Wikimedia monthly activities meetings/Quarterly reviews/Grantmaking, 2013-05-15

The following are notes from the Quaterly Review meeting with the Grantmaking team on May 15, 2013.

Present: Anasuya Sengupta, Jessie Wild, Asaf Bartov, Katy Love, Siko Bourtese, Winifred Olliff, Haitham Shammaa, Evan Rosen, Jonathan Morgan, Sue Gardner, Erik Moeller, Adele Vrana (taking minutes)

Agenda

The story of a grant --- Asaf Bartov --- 3-5 min (presentation)
Overview, targets, goals --- Jessie Wild --- 10 min (presentation) / 10 min (discussion)
Strategy --- Anasuya Sengupta --- 10 min (presentation) / 5 min (discussion)
Grants Administration --- Winifred Olliff ---5 min (presentation) / 5 min (discussion)
Project and event grants/Wikimedia Grants Program --- Asaf Bartov--- 20 min (presentation) / 10 min (discussion)
Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) --- Siko Bourtese --- 20 min (presentation) / 10 min (discussion)
Annual Plans/FDC --- Katy Love--- 20 min (presentation) / 10min (discussion)
Next steps, challenges, questions --- Anasuya and team --- 10 min (presentation) / 20 min (discussion)

The story of a grant

Introduction: Anasuya began by appreciating the work done by Erik and Asaf to build the grants program, and the work of every member of the team over these past few months. The Quarterly Review process itself was useful to the team since we're a new team. We have challenges but also significant achievements.

To introduce the team's work, Asaf tells the story of two successful grants: small investments that had good returns for the movement.

Support for Wikimedia Australia's first GLAM-Wiki event

See, Grants:WM_AU/GLAM-WIKI and Grants:WM_AU/GLAM-WIKI/Report.

Amount: US$5,000

When: August 2009

Supporting: Wikimedia Australia's first GLAM-Wiki event.

What happened: It helped spark Wikimedia's GLAM movement, enabling the creativity of Liam Wyatt and others in WMAU.

WikiSangamotsavam

See, m:Grants:Kannan_Shanmugham_-_WikiSangamotsavam_2012/Malayalam_Wiki_Conference_2012

Amount: US$2,700

When: April 2012

Supporting: Community-initiated grant which didn't come from a chapter (co-funded with the government of Kerala).

What happened: A well-orchestrated event and grant with demonstrable Community growth after this grant (and a quality grant report)

Overview, targets, goals

Overview of last quarter and 3 goals for the team:
1. Implement FDC
2. Provide finance support through grants and fellowships
3. Global South, India, Brazil
These goals were achieved, with some shifts in strategy with the catalyst programs in India and Brazil. There has been significant transition, but a new team is being built with a revised grantmaking strategy, post the narrowing focus process last year. Both the FDC and the Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) programs are new for the year. The strategy looks to support different parts of our movement (from individuals to established chapters) through the different grants programs, which are designed for specific needs and goals.
Jessie presents the team members and their roles in the team.
$6.5 million of funds were distributed in FY 2012-13.The majority of resources are going to the FDC. 90% of total fund have gone to chapters, 6% have gone to individuals and 5% have gone to movement groups and partners.
Question: do we have a potential grantee pool?
We feel we are not reaching out to enough of our community; only a slice of our movement knows that these resources exist. We want to reach out to both a greater number of our community members and other potential partners, and are working on deepening our communications around the WMF grants programs over the next year.
Overall, funds are not going to Global South, Individuals or Gender Work yet. Only Argentina is on the list of FDC grantees from the Global South.
This categories on this chart are not mutually exclusive: grants may show up in multiple categories if they meet multiple criteria. For example, a grant to a global south organization funding gender gap work may show up in both categories. This chart does not yet show how FDC entities are spending on programs because we will not have that information until after FDC entities complete impact reports.
Question: Do we want to to get some data on grants other entities are giving to individuals?
Yes, we will get an individual bar as soon as we get the information. We anticipate being able to understand better the spending of our grantees following their final financial reports.
Jessie presents a snapshot of funds spent in each program: mostly outreach programs, education program (including primary or secondary), WLM, GLAM

Grantmaking Strategy

Anasuya presents the grantmaking strategy.

Highlight: Grantmaking is not just about giving out money: it is about supporting the exchange of all sorts of resources.
We want to support different elements of the movement. How can we fund individuals, movement partners, etc?
Our grantmaking strategy was built from the ground up by looking at different parts of the movement and trying to find the appropriate ways to support these parts.
We want to understand and lead thinking on outcomes and impact.
We would like to support Global South and Gender Gap.
We are an interesting combination of key money mobilizer, donor, and actor in our movement.
Theory of change: resources are money, partnerships, different tools, mentoring, sharing to fund and support the development of the movement
To support different needs, we have created different grant programs. Planning to rename some programs for the new fiscal year, to make the distinctions and uses a bit clearer.
Grants Program proposed names:
- Annual Plans (FDC)
- Project and Event Grants (WMF Grants)
- Individual Engagement Grants (no change)
- Travel and Participation (Participation Support Program)
- Partnership Grants (currently CIS is this type, in future we would like to create a new Partnerships program to support entities like CIS)
Question: If a chapter wants to get funding for their annual projects, but isn't eligible for FDC (or that doesn't work out), would that be covered by the WMF Grants program?
Yes, we have funded many grants which didn't involve staff hiring to chapters. If a chapter feels comfortable with project-specific funding without full-time permanent staff, we still can do that through the WMF Grants Program.
Question is linked to HK issue, how do we help chapters do their work if not through an FDC/Annual Plan grant?
Positive example from Wikimedia Serbia. They approached Asaf in order to professionalize: Asaf pointed our a number of gaps in governance that they would have to fill before we'd consider funding staff, they held a general assembly and enacted some missing policies and crafted a strategy, a budget, and a program plan, and we agreed to fund their first employee and their office. This funding request would have gone through the FDC today, but was made just before the FDC began accepting submissions, so we allowed WMRS to go forward with the original plan.

We have learned that we are not communicating effectively enough that the WMF Grants program can be an entry point to professionalization.
Comment from Sue: Reflections around effectiveness should be reflected in the Grantmaking strategy.
- We don't just support global partners, but we need to make a desicion on who and what we should support.
- Our goal is to spend money on projects of strategic importance. Focus in building success and not spending time fixing problems or failures. We shouldn't get distracted by focusing on problems.
- Anasuya agrees we have to focus on effectiveness and impact but doesn't know if the answer is only to look at successes. We don't know entirely yet what success looks like in our movement because the movement is still so young.
- When WMIN brought on a new Executive Manager, Asaf introduced him to other new EDs of similar-sized chapters. We can be creative about learning across the movement, and learn from both success and failure, while highlighting successes.
- This is a context of shake-out, where the new programs are "shaking out" entities to the appropriate level of funding and support.
Comment from Sue: The movement is designed with minimum friction, and barriers are very low, but when maintaining very low barriers, you might have some issues later.
You have to have high bars at some point and the amount of money increases that bar.
Question from Erik: How to celebrate success? Does the team have a strategy for that?
Example from Sue: Wiki Towns were celebrated at Wikimania as the best project in the year, and one reason was because it generated a lot of media attention to the project. The success of Wiki towns shows there is a vacuum waiting to be filled; we don't necessarily lead with programs that have high positive impact on our community relative to the costs.

We will be looking at chapters in the context of their communities and online contributions, so we understand success in terms of impact on community and content. We will get inputs from grants reports, other internal teams/resources, and learning from across the movement and elsewhere. The inputs from all this will feed into which programs and organizations we invest in at different levels (e.g., amount of $, amount of time).

Grantmaking principles

Anasuya reviews the principles that are guiding the team: transparency, participatory grantmaking, coaching and mentoring grantee, support to GS communities, innovation and experimentation, outcomes and high impact (high standards), accountability with simplicity and ease. See the slide deck for more details.

One grant doesn't fit all, and one size doesn't fit all, and we want to be sensitive about context.
Although there is a lot of backend complexity to our systems, we are trying to build a user friendly process.
"Raising the floor" (FDC guidance for some chapters not yet ready for FDC) and "raising the ceiling" (celebrating success). We should do both.
Achieve systems and processes that are user-friendly and at the same time accountable to our movement, and that give us the impact learning we need to measure success.
Pro-active and intentional partnerships. IdeaLab's example of how to support new ideas. Half of the IEG approved grants came through the IdeaLab.

GS Strategy

We are excited about the GS strategy: the idea is to move from building our own teams in these geographies to better supporting the communities to grow effectively. We will focus on the following 9 geographies and associated languages: Argentina, Brasil, Mexico, Egypt, Turkey, India, Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam.
We tried to feed into our thinking not only numbers (active editors ... etc.), but also internet penetration, political limitations, etc, and more subjective inputs such as community engagement.
There is a basis for work in Turkey, and there are potentials in other countries too.
We are thinking about more than grants: e.g. community mapping, and engaging with them to build things based on the subset of what each community is passionate about, intersected with our strategic goals.
Mentoring & leadership development are also key things we need to focus on. Staff and experienced Wikimedians should do site visits.

Learning agenda for the grantmaking process

Jessie introduces the learning agenda for the grantmaking process, which is critical in informing our internal grantmaking strategy, as well as building movement capacity. We have been thinking about a learning agenda, in four areas:

Organizational effectiveness
Looking for/developing good tools to help community/WMF
Community mapping and baseline
Learning studies designed and applied (being pro-active to highlight success stories we want to see)

Review of a grant's cycle

Before taking a deep dive into the grants programs, Anasuya presented a grant cycle: the grant process is a heavy lift and time-consuming. It requires being proactive to find grantees, multiple steps for risk mitigation during the proposal and approval processes, intentional conversations during execution, and reflection following the grant.

Grants Administration

Anasuya appreciates Winifred for her work handling up to 100 grants a year.
Transparency: we published a table on Meta and have improved the templates on Meta to show the community where each grant is in the processs
Ease: we have done a lot to improve our forms, templates, and documentation on Meta, and are striving to keep processes for each program lightweight and to remain highly responsive to the community even as the number of programs and grants grows and our internal systems become more robust.
Efficiency: grants administration software (Fluxx) to help with this; more internal processes are documented for moving grants through the proposal pipeline.
We have reduced significantly the time to review a report after reported to less than 10 days on average across all programs.
Risk Management: improved grant agreements are in place as well as other compliance-related internal procedures

Project Grants

Asaf presents the WMF Grants Program.

Program overview

Former purpose: grants to chapters
Refined purpose: small to medium project-specific and event-specific grants
Goals:
1. Support chapters and partners via grants (29 grants this FY in total of US$337K)
2. Support FDC process in eligibility and compliance

Highlights Q1-3

Breaking down monolithic pages on Meta into more streamlined pages. (Now rebuilding translations that were disrupted in this process.)
Kevin Gorman was contracted to review the process of the grants program: identification of risks and proposed mitigation (some proposals are already adopted and others were not).
Chose a software solution (Fluxx) to implement grants management across all programs.
Question: Would using Fluxx reduce the information available on Meta?
No. we are still commmited to working on the Wiki. We will eventually look into creating bots and integration with wiki to bring information from the wiki into Fluxx.

Current grants work

Grants currently support: community events, competion and content drives, outreach events, partnerships and instituitional outreach, travel funding, lobbying, administrative expenses, legal fees.
Large amount of money spent is spent on events

Programmatic learning

Each of these grants demonstrates something interesting we have learned about the potential of grants to support communities in different ways and to spark longer-term effects beyond the immediate execution of the project.

Funding for WMAU's first GLAM-Wiki event: helped spark the GLAM-Wiki movement
WMCZ's Mediagrant: very large grant (21,000 EUR) for centralized, very small reimbursements supporting media aquisition. Unfortunately, alongside the contributions it enabled, this grant has also contributed to chapter conflict and has been an administrative challenge.
Comment: On the positive side, it has resulted in significant, high-quality content creation.
TamilWiki's Media contest: very small (US$800) grant for contest prizes that generated a great deal of content
WMDK's WiR grant: WiRs in place even though grant funds were not actually used (the mere presence of funding may have encouraged institutions to fund WiRs themselves).
Sue supported that with the example of the Consumer Reports residency (also a co-funded initiative partially supported by the WMF Grants program). If we offer some money the institute will feel that we are serious about the work and will be more motivated to admit the Wikipedian.
Turkic speaking Wikimedians Conference, WMRS's CEE Conference: grants leveraging regional community meetings and skill-sharing
WMCA's Quebec Programs, Amical's GLAM & Outreach, "Annual Grants": large grants support a group or series of projects

Process learning

These are some things we have learned about making grants in our context.

Compliance is still an issue for many grantees; preparations for the FDC process have revealed past neglect by both WMF and grantees
Information about compliance and the differences between different grants programs is available, but needs to be more proactively communicated. ("TL;DR effect")
Actively inviting people and organizations to apply for grants is effective.
There are many benefits to the dialogue on grant discussion pages on Meta.
Some grantees experience stress or are afraid to apply in the first place.
Some grantees would benefit from help with project management. (This kind of support has been given to grantees that asked for it but we aren't been able to offer this help proactively with our current resources.)

Touchpoints with the WMF staff and community throughout the life of a grant

See the slide presentation for details about how the grant's team is involved in the life of a grant.
Grants team doesn't rely much on people from outside the team through the application/review process for the WMF Grants program, except in special cases
GAC is involved with grant review, but not commited to reading reports for the grants they have approved (this should be changed)
- GAC's composition: all volunteer committee of 21 total volunteers
- GAC activity: 1/3 very active, 1/3 infrequently active, 1/3 not active
- We finally came up with a proccess to remove completely inactive members of the GAC
- Global South countries are well-represented in the GAC

Where the program is going

Work with GAC to adopt criteria for evaluations and discuss paths for organization development
Provide proactive guidance about who would most benefit from project grants vs. FDC allocations
Do more proactive grantmaking, reaching out to non-movement entities
Migrate to Fluxx for better management of the grants process

Questions the Grants team is thinking about

How can we best support geographies with little to no active editors?
Suggestion: We have partners like NGOs on the ground that could partner with our community to do some initiatives.

Question: do we have some good examples for programs to fund in areas where there was no organized community prior to foundation's work/investment?
One-time editing workshops often do not work, while competitions work fairly well. Even with competitions, bootstrapping a community ex nihilo is next to impossible.
Should WMF make a stronger statement about low-impact vs. high-potential Wikimedia projects, to discourage funding requests around those low-impact projects? We have been not funding low-impact requests, but have not made a statmenet to guide grantees about what projects may be considered low or high impact.
Suggestion: Let's not focus on the negative, but emphasize high-impact projects. Let's shine a spot light.

Comment: it's impossible to equally allocate resources to new projects. The recent Wikisource IEG-funded community-led vision project as an example of a success story.

Comment form Sue: I think this fits with the earlier 'low barrier' conversation.
Do we ever say no to a great opportunity because we've spent our grants budget? (We haven't done that so far.)
Life-cycle question to be added to this main question: If a certain amount of funds are not allocated in the FDC could be it be allocated in the Grants Program?

Yes, it makes sense if a flow of funds exists within the Grants program.

Individual Engagement Grants

Siko presenting the IEG program.

Designed to respond to gaps we have identified in existing grants programs.
- Support for Individuals - community leadership
- Support and encouragement for online/on-wiki projects . Where our other grants programs tend to result in offline events, etc, we want to specifically encourage online work: offering funds for individual's time helps with that
- Experimentation, innovation and risk-taking in the service of impact

Q3 Goals

Pilot the program
Focus on positive user experience
Build committee trust
Lay foundation for impactful, scalable grantmaking. The focus was in the process, for this round, it remains to be seen how many of the actual pilot round projects will have true impact though.

Portfolio

Eight grants were recommended by the committee, and WMF approved all of them, making some adjustments to scope and budget.
They are diverse in terms of type of projects and funding range. Some of them are more like what WMF has traditionally funded with grants (education, outreach), but some are closer to the online innovation we envision supporting (like the Chinese social media project, and The Wikipedia Adventure).
In the Chinese social media project, we don't know yet what the ROI will be, but with a small grant like this, we're mitigating the risk and able to try something new.
The Wikipedia Adventure is another online community-building example, teaching new editors social/policy, not just technical skills, and we'll measure the impact from that to see if games are a good strategy for this.

Lifecycle of an IEGrant

See the slide deck for more details.
Committee volunteers are involved at every stage of the grantmaking process, as is grantmaking staff, but we've designed it to be not a very heavy-life on all of WMF organizationally.
Pipeline should continue to be focused on, and reviewing the grants is one of the heavy-lift part in this lifecycle.
Some consultation with other WMF staff during review. Example: technical consultating with Engineering.

IEG Committee

They are responsible for finalize the proposals, and work together to recommend a shortlist for funding.
Strategy is 'be bold, be nimble'.
We have 18 members, 12 active, 2 recused (submitted proposals), and 4 went inactive.
Goal: to have a diverse breadth of experience and projects in the commitee.

Submissions

Over 50 pages created with ideas and drafts which resulted in 22 eligible proposals.
The varied distribution of funding requests can be seen on the slide.

Learning

We ran two surveys: one aimed at committee, and another one for the all proposers.

Success, what worked

Proof of positive user experience - want to make sure applicants would have a positive user experience even if they are not funded, so far looks good, high satisfaction/recommendation scores even from those who were not selected in this round.
We are declining a large proportion of the proposals, more than other grants programs so far, so it is good to see the high satisfaction.
Thinking about things in a programatic way resulted in a good program structure.
The committe hit all their deadlines during the review process, tight timelines but nimble, structured process facilitated this.
Focusing on diversity from among proposals.
Focus on managed risk. (The committe managed to recommend funding some new projects of a sort which we have never done before, but didn't fund any at the max level of US$30k.)

Challenges, what we can improve

Balance the need for human support and the need for scalability:
- Need for more qualitative feedback on proposals, in ways that scale
- Cultivating impactful ideas takes time (proposals were written over a short time, in future rounds we'll have IdeaLab pipeline, etc)
- Grantee demographics: need to do more to bring female grantees, global south grantees

IdeaLab

Grants project incubator: long-term vision is to make the IdeaLab a sort of entry-way to all grant programs. Low barrier to entry, to share ideas and match up with other participants, get early feedback, etc.
Suggestion from Sue : Regarding subset of ideas that may not require funding, I think it's great to have a place where they can incubate their ideas, find people, etc.
Siko agrees and believes the idealab can be a friendly "full-of-kittens" place where anyone can bring an idea, proposers can find support while drafting their proposals, but there are multiple exit points, doesn't have to be just one path.
Challenge: Driving cross-wiki traffic to Meta, encouraging ongoing activity in the space..
- Notifications on Meta will help.
- Surfacing dynamic content (people and ideas), we'll use some of the same systems we built in Teahouse for this
- Calls to action for participants to find ways to get involved
- Roles/badges to encourage activity

Future

Measure results of Q4; scale what works in Q4
Volunteer mentorship through IdeaLab, etc.
Robust scoring system: Google docs is ok for now, but eventually we shoud think about a more robust scoring system that might even benefit all of our grants programs.
i18n : we launched in English only, so we need to get things into L10n pipeline.

Questions

Do we see value in prioritizing efforts to make grants more accessible to outsiders?

Sue: I have a bias towards "outsiders" in our grantmaking. There are a lot of other organizations that have expertise, and if we help fund it, we can start building it internally. Think it is a good thing to make grants to outsiders (ex. Ada initiative). There are a lot of expertise in gender gap, Global South etc outside our movement. So we would like to take people who are on our borders inside, and try to bring our community members to the outside.

What is the right scale for IEG program to shoot for? Do we set program targets by number of grants, dollars, number of volunteers impacted?)
Suggestion from Sue: Impact is most important.

IEG grants are helping us learn more about impact of on-wiki/off-wiki work.

Discussion around grantmaking and technology

Do we see future where Grantmaking and Tech could partner and work closely?
Erik: we support the tech community through GSoC, where we mentor students. It wasn't our money, but we mentored those students, and today we do a similar program from our budget. Another example: OPW (which we pay for). So we have a similar program, but we need to make sure to match the suitable staff member with the students. So if an IEG requestor has a technical project, that needs engineering support, you should route them to OPW/GSoC instead. (Note: though GSoC and OPW are similar in their objectives, they are different in their distribution of resources.)
The problem is not "to touch WMF engineering or not;" the question will be whether will they benefit from being in the engineering pipeline more than in the grantmaking process.
There used to be an IEG proposal about 'Easy media uploader,' and that proposer could have been routed towards OPW. (Note: this does not mean their project idea should be routed to OPW, just the candidate.)
Erik recommends leveraging the appropriate engineering resources to pull some community tech reviewers into the IEG committee or into the public review process and keeping existing eligibility requirements and separation in place (if you can accomplish your project without WMF tech, then it is ok to fund via IEG).
Recommend that people apply to OPW, if applicable
Question from grantmaking around a long term a way of Engineering offering technical support to the grant projects themselves?
Sue suggests we should not partner Engineering with Grantmaking. Engineering puts a lot of energy into finding good tech folks already (going to Hackathons etc in order to bring new engineers in). We think they find those people, and the most important thing we can do with new tech folks is bring them into the potential contract / engineering intern pipeline. We shouldn't try to use grants to do things which can be done through a different mechanism.
Question from Erik: How can we serve better the individual editor on our projects in their daily needs? I really liked that idea of micro-funding where you have a simple process for reimbursing small amounts of money. The grants processes are still on Meta, which is isolated from the editing spaces.
Need for notifications for grantmaking. Need input from Erik and his team on how the average Wikipedian can find out about grants or other needs (ex. related to Fluxx integrating with grantmaking on-wiki processes).

Glad to see the structure coming together and functioning.

Annual Plan Grants/FDC

FDC purpose and theory:

Purpose: general support grants for annual plans of Wikimedia-affiliated entities

Theory: maximize the impact of movement resources through the FDC

Highlights

2012-2013 Round 1: US$ 8.51M allocated for 12 proposals. This round has tested the FDC's abilities to handle previously unused processes and systems (complaints and appeals)
2012-2013 Round 2: total recommended by the FDC is US$665K for 2 of the 4 applicants (awaiting Board decision)

Lifecycle of an FDC grant

For details on the lifecycle of the FDC grant and touchpoints with staff and the community, please reference the slide deck.
IRC chats to work with the applicants or possible applicants
Proposal review is a time-consuming and heavy part of the FDC process
Deliberations are several days long, and very dynamic. (These have to be done in person.)
Reporting and learning: we will do some site visits next year, quarterly reports are coming back
We are reallocating US$2M back to the WMF reserves.
If a proposal doesn't meet the high standards for quality and eligibility then it won't be funded.

Processes and systems

This year tested the FDC's ability to handle several extraordinary events and processes like complaints and appeals, as well as trying to determine where the WMF fit into the process.

Learning and improvements

We shared a survey about 2012-2013 Round 1 applicants in Milan. The vast majority were very satisfied/satsfied with the process.
- FDC process made it clear to our members that activities need to lead to clear outcomes.
- Single point of contact: FDC Program Office hired.
- Portal improvement is a focus of work for this summer.
1st year learning:
- Can FDC process help highlight different, contextually-approporiate models of growth and development?
- Not all entities have a strong governance in place.
- FDC process is apropriately time-consuming and challenging considering the amount of money allocated.
- Major weakness: community engagement in the FDC process. How do we get it? What does it look like?
- The impact of the FDC's recommended allocations is still unclear and we probably won't know the impact until early 2014.

Focus of next quarters: Learning and improvement

Improving our processes and learning, collaborating with community members. Annual reports about the FDC are forthcoming. FDC Advisory Group will be making recommendations to the Board and ED about the FDC in 2014.

Questions

How can we create more modest expectations of resources and promote alternative models to institutionalization?
Sue: One of the reasons we don't want to view grantmaking only through institutionalization is that this is not the right lens for impact. The real question is how do we make impact and how to get more community people involved? It is important for the FDC to do a lot of communicating with the community and encourage them to participate. Looking for the patterns that work, looking for other entities and learning from them. One of the most important things the FDC can do is help everyone stay focused on impact.
How do we assess if chapters are truly resource hubs for their communities?
The important question is, should chapters do more to deepen their reach within the communities they serve?
How do we scale the FDC process as more and more entities apply?

Next steps, challenges and questions

Finding a way to communicate there is not a relationship between governance and money. There are small organizations that are a good example of governance and don't necessarily have money.

Challenges for the Grantmaking team

Lack of clarity of the "Grantmaking" and "Program Evaluation" teams. The Grantmaking team is having a hard time knowing what role the Program Evaluation team will have in providing useful inputs. Sue says she is meeting with Anasuya and Frank in order to pull together the clear roles and responsibilities.
Site visits: Sue is concerned about Garfield's time - we should be really careful in requiring his time to go around to organizations that may not even be achieving impact. She points out that other organizations that fund WMF do not send CFOs to WMF on site visits -- they send program officers. A concern with this as well is that it steers conversations away from impact, and towards governance and financial discipline.
Anasuya clarifies that right now with the state of our movement, the amount of funds we are distributing, and the concerns we have about impact, investing in site visits is important. We should be concerned about both fiscal management and program impact at this point in time, and make the case that the two are related.

General Comments from Sue

Support editors: Editors need tiny things like books, cameras, laptops. For example, I've seen someone ship them their camera or book (see WMDE's project in which editors can buy books on Amazon). I would like to echo Erik: we should be supporting individual editors.
Asaf, Siko, Anasuya: we will look into this, but it's not as simple as it appears. The key concern is that we should be supporting individual editors better. The question is how to do it effectively and well as a grantmaking team.
Innovation: We should be very cautious when using the word 'Innovation' as a desired outcome. Be cautious of over stressing innovation unless tying it to impact. The one area where we should be overly innovative is with organizational roles and forms.
Ways for the Grantmaking team to move forward:
1. Iterate on the process - keep it lightweight and attainable
2. Relentlessly keep driving the focus towards impact
The Grantmaking team is doing great. The work is going in a good direction. Astonished by the FDC's results.