundation to decide which of the possible options is the best one for them.

The Video grant was extended until march 2012, so we are still working on that. The video is on production right now, we are now doing a casting to select the face and voice of the video. It will be ready next March. We'll be shooting in december.Patricio.lorente 11:19, 5 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

6) Travel expenses to attend wikimania, chapters meeting, and iberocoop can be financed from other grants. Perhaps Iberoccop meeting could be held together with wikimania to save traveling and facilitate attendance.

These are different issues. There are several good reasons to do a regional conference apart from Wikimania, mostly because working together with our neighbours is one of our main goals, promoting new chapters, working groups and making plans and projects together are the main results from Iberocoop. There is no chance to include this kind of conference within Wikimania because of time, agenda and schedules, travel issues aside. Iberocoop's annual conference is a different event from Wikimania, with a different scope and different participants, in different languages.

Then, your second point is that our travel expenses could be covered by other grants. We will leave WMF to decide on how to proceed with this topic, whether they prefer the chapter to manage these expenses or rather they prefer us to ask for per-event grants or scholarships. But that is not yet decided, so we will keep this proposal and then talk to the WMF to check which is the best options to cover our participation in these events.Patricio.lorente 11:19, 5 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

7) The total amount in "Iberocoop and others" says 24.000Ar$ but adding the detailed amounts you get 39.600Ar$ there is an error of 15.600Ar$

You are right. There's a mistake there. Thanks for pointing out.Patricio.lorente 11:19, 5 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

My suggestions are:

1) To be coherent with the amount to be administrated and the period of time the grant is for you should limit the administrative expenses to a 12 months office rent and services and to a part time assistant. That is 21,219.51$ instead of 65,121.95$.

2) You should seek for other grants to finance international traveling and limit the requested fund to a single chapter representative to guarantee your attendance in case those other aids are not granted. That is 3,060.98$ instead of 9,658.54$ or 5,853.66$ as mistakenly stated.

3) You should present your financial reports and the report for the grant "Video instructivo"

4) Finally you should request the required money to develop the activities plus a small amount for unexpected expenses less the expected final balance for 2011, the under spend amount from previous grants, and the expected regular incomes of the chapter.--Josepnogue 18:30, 29 November 2011 (UTC) Reply

Could you expand a little about the education project? What exactly do you propose to do in Guarani and Aymara? Why those lanugages? I note that Guarani and Aymara have a tiny Wikipedia (i.e. unusable in education in the foreseeable future) -- so what would those booklets contain, and what are they intended to achieve? (Also, whereas Guarani has many speakers in Argentina, it seems that Aymara is mostly spoken outside Argentina.) Ijon 17:23, 5 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

We are already working on those languages. If you look at the statistics, both Wikipedias were almost abandoned four months ago. The Aymara Wikipedia had 1,272 articles by the end of August 2011, has now 1,459; the Guaraní Wikipedia had 1,409 at that time, and now has 1,523. The number of active editors has raised from none to a few in this period and in both Wikipedias there's a seed of a community trying to develop. Why these languages? Because there's a huge population of native speakers, but their languages have almost no representation in the web. Guaraní is official language in Paraguay, in the northeast provinces of Argentina, in part of Brasil and in some regions of Bolivia. According Wikipedia, 5 million people speaks Guaraní as their native language, but this is a very conservative figure considering is the main language of Paraguay and the population of this country is above that number. There are many schools, both in Paraguay and in Argentina, that teaches in Guaraní as first or even unique language. Teachers and pupils are receiving computers, netbooks and are being conected to internet due to goverment initiatives but they can't find content in their language, except for this tiny Wikipedia. In these last months we worked with a language institute of Buenos Aires, teaching how to edit Wikipedia to a group of native speakers of Guaraní with the aim not to use Wikipedia as a source of information (it is yet to small), but as a place to develop content as part of the classroom activities.

The Aymara language has a population of native speakers of arround 2.5 million people. This people belongs to the Andes region (Bolivia, Perú, northwest of Argentina). As in Guaraní, there's very little content in the web in their native language. In this case, we are mostly supporting the efforts of bolivian wikimedians in the wider network of Iberocoop. Perhaps you remember Rubén Hilare, who attended last Wikimania, and belongs to an aymara group called Jaqi Aru. This group and the organizers of Wikimedia Bolivia (not yet a chapter), are holding workshops to the Aymara community and finding new and enthusiastic editors.

For both languages, we are asking for some funding to translate, print and distribute a booklet for new editors. We've almost finished the Spanish version, wich is an adaptation of the Wikimedia Germany's booklet.

In Spanish we are working with secondary schools and universities. During November (just to mention last month), we had a workshop with 200 teachers of secondary school in Buenos Aires city, a workshop with students of professorship in Santa Fe city, and several workshops with university professors and students in La Plata National University and in the National University of Northwestern Buenos Aires. This is a permanent program of Wikimedia Argentina since 2010. Patricio.lorente 18:21, 6 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

Thanks! Ijon 20:36, 6 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

1) However it seems that there is still an imbalance. With respect to the accounts of 2010, expenditure on the projects grow 1.500% while expenditure in administration grow of 2.800%

In the aid Grants:WM AR/Professionalization the salary of the Director General was $ 1.500 for 6 months while in this application is $ 2.439 for 15 months and the part time person was $ 200 x 6 months while now is $ 732 x 15 months. Why those differences?

The program of intellectual property and free licenses is very interesting but it seems more an activity as a chapter of Wikimedia Argentina Creative Commons rather than as a chapter of Wikimedia. It is not an activity aligned with the priorities of the strategic plan. Also according to Grants:WM AR/Professionalization it seems that it is intend to hire as full time Beatriz Busaniche. According to her curriculum in english (it seems more up to date in spanish she also works as a project coordinator of Fundación Vía Libre (also chapter of Creative Commons as Wikimedia Argentina) and also works as communications coordinator of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. This conveys the image that you will be paying the cost of the work of these organizations.

The key to successful professionalization of a chapter is a good combination of volunteer work with the work of professionals. Volunteers have difficulty in doing jobs that require constant work and scheduled commitments but they are very efficient in specific activities or in jobs that do not require ongoing scheduled commitments. For example, to organize events, manage the publishing and distribution of leaflets or to deal with the press it can be a good idea to hire a professional. But activities such as maintaining a website, lecturing a conference, designing logos and brochures, writing articles etc. are best done by volunteers. Doing those things by professionals can end up frustrating volunteers when they see they do things for free while others are paid for the same.

The activities to be coordinated by the staff according to your working plan seem to be: Organizing 20 events (1 federalization, 1 gender, 5 outreach and 12 education), coordinating the design and printing of 3 guides and manage the relationships with the press. This really justifies a part-time person but does not seem wise to go beyond. And the intellectual property program perhaps should be financed from other sources, not from the WMF.

There is no reason to think that Wikimedia Foundation or Wikimedia Argentina will cover any cost of other organisations (In fact, it is clear that none of them needs us to cover any of their expenses). Wikimedia Argentina is a member of Creative Commons network, and it is not the only case within Wikimedia Community. And Wikimedia Argentina's main commitment with Creative Commons is promoting the free licenses that are compatible with our projects, which also is part of our own bylaws and institutional goals. So, these free licenses, intellectual property and public domain program is clearly a fundamental part of our plan.

Talking about Bea, of course she has different activities and affiliations, and THAT is the reason why we asked her to be our Executive Director, because of her experience and commitment with free knowledge, and all the networks she already has after long time working in NGOs related to free knowledge.

Going back to your question about her salary. Her amount of work in 2012 will be much bigger than her work in 2011, as she started working as Executive Director while still having other commitments. You are quoting her curriculum of 2011 a year when she certainly fulfilled all the expected goals. Based on that, we decided to work with her for next year, and this is exactly what we are talking about now for 2012.Patricio.lorente 21:18, 14 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

2) I think you should add these activities to really have a vision of an annual plan. According to your accounts you had more than $ 38.500 (at 31/12/2010) in your bank account. If along 2011 you spent a similar amount that in 2010 now it will be approximately $ 28,000. I still think you should subtract this amount from the requested grant. In fact according to your accounts it sems that this money comes from under spend amount of Wikimania 2009 grants so it should be spend in promoting wikimedia projects.

We do nothing else but promoting wikimedia projects. All of our work is dedicated to that. Patricio.lorente 21:18, 14 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

3) This is not accurate. Your experience refers to rental housing and you have not understood the concept of the minimum period of lease. The minimum duration of contracts for housing in Argentina is effectively 24 months but this is not a house and therefore the minimum duration is 36 months rather than 24. This period is a protection for you, not an obligation. The owner may not terminate the contract before 36 months but the tenant can. According to the Argentinean laws if you terminate the contract before the first 12 months you must pay a compensation of 45 days and if you do it after the first 12 months then the compensation down to 30 days. Anyway only the first 12 months belong to the 2012 yearly activities and the other costs should be applied to next year grant. Take into account that the rent will be updated and next year you will need a different amount of money.

Renting an office is exactly like renting a flat, in fact, most of the offices are also flats with professional use permission. We are not talking about leasing but renting an office (or a flat with professional use permission). And yes, we understood: contracts here are for 24 month, and you have rescission clauses, but then you has to pay a compensation, as you said. We don't think is wise to pay this compensation when you can prevent it. Patricio.lorente 21:18, 14 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

4) No problem. It follows perfectly the rules according the Argentinian accounting system. There is a small error on page 6 where it says that in 2009 you received a "Subsidio Wikimedia en el Aula " amount of AR $ 662,707.97. I guess it should be " Subsidio Wikimania 2009".

Yes, we also noticed that after it was delivered to the administration. And because is a mistake in a tittle wich doesn't affect the numbers we choosed to keep it like that. But, as you said, when it says "Subsidio Wikimedia en el Aula" you should read "Subsidio Wikimania 2009".Patricio.lorente 21:18, 14 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

5) For the same reasons as in point 2 I think you should add both costs and revenues of the project "Video en el aula" in the present annual plan.

We don't have a project with that name. If you are talking about this project, we don't see the need: it has its own budget and we has to report as an individual project. Patricio.lorente 21:18, 14 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

6) See the suggestion 2). I am not proposing that you ask nothing but limit this to a single person to ensure your participation, and then go for other aids if more people want to go.

As I said, we will leave WMF to decide on how to proceed with this topic.Patricio.lorente 21:18, 14 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

In addition Iberocoop should begin to produce tangible results. You are contemplating the development of classroom materials, brochures etc. Some of these materials may be used by other chapters who also speak Spanish. For example Amical Viquipèdia in the mail sent on 27/01/2011 offered to Galileo (your vice) to share the costs of the brochure "Welcome to Wikipedia" if you translated it into Spanish. You recently refused to admit this group in Iberocoop. It seems that these synergies should be applied and the costs of these materials be shared with other groups. --Josepnogue 20:21, 12 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

The materials we are developing have free licenses and we also publish the sources to help translations and adaptations. In fact, the booklet we are producing right now is being designed with Inkscape and Scribus to have free format sources. This booklet is going to have Spanish, Portuguese, Aymara and Guaraní versions, and this scope is only possible if there's a strong cooperation with multiple chapters and groups.Patricio.lorente 21:18, 14 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

From your answer I understand that you hired Beatrice several months ago and that the first proposal was not actually for a full-time position. My perception is that there has been several practices that should be changed:

You have hired a person without an open process announced publicly where everyone has the opportunity to apply.

Frist you don't know this. And second this has absoluty nothing to do with you, this grant or WMF, but has to do with WMAR members. And since none of them complained, I can't see why you're so worried about it.

You have requested a grant to fund a contract stating that otherwise you did not have enough own resources to do so. WMF required you to transform the aid in an annual plan.

Yes, WMF did asked it, because is the new policy regrading grants. Not because they found anything wrong with the other grant (as you seem to sugest.)

This application has been delayed but you have hired the person paying him with your own resources despite having said you could not.

You got that wrong. They hired Bea even BEFORE the grant to WMF asking for it. And they did so because they had the money to do so at the time, but not enough to pay her forever.

WMAR has received and executed grants where it has obtained excess of funding and has not returned the money neither has asked to reallocate it to other projects: Wikimania 2009 (662,707.97 AR$ Grant - 428,690.72 AR$ expenses = 234,017.75 AR$ under spend ) and Ibero-American Summit Wikimedia 2011 ( under spend $ 975.36).

I think I heard Patricio says at least one million times that this in fact WMF pick to what to do with this money. And btw, there are no "Wikimania 2009" grant here.

WMAR has received a grant to develop a "video instructivo" (original grant $ 2.850 plus $ 500 added from under spend in Frankfurter Buchmesse grant) that should have been done before May 2011. Despite having the new Director from several months, this project has not yet been accomplished. Now you say that you will finish in March 2012 but you refuse to put it in this plan.

Tell me for what reason in hell would they ask the money for the same thing twice? The video grant is done, funded and in development. Has no business being here.

You are asking money to pay for lobby and dissemination of Creative Commons which is not a priority for wikimedia and that corresponds mainly to your activities as local chapter of Creative Commons.

And? Considering that CC is the license which makes Wikimedias projects possible, I don't see the problem with disseminate it. And the lobby is for changing the FOP law - something that at least 3 other chapters are doing as well (I remember WMFR mail for some days before about the same thing).

--Josepnogue 18:06, 16 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

As a last remark: I find incredible rude someone comes to say how some other people should or should not run their chapter. If has nothing to do whit the grant, shouldn't be in this page, and this looks like vendetta to me. Béria Lima ^msg 00:09, 18 December 2011 (UTC) Reply

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