Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Wikipedia Day LA, 2019

Hi, JSFarman! Thank you for submitting your rapid grant request. We are currently dealing with a very high volume of applications so our response may be delayed. We will review your application as soon as possible. To help us speed the review process could you please address the following issue? The grant cannot have the same start and end date, so please adjust the dates in your application. The start and end dates need to cover the entire period during which you expect to incur expenses. Please keep an eye on the discussion page as we review your grant, as we will post comments and questions here. Best regards, LSmith (WMF) (talk) 23:08, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Hi LSmith (WMF)! I have adjusted the start date to December 3, 2018, and I have this page watchlisted. Thanks! JSFarman (talk) 03:53, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

Approved

Hi JSFarman. This request is approved and we look forward to hearing how the celebrations go. Best, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:01, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

Budget adjustments

With apologies, we are hoping to rework our proposed grant budget to reflect the following:

Speaker honorariums: $550 (total for six people)
Cake and other refreshments: $300
Parking/transportation: $170
Supplies (plates, sharpies, name badges, etc.): $50
Misc. Ace Hotel (portage, tips): $80
Volunteer/presenter thank-yous (t-shirts, etc.): $100

We had a fantastic day of presentations and panel discussions. We opted to pay certain speakers an honorarium in lieu of directly reimbursing expenses like transportation, parking, and lunch. In the future, we will plan our grant budget to be more in line with the actual projected programming expenses. Can you let me know if there is further information you need to consider approving this? Thank you. StaceyEOB (talk) 01:43, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Approval of budget adjustments

Hello StaceyEOB, thank you for putting your budget adjustments here. Normally, we don't allow cash prizes or cash payouts to people because of OFAC checks we need to do on our end. But given that this has already taken place I will allow it this time. For future projects please replace the cash with gift cards or similarly priced gifts in keeping with our criteria and guidelines. Please let me know if you have any questions. Best regards, WJifar (WMF) (talk) 04:09, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you, WJifar (WMF). We had our wires crossed here in the planning, and I apologize this wasn't sorted sooner. FTR, these are modest honorariums, like $100 to a presenter who traveled 2 hours from San Diego to present to our local group on a Sunday. I understand (now) the policy is there and has to be; but just for what it's worth, it hamstrings organizers and limits the programming possibilities—-especially if we are meant to be thinking about diversity and getting new voices into the mix. Some latitude with programming would allow us to attract and communicate with new audiences like the 100+ who showed up—-I'd say 75% were new to Wikipedia. But thank you for the exception here, apologies for the confusion between us here in LA, and it won't happen again. 142.129.100.5 17:46, 4 March 2019 (UTC)