Hi Pine,
Standardising reporting across affiliates is an attractive-sounding
idea in theory but turns out to be very difficult in practice.
A few issues that spring to mind:
- User Groups are meant to be a low-barrier-to-entry, lightweight form
of affiliation. Basically you need 10 people and a good idea. Creating
in-depth expectations around reporting by User Groups would defeat the
object of having them. [Of course there are plenty of User Groups
these days that are incorporated entities with five or maybe
six-figure budgets, full-time staff, and so on... but that's because
the WMF Board decided that User Groups were the only option available
for new affiliates.]
- Where an affiliate has significant programmes and is incorporated,
there are a whole bunch of expectations on them that depend on how
they register. The way a UK-registered charity has to prepare its
annual accounts is different to how a nonprofit anywhere in the world
has to. Dual-reporting everything according to local laws and the
WMF's expectations already creates issues and extra work, gold-playing
the WMF's expectations would significantly increase this.
- There is no consensus around what metrics actually matter. Global
Metrics were only ever presented as a first draft of an answer, and
for many projects they are simply poor metrics. The movement's focus
for the last 3-4 years has been on movement entities developing their
own metrics that are relevant to their own activities. Standardising
on naive metrics would be a step backwards.
- Also, we are still very much in the middle of the movement strategy
process. What you've suggested is very much a "This is what WMF should
require affiliates to do" approach, hopefully on the other side of the
strategy process we will not be in a situation where we solve problems
in the movement by the WMF telling people what to do. (I mean, in
practice the WMF doesn't do much issuing diktats any more, but
hopefully we will end up with some more formal creative solutions...)
Chris
On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 3:11 AM Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
This email is mainly addressed to Affcom and WMF but I would like to hear
others' comments also.
Some background information regarding the context for this email: the
recently published annual reports from user groups reminded me of some
issues that I first considered a few years ago. I believe that user group
annual reports are currently not standardized, and I think that the public
and WMF might like to have standardized quantitative and comparable ways to
understand affiliates' work, including use of volunteer hours and
per-program benefits, while minimizing the burden on volunteers for
administrative tasks.
I would like to suggest that Affcom and WMF require that all affiliates'
annual reports include:
1. A list of programs which the affiliate supported in the past year. For
each program the affiliate should state the financial costs to the
affiliate including overhead costs and overhead person-hours attributable
to the program, how much time the organizers and participants spent on the
program, the Wikimetrics/Global Metrics results of each program, and
results for any custom-defined measures of success. Auditable performance
information can be made public and/or shared privately with WMF, depending
on privacy rules and the willingness of participants to share information
regarding their participation.
2. A financial summary for the year that states all sources of income and
amounts from each source, how funds were spent, funds payable, funds
receivable, debts, reserves, assets, etc.
3. Total annual organizer and participant person-hours and a summary of how
those hours were used, for both programmatic and non-programmatic
activities.
4. Total annual Wikimetrics/Global Metrics results for the year, and total
annual results for any custom-defined metrics. Again, auditable performance
information can be made public and/or shared privately with WMF, depending
on privacy rules and the willingness of participants to share information
regarding their participation.
This information is important enough that I would support reasonable staff
or contractor expenses to produce reports with these details. I am mindful
of how precious volunteer time is, and I do not want to burden already
generous volunteers with administrative work that could be done by
contractors or staff. Some cooperation and support for reporting from
volunteer organizers may be necessary, such as when gathering information
from participants at individual events. Some affiliates may have such
generous volunteers that they can do all of the reporting with volunteer
time. But for many affiliates I would support reasonable expenses for
producing standardized quantitative information in annual reports while
minimizing the administrative burden on volunteers.
Regards,
--
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l
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>