On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Fae fae@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
Thanks Phoebe. I'm glad to hear that the WMF has used almost no donated money in staff costs running this global referendum.
As a member of the board you may want to consider what it means in terms of operational accountability if such a large exercise with massive impact on our community has no measurable costs due to staff not reporting their time against it. I am puzzled at how your programme managers ever decide when to cancel projects if the resources they are consuming are not reported.
With regard to your comments about massive and possibly excessive use of "free" volunteer time, as a UK charity we are interested in improving how we measure e-volunteer effort spent on our projects as we believe that we should take care to avoid volunteer "burn-outs" (which we see too many of) or using up all of the good will that is represented by the efforts of our volunteers, of which I am one, without maximizing the impact on our mission. Perhaps WMF could consider the same issues when judging the success of its projects?
Cheers, Fae
Fae -- I'll be really interested to hear the results of what WMUK finds on the volunteer-burnout front. It's an important issue, and one we have largely glossed over in our 10-year history -- or just deal with as individuals.
One note -- me not knowing what kind of staff time was reported doesn't mean that reports don't exist; the staff don't report to the board directly. We work on the level of the annual plan, and divergence from it on a broad scale, so I was just speaking generally about the resources used... And while this referendum caused way more discussion than most things the WMF does, and thus had a much higher volunteer and community time cost, in terms of money and staff time it is a pretty tiny piece of the overall picture.
-- phoebe