Please don't put words in my mouth. Trying to reduce costs is a good thing. Trying to get donated hardware is a good thing.
Anytime you make a budget sometimes you will have unplanned savings, and sometimes you will have extra expenses.
My reaction is motivated by your comment that "it is GOOD when there is some conservative bookkeeping", which I disagree with. Conservative bookkeeping shouldn't be the goal. Rather, we want effective bookkeeping that includes planned contingency funds but is on target more often than not. It is too early to say whether the WMF will ultimately have a good track record, but I would discourage a policy of intentionally overstating likely spending. Being conservative, with the intent of being consistently underbudget, would be a bad thing. It would imply that one is holding too many resources back and misrepresenting your needs to the donor community.
AND if there are going to be large variances, then I would want to see that money put to good use. For example, if UNICEF (or insert your favorite large charity) did have the good fortune to decrease their operating costs by a large percentage, then you can bet they would almost immediately put more money into feeding starving children (or your appropriate analogy).
Having extra savings is not a bad thing, but unless there is a good plan for those savings then it is a sub-optimal place to allocate resources. For example, if you discover that you don't need to buy servers now, then one could choose to accelerate hiring etc., which serves the mission more directly that simply sitting on capital.
I'm not upset with the recent WMF performance (there are much worse things than saving money), but in the long-run underutilizing capital should be seen as an anomaly and should not be seen as a desirable goal.
-Robert Rohde
On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 12:58 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, Ehm, so you are happy when money is spend according to plan as it shows that the plans were implemented and the budget was used according to plan... Now I am really happy when there is a plan that will allow for the spending of money according to a plan that will get us the results. I am even more happy when the people spending the money are smart and find ways to improve on the budget and spend less. In a company it is profit in a "Not for profit" is allows for other / more activities, this is a different kind of benefit and it is positive in my book.
Now when the WMF budgets for the acquisition of hardware and at the same time tries to find donors to provide us with the same hardware, I think this is an excellent way of operating because it allows for the donations not to materialise.
When you are of the opinion that this is not the proper way to do this, then i would say tough. I prefer a common sense approach that allows to spend our money as effective as possible. Let me be clear on one thing; the money has to achieve a goal. I want to see money spend, others want the WMF to have reserves. Having sufficient reserves that prevent the WMF from having to rely on donors is in my book excellent management.
Thanks, GerardM
On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 9:43 PM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 12:10 PM, Gerard Meijssen < gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> wrote:
Hoi, This is not specific to non profit organisations, it is true for all organisations. A dollar not spend is a dollar saved and a dollar
profit.
This is what keeps the bean counters happy :) Thanks, GerardM
That only helps if your goal is "profit". For a non-profit, you don't
want
them to have lots of unplanned savings because that implies they have not allocating resources effectively.
I don't think Nemo's comment about servers is fair (they are working well by historical standards), but at the same time one can ask: "Does not
spending
this money mean that the mission is 6 months behind where it could be?" Any real budget will include contingencies and have unplanned variances, but
at
the same time we don't want the budgets to be consistently too high OR
too
low as it generally implies resources are not being allocated as efficiently as they could be towards accomplishing the Foundation's goals. We want
to
know that unplanned resources go towards making the world better. Having savings and a contingency fund can be part of that, but it should be part of the plan and not just something one falls into for the lack of other
things
to do.
-Robert Rohde _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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