Hi, Kerry.
Thanks for sharing these thoughts. I know what you're talking about, and I
think they are important to express, for the benefit of those who do not
have experience with the kinds of activities running a chapter requires. (I
do.)
Some comments, inline:
(Pardon the length of this e-mail. I thought it a good opportunity to
engage with this important topic, and I hope I offer some new thoughts to
at least some of you.)
On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 4:50 PM Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
My personal 10c on this having been a chapter member
for several years
and a chapter committee member for some of those years is that there are
the chapters who get annual funding and those who don’t.
And there are chapters (and non-chapters) that get funding on a project
basis, which *can* include some compensation for lost days of employment.
If you think this could help WMAU, I encourage you to discuss it with one
of WMF's grant program officers. See [[m:Grants:Start]].
Also, chapters can transition from project funding to annual funding, given
a track record of accountable spending and organizational maturity. Some
example of chapters that have made that transition in the last couple of
years are Wikimedia Ukraine and Wikimedia Spain.
If you don’t get annual funding, then you have no
staff member who can do
the day-to-day administrative work (every organisation has to submit forms
to their government, organise auditing, keep the web site updated, do the
bookkeeping, etc) so this work has to be farmed out to the members, which
means that sometimes you have nobody with the right skills
(responsibilities of treasurers make it a particularly difficult role to
fill) and that you use up all of people’s time and goodwill in doing the
day-to-day stuff instead of doing the exciting projects you hoped you’d be
doing as a chapter member.
In addition to the possibility of getting reimbursed for time off work,
grants proposals can be written to include paying contractors for services
like bookkeeping, auditing, and Web site management. I recognize it
*usually* falls to the (active among the) board members of a small chapter,
but it doesn't have to, with a bit of planning.
Contrary to what WMF think ,there is a lot of work
involved in writing
grant applications
I wonder what makes you say that. As a former grantmaker at WMF, I know I
have never considered writing grant applications easy (or fun), and
certainly never said anything of the sort. I do think WMF has taken some
pains over the years to make the process _as_ painless as possible (not
pain-free, to be sure), and I think we're doing fairly well compared to
most traditional grantmakers. But I know I speak for my team when I say
none of us thinks this is not a lot of work.
If, on the other hand, you meant to say "it's more work than a group of
volunteers can be expected to do" -- that I do disagree with. There is
ample empirical evidence that many groups of volunteers *do* manage to
write grant applications, and with some care and good judgment, they also
manage to grow the organization, both in active and engaged volunteer base,
and in organizational capacity up to and including hiring employees.
and, when you are doing it with lots of volunteers
each with randoms
skills and only a certain amount of spare time, generally some people let
you down (family issues, busy at work, or maybe just don’t know how to
write the section allocated to them) and it doesn’t get finished to meet
the deadline, which is then a waste of the time of the people who did their
share of the work. The net result is a somewhat demoralising downward
spiral with fewer members, burned-out committee people, and fewer
achievements. I’ve pretty much abandoned trying to work chapter-wide and
just try to do what I can in my own local area.
This is certainly demoralizing, and I am sorry to hear this has been your
experience. I have heard similar experiences from others in Australia.
There is no doubt that in addition to objective difficulties (huge country,
widely distributed community), there have also been some difficulties
caused by some internal strife and poor decisions in WMAU's past, which
must have contributed to the downward spiral, as you aptly call it, of
frustration, demotivation, and burnout.
The only known cure to such a downward spiral is resisting it with an
upward spiral: finding new people, or at least new energy, to put in work
despite the frustration and despite past disappointments, utilizing all
available resources (e.g. those I described above, and several others that
had perhaps not been available in previous years), and creating an upward
spiral of small successes, motivating and drawing others, and growing
anew. Perhaps you are on your way to doing this, with the activities you
mentioned taking on; perhaps you do not feel up to doing this, and I am not
laying that burden on your shoulders; I am merely sharing a thought about
what it would take to stop the downward spiral.
WMF strongly pushes you to use volunteer time in a chapter, but overlooks
practical realities. Engagement with GLAMs almost
always involves weekday
meetings; most volunteers are not available on weekdays due to their own
employment. I have 7 upcoming GLAM sessions in the next 3 weeks (all for
1Lib1Ref) all on weekdays and despite my call for help to both chapter
members and the Australian noticeboard, nobody is volunteering; I guess I
am doing them all myself (assuming I don’t have conflicting commitments).
Even committee meetings are very hard to schedule across 4 time zones with
everyone with different working hours, different commitments to family
events etc on the weekends, and technology problems with phones/computers
often waste a lot of the meeting time (some people can’t get Hangouts to
work for them, other people’s microphones cut out randomly, etc). Our
chapter has never met face to face.
Again, I am sorry to hear you have not been able to get help from your
colleagues. I am interested in seeing what might be done to help WMAU. I
encourage you to consider me a contact point at WMF, and we can discuss
some options and plans, if you'd like.
I agree with Pine’s comments about impact. Given that
we have no way of
knowing which editors on en.WP are from our country, we have no way to
measure impact of anything we do other than small group events where the
individuals are willing to disclose their user IDs.
I hear you. I think it's a major problem for many chapters. However, we
(at WMF) *do*, in fact, have a way to measure the amount of active editors
in a given country. I have been advocating that WMF make this data
available publicly for more than 3 years now, but, despite at one point
getting the Legal dept.'s blessing, have not been able to overcome internal
concerns that a sufficiently-determined attacker could use this data to
determine an individual editor's country. You can see some public evidence
of this discussion in this Phabricator ticket:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T131280
In the meantime, I do have access to those numbers, and can tell you that
the average active editor (5+ edits/month) count on English Wikipedia from
Australia is between 1210 and 1250 editors. (This broad bucket is a
precaution. I am happy to share a precise figure with you privately, as a
trusted user, until we manage to make the data [probably bucketed like
above] public.) The very active editor (100+ edits/month) count of the
same is between 140 and 170.
WMF has these numbers going back to 2012. I am happy to help you get some
snapshots of those numbers to help you assess the size of the editing
community in Australia in the past few years.
My overall point here is that chapters are very
different. I suspect if
you consider chapters across the range of issues I’ve outlined, you will
find very few are directly comparable in terms of how they operate and
there is virtually no way to measure their impact.
It's difficult, to be sure, but we're not quite prepared to give up on at
least attempting to measure impact, or at least some aspects of impact. We
have adjusted our expectations after several years of thinking about impact
so that we no longer pretend we have a good grasp of what impact looks like
in every community or program type. But we try, and we hope we are
improving our tools and perspectives for measuring at least some aspects.
My colleagues at the Learning and Evaluation team are eager
thought-partners for developing a better understanding of impact.
A.