The Event Fund pools funds from multiple funders and runs a transparent, community governed process for grant awards. Bringing greater transparency and community governance to the process of awarding small grants for data science events is a concrete step towards the long term health and sustainability for the research data science ecosystem.
Towards increasing the transparency of grant funding processes, we outline a behind-the-scenes view of our Event Fund processes.
We hope this information also serves as a helpful resource for community managers establishing new funding opportunities.
We host an annual call for proposals and our process for a new request for proposals typically runs over 8 months.
Event Fund Request for Proposal (RFP) process
- Selection Committee kick-off meeting to review and revise previous RFP and application.
- Advisory Committee meeting to review RFP changes and approve/revise.
- RFP goes live
- Selection committee revises the evaluation criteria. Advisory Committee asynchronously reviews.
- Advisory Committee Meeting where revised evaluation criteria presented to AC for approval/revision.
- RFP closed (generally after one month of being live)
- All applications reviewed by manager for completeness and assigned to reviewers via OpenReview portal. Selection committee meeting to initiate review. All conflicts of interests are flagged and any necessary applications are reallocated.
- Selection committee has one month to submit their review of applications. Each application is reviewed by at least two different reviewers. Ratings and comments collated into a spreadsheet to share with the whole selection committee prior to discussions
- Selection committee discusses synchronously which applications to advance for funding
- Advanced finalists and list of all applicants submitted to the advisory committee with summaries of scores and comments.
- Advisory Committee Meeting to review and approve finalists. Final list of proposed grantees submitted to be funded.
- All applicants notified of results
