(responding inline)
2017-04-22 7:41 GMT+02:00 Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com>om>:
On Fri, Apr 21, 2017 at 5:08 AM, Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org>
wrote:
(not responding to a person in particular)
I'm a little bit at a loss here. The proposal is to share a lot of
information from the application process (whether attempted to anonimize or
not) beyond statistics. Given the high number of countries and other rather
specific characteristics, anything vaguely useful will likely contain at
least some personally identifiable information.
PII disclosures can be limited to what users have already disclosed in
public (which, admittedly, may not be entirely current and truthful.)
Aggregated information can be provided as well.
Sure - like I said, probably rather useless depending on the goal you want
to actually *do* with the information. And still tricky, aggregated
information could be provided to some extent, but probably not to the level
of detail you'd want.
More likely even, anything you can share without
being personally
identifiable will probably not be very relevant for the application
consideration. Sure, you could do some gender statistics, but how does that
tell you why people have been rejected?
I anticipate that the level of transparency would be insufficient to
evaluate the Scholarship Committee and WMF decisions about individual
applicants. However, the information that is published may still be useful
and of interest when considering trends and groups.
OK, so you want to discover 'trends and groups'. Goal 1 identified.
So I'd like to take a step back: what exactly is the problem you're
trying to solve? Is publishing a lot of data really the best approach to
that solution? If you define the problem well, I can imagine a few
alternative approaches, like asking the scholarship committee to report
back with an analysis of the problem and how they went about it - or asking
an independent person/persons to sign an NDA, and go into the data,
investigate and report back. They could actually go in depth - but it
requires a good definition of the problem.
My impression is that there are disappointments and complaints almost
every year about scholarship awards. I hope that increasing transparency
will result in a decreased number and intensity of complaints about
individual cases, and will also increase the amount of information that is
made public which can be used by anyone and everyone to analyze policies
and practices and to make recommendations for refinements or changes as may
seem best.
Also, as a broader theme, I would like to see more transparency about how
WMF funds are used. A change of practice like we're discussing here would
be one step in that direction.
Of course there are going to be disappointments and complaints every year.
Unless we increase the acceptance rate to 100%, that is bound to happen in
a process that always results in some personally disappointing outcomes.
Even with perfect transparency and process, people will be disappointed.
And a process will never be perfect. I sincerely doubt transparency will
decrease the intensity or number of complaints about individual cases - I
rather suspect it will increase them. As transparency often does. Which is
fine if the transparency brings other benefits - but don't expect it to go
down.
Also, identified the second goal: propose recommendations for refinements
and changes.
Good! Two valuable goals. Now, just disclosing stuff the best approach to
tackling it?
Lodewijk
Best,
Lodewijk
2017-04-21 13:32 GMT+02:00 Jonathan Cardy <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com>om>:
Hi Pine, I agree with you that partial
transparency can be a positive
and at least assure people that their region/language/project is getting a
fair share even if they were declined. But I'd suggest that can be done
with anonymised stats rather than applications with some details redacted
or withheld.
Let me ask: why shouldn't the usernames of applicants, and whether
they
were offered scholarships, be made public in future years if scholarship
applicants are told in advance that this information will be published?
Trend analysis can be self defeating,
How so?
I've discussed this off wiki with some of the
people who have had
scholarships in the past, including a couple of
people who didn't apply
this year because they assumed they would be declined for Montreal after
having had scholarships recently.
What might save a lot of time on everyone's part would be if there was a
simple rule such as we don't give the same person a scholarship for two
consecutive Wikimanias. Emphasis on give rather than award as there will be
people who were awarded a scholarship but could not get a visa. That would
reduce the workload of the scholarship team, and also of the applicants.
You could of course balance that by other factors, I'm hoping thatFrench
speakers are being given preference for Montreal.
I agree with the general sentiment that giving scholarships to the same
person for multiple consecutive Wikimanias should be avoided. If what I'm
told is true that there are thousands of applicants for only a few hundred
scholarship spots, perhaps the bar should be even higher and scholarships
should be awarded to the same person at most once out of every three years.
It would help to have the information that we're discussing in this thread
be made public so that we can have a better-informed conversation about the
policies for scholarship awards. (:
Pine
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