ECF has put us on the waiting list. Mike and I had a rather positive conversation with their coordinator this morning. Here’s the summary:
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ECF team found our meet.coop proposal very good, and are not rejecting it, but continue to expand their funding budget to possibly fund us still this year (but with 13 others on the reserve list as well). In any case that’s what ECF does: work with other funders to fund cultural projects in Europe. We had the disadvantage to present ourselves through a Dutch entity (FKI), now that they had already preselected various proposals from NL. They also considered somewhat negative the fact that we are not specifically focused on Europe. That said, he mentioned it was a pleasure to read our proposal, very well written; they consider the platform very interesting, the cooperative and commons aspects of it, and the various key values we work. Also our awareness of our whitemale geek background and awareness with other issues is seen as very positive.
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They are looking into the possibility to become members and use our services. Maybe from Menno’s department or ECF-wide. He mentioned the team’s aim of practice what you preach, but also an operational hesitation to change. Now they have a multiuser account at Zoom, they might go for multiuser at meet.coop.
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possibility to support ECF funded projects (and on the reserve list) with meet.coop service.
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we should keep them in the loop about the commons.hour. They can possibly promote the events + encourage grantees to join and participate actively to (selected) events
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they plan to send us an update before August - then during August he’ll be on holidays.
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He also mentioned wrt 1) the possibility that the funders they talk with, instead of funding through ECF might be interested to fund us directly. He’ll be pitching us so to speak. I mentioned our availability for specific meetings to join or provide specific info whenever he considered that useful
re 2) he may ask us for technical help or specific support to get them started
though we had hoped to make it, it is all in all not bad, let’s hope they can confirm some of these proposals.