As deadline approaches, Individual Engagement Grants looks for ideas
The deadline for proposals to the Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) volunteer committee on Meta will pass on 30 September. The program is designed to fund projects that tackle long-term problems and have a significant editing community impact; it has previously supported solutions like The Wikipedia Library, which improves Wikipedian access to online reference sources like JSTOR (see Signpost coverage).
The WMF grantmaking scheme was introduced in January 2013 after a community consultation-period in late 2012. It aims to enable volunteers—individuals or in teams up to four—to tackle chronic on-wiki problems. The funding period is six months, with an opportunity to renew it for six more; it is capped at US$30k, which can be used for living costs and expenses like travel and project materials.
Interested users can either submit complete proposals or outline rough ideas in an open collaborative space, IdeaLab, which is designed to help think through and improve potential projects together with the committee and other community members. The committee itself is composed of eighteen community members from several different projects and advises the WMF's grantmaking department. The English Wikipedia's Anne Delong, Pine, Hahc21, Steven Zhang, and Ocaasi—himself a grantee last round—are among them.
Upcoming topics for review include an attempt to create a standardized way to handle backlog pages for WikiProjects on Wikipedia and introducing a mechanism to export content into LaTeX. However, proposals with technical focus have to be able to deliver on their own and cannot rely on the WMF's tech-departmental resources, due to its narrowed focus on key projects like VisualEditor and the upcoming Flow project—which aims to replace talk pages and is currently undergoing community consultation on MediaWiki. At the time of writing, 12 draft ideas, mostly aiming at improved outreach in developing countries like Bangladesh and Uganda, are under development in the IdeaLab. One formal proposal has already been filed.
The community comment period on IEG proposals ends on 22 October, while the committee will review both the ideas and community input on them until 19 November. Based on the findings and recommendations, the WMF will announce its funding decisions on 15 December and distribute resources in early 2014.