Re: [Wikimedia-l] help, how much money goes to volunteers?

I cannot answer your question, but I am unsure if numbers would mean much unless large changes (like more than 20%) are indicated. Here's why - The key problem with working out how much of a volunteer fund goes to volunteers, is that reports rarely separate out the money that is nominally spent on 'volunteer projects' from the money that directly funds a volunteer activity. Based on past discussions and the experience of real cases, this means that: 1. Employees or contractors of the WMF or affiliated organizations may use volunteer budgets for expenses, travel or scholarships if they want to identify themselves as a volunteer in that context. For example, many people funded as Wikimedians in Residence may have no travel funding and will rely on a volunteer grant, or chapters may not provide funds for employees to travel and contribute to events not directly within their scope of employment. 2. A grant for a volunteer project may require reporting of outcomes and specific evidence of some expenses, but there is a cost of administering the grant before it gets granted, there are costs of proposing the grant that may or may not be funded from other grants, and there are costs of administration of the money and reporting on it, while the project runs. In cases where this can be analysed, the overhead costs are in the order of 20% to 50%. In some cases, the end-to-end costs of administering a grant from the WMF, to a local organization, and then to a specific project means that less than half of the money going to a volunteer project was actually used by volunteers to deliver a planned outcome. It's a problem, and unclear reporting of administrative overheads really does not help. Changes over the last couple of years to the way the WMF and chapters work, means that overhead costs invariably move from a central overhead charge, to being absorbed into project budgets, making the end-to-end overhead/admin costs almost impossible to deduce, unless detailed project time accounting and individual expenses are made public (which is never going to happen). The end result is that we cannot judge whether reports of reduced administration costs, are due to a smart accounting change, or the result of hard won meaningful improvements. Fae On 14 April 2016 at 10:48, rupert THURNER &lt;rupert.thurner(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>