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@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:
- 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.
- 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.
- Total annual organizer and participant person-hours and a summary of how
those hours were used, for both programmatic and non-programmatic activities.
- 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,
--
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