Funds Dissemination Committee/Additional Information and Analysis/Interviews/Phoebe Ayers

Board Interview with Phoebe Ayers

Wednesday, April 25th 2012

What do you believe is the most effective model for the FDC?

The FDC should be relatively independent of the Foundation, staff, Chapters, or any other particular interest. What we’ve talked about at the Board is the FDC will be an oversight body – not necessarily doing a line by line deep dive on all grants.

I have imagined a body that would make recommendations on big blocks of money (e.g., not individual grants to volunteers or other small scale grants). It’s not clear to me where the cut-off is for grants that the FDC focuses on, but I feel that the cut-off might be money that is strategically important in some way. And the FDC's allotment will be a block of money that is not necessary to keep the servers running – which is my cut-off for what shouldn’t be touched.

I think one challenge we may have with the FDC will be to get Wikipedians to focus on the big picture. Collectively, we’re all interested in the details. I would like to delegate the emphasis on details to other bodies or to FDC staff. I would like Wikipedia Australia to say that “this editor is going to the outback and needs $50 for gas” and have them manage that grant within their own larger budget that they might submit to the FDC. That being said, the Foundation will also likely continue to have some small grant programs (e.g., scholarships for Wikimania).

We have yet to tackle the issue of the role of the FDC in the formal annual planning process for the whole movement.

How do you envision the FDC evolving over time?

The FDC will have to start small and will likely grow in scope and responsibility as we iterate on our process. My vision is that the FDC will evolve into a very mature body that uses feedback from many sources to improve and influence many processes (like budgeting and strategic planning). The decisions made on the FDC will improve over time as we learn from experience (for example, the FDC would be able to make investment decisions within the movement based on where they see the money used most effectively).

We must be very clear on iteration –to establish upfront the processes we will use to evolve the FDC. We must specify when we will revisit the FDC processes, purpose, and structure. This will be helpful because inertia is a very powerful force. Sometimes things start in a certain way and then become a tradition which can’t be broken. We need to break out of this mould. Specifying a review process is a great way to ensure that these open questions are revisited.

What are your early thoughts on the FDC’s relationship with the Board?

In the long-term, we would like an FDC that is functional enough that the Board of Trustees can essentially rubber stamp their recommendations. “Rubber stamping” is the ideal situation for two reasons:

1. As the FDC matures over time, they will make increasingly good, reasoned, appropriate decisions
2. The Board has limited capacity to manage these decisions

It may make sense for the Board to step in when individual grantee disagrees with the decision or when there’s a conflict that can’t be resolved within the FDC. It’s almost a legislative body model. If you’ve got two bodies in agreement then that’s fine. If there’s something that goes wrong then the Board can step in.

A question is whether the Board should approve the FDCs recommendations as a slate or line by line. I think this would depend on what the line items are. If a line item is what we see at the annual plan level then that would be fine but if it’s a $500 travel related expense, that is much too detailed. For those bigger line items, I would want some data to inform the decision.

Overall, the Board will be interested in striking a balance – and answering big questions like “is funding well-distributed around the globe”? In terms of the specific project details, a lot of that will be figured out before it gets to the Board.

What do you see as the role of the Advisory Group?

Beyond setting the design and providing guidance, the Advisory Group is going to have to be the ones who keep a close enough eye on the FDC to uncover any emerging problems, for example, identifying if they see the FDC getting bogged down in grant details.

How could the FDC play a role in driving standards of excellence in decision-making and strategy alignment? The problem we have (but it’s a good problem) is that our mission is so broad that most things could fit within our mission. We will have to define the broad categories of what the FDC funds – e.g., projects, infrastructure grants etc…I’m uncertain if this could be determined by the FDC themselves based on the strategic plan or with the Board’s guidance.

Should some elements of Chapter budgets be considered “core”?

This may be contentious but I would like to see a block of money set aside for some Chapter Infrastructure and development (but not all of a chapter's budget, and not all of the FDC funds). I think the ideal is that the FDC would themselves discuss those higher level strategic decisions about chapters (e.g, appropriate number of employees or overall budget).

What do you believe is the best selection process for FDC representatives?

The Board election process is what I envision to be the closest model to the FDC selection process. However, the Board process can be something of a popularity contest – which we should avoid for the FDC. We can avoid the popularity contest by having very clear criteria for FDC members to meet. A mix of elected and appointed members has worked very effectively at the Board and has created a strong process and variety of opinions. We should emulate this process at the FDC.

The selection process should be open and should have clear rules about the length of a term and the election processes. If we don’t have clear and open processes, there can be many arguments about the membership and the legitimacy of the people on the FDC – which would bog down decision-making. Trying to make it representative of everyone is a lost cause, but it should be representative of multiple points of view (e.g., it shouldn’t be all editors, all Foundation staff, or all chapter people).

How can we ensure the FDC works effectively?

There are many considerations that we cannot overlook when thinking about building an effective working group. There seems to be a number of problems that always happen. One is that people have less time than they think – even if they say they can spend 5 hours a weeks on Wikipedia, life always gets in the way. The second problem is that volunteer efforts tend to be uneven. We need to build in that understanding that there will always be someone who is not going to be able to attend a meeting at a certain point in time. We must also manage FDC reporting and who the FDC reports to – remembering that reports are only useful to the extent that they really get used by other parties.

How can we effectively engage the community in helping to define the role of the FDC?

This is a tough question. It’s hard to get people involved in abstract topics if its not directly related to their lives. I don’t have a magical answer. One suggestion is to have a very strong, concise introductory paragraph (on the pages on Meta related to this) so that people don’t need to wade through 40 pages of text. Focus on questions that specific groups that would be interested in answering – particularly targeting those individuals further removed from this process.

Community members dislike not knowing what’s going to happen to their input. They have the expectation of seeing results if they’re going to invest the time and effort to comment. Your team should think about ways to make concrete changes based on what people say (and perhaps make the scope of possible changes clear).

Lastly, funds dissemination can be a pretty dry subject. It may be worthwhile to think of questions to make this interesting - even if it’s out of scope of the FDC’s role.