Fellow Wikimedians, As you all know, Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore has sought funding of about *1.8 Crores* through the FDC process from Wikimedia Foundation to carry out work on seven local language projects in India that includes Kannada, Telugu among others. [1] The funds primarily cover the salaries of the people belonging to the CIS-A2K team among other administrative expenses and other expenses as outlined on their proposal page.
The proposal was up for Community review and comments until April 30th and many have recorded their response about it [2]. Several community members have come forward in pointing out that the staff salaries being paid and that being proposed - are quite on the higher side (which is up to 2.4 Lakhs per month per person). Apart from the concerns on extremely high salaries for Indian norms of the team members of CIS-A2K team, there have been some serious concerns raised about some apparent Conflict of Interest [3] and non-compliance with the local laws (mainly Karnataka Societies act and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act). However, looks like the proposal has moved forward through the FDC process for funding despite the concerns raised and has gotten through to the next stage. More concerns have now been raised by several community members on the Staff Assessment discussion page here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Staff_proposal_assessment I invite you to participate in the discussion and help steer this in the right direction. [1] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Proposal_form [2] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Proposal_form [3] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/Draft_Work_plan_July_2014_-_June_2015/Budget#Budget_as_per_Expenditure_Heads Thank you, -- Hari Prasad Nadig http://hpnadig.net http://twitter.com/hpnadig http://flickr.com/hpnadig
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