Policy Hero Challenge of ours was not given funding by Youth in Action yesterday, and then the e-mail converstaions have started about where to go next with it etc.
So I thought: this is actually quite interesting to read, and also fits perfectly the FormStorm group and the main idea. Thought transparency is for kids and kittens, this funding discussion is a good piece of content.
And Funding Applications Recycling Bin: lets collect a bunch of failed forms. With commects about what they failed, comments about funds and projects.
Of course there is always intellectual property concerns. Links to filled in forms which failed to receive funding can be made accessible on request. And whoever shared a form at the first place can deny or grant access without explaining why.
The Funding Applications Recycling Bin is good for several reasons:
Obvious: learn from mistakes.
Upcycle: fix mistakes and weaknesses and go for the next funding application.
Psychological: also is an important one. Are rejected funding forms is something to be ashamed of and put of other funding opportunities?
if everyone is fine with it. Unless you already did it somewhere I couldn’t find.
Should say, forced transparency is one of the ugliest things of our times. But good free content, if pops up in our emails, is a good free content. So I suggest.
The main reason our Policy Hero Challenge didn't go through is that we had participants/ beneficiaries listed which were from multiple countries, like Edgeryders members are, and these beneficiary youth were supposed to be only from countries where we had foreseen partnerships - UK, Romania, Spain. Perhaps it was a bad match from the beginning - but we couldn't apply for the European agency dealing with more wide youth participation since ER the company is too young. Which meant applying for a national agency, hence smaller project with limited participation and scope.
My lesson from the experience is that for a first time of dealing with European Commission funding and eligibility criteria, it is damn hard to understand tens of pages of application guidelines. Even with Q&A sent to the agency for clarifications, and relying on peer advice, it was something I felt was too time consuming and prone to error given the amount requested.
No harm in trying though. If you hear about similar funding opportunities or anything that would go well with youth (or not only) participating directly in policy making processes and entering direct dialogue with policy makers, do let me know. We have a whole 30 pages application written and ready to be customized and submitted elsewhere.
Sounds like a really good idea! Can we integrate successful and unsuccessful funding applications in the same space?
Maybe what we could do is use a component-based approach where we drag out different parts of the application that can be re-usable in different funding programmes (i.e. team structure, activities, evaluation methods). Which could mean people could do quick searches on these to adapt them for their funding applications? Like an internal database on the Edgeryders platform which people could do quick searches?
I can’t do the database development, but I can drag and drop parts of different funding apps (anonymised) into this.
The Edgeryders platform allows you to search for content inside a group (a group which could contain, aside from the usual posts, also wikis and uploaded ready-made documents). Yet it’s still not quite interactive, you can’t easily play with chunks of text and remix them, you’d need to go though the content and manually select those parts you’d need in a new application.
A google drive is also an alternative… what would be others I wonder?
I really like this idea. And no, in my opinion failed applications are nothing to be ashamed of – many of them fail because of bad matching with the thing being applied to, rather than because of inherent shortcomings. It’s like looking for work: a successful search for work will typically have the applicant consider tens of jobs, apply for several posts and be hired only once. The one hiring makes the success – the five or six employers that turned the person down are just part of the process of building that success.
So, a repository of projects is a great idea. Especially since they will probably never be re-submitted as they are, but reworked, hybridized and mutated according to changing circumstances and to the strengths and inclinations of the person doing the re-submission. How would this work in practice? A simple list of links on the Edgeryders platform?
You don’t want to use Twitter. Twitter’s APIs give you access only to content two weeks old and newer. A discarded application might wait around several months in the bin before someone else finds it inspiring and tweaks it, so we need an arrangement with a much longer memory than Twitter. A wiki with a list of links, as suggested by Noemi, seems a better candidate. Also remember: anything on the Edgeryders platform stays in our database, and we can take responsibility for. Anything outside of it… we need to hope it stays up
We would need to improve the introductory/ disclaimer paragraph with instructions on how to re-use the content, what kind of cc license we are talking about etc to avoid misunderstandings…
I’m thinking that maybe we could couple this hangout with one on Horizon 2020 applications that [Caroline Paulick-Thiel], [Nadia] and others were planning this January? That way we get to talk about concrete funding applications, and see if there’s something we can use for an entry in there? I can set it up for next week? would you guys be available?
