Hi Sam,
From looking at the pages about Indonesia and CIS you link to, they seem to
relate to 2021, no?
All the figures I mentioned are from the 2020 Form 990, released by the WMF
just a few days ago. I believe the WMF would have made sure they are
complete.
(The 2021 form is not due until November 2022. However, I anticipate that
the WMF will ask for an extension, as has been its practice, to delay
publication of the 2021 Form 990 until May 2023.)
Now, you explain eloquently in your email why it has not been possible to
send much money to the Global South. You cite a lack of mature
organisations, a lack of good ideas, "starting in a valley", etc.
But you completely elide the fact that the Indian public has just been told
that the situation is the complete opposite of what you describe. It has
been told that "Although a lot of the money is raised in the more developed
Western markets, most of it is actually flowing into the global south,
where the growth will come in languages and users."[1]
Are you then fully at ease with that apparent mismatch?
Do you think the Indian Express should publish a correction to reflect the
real situation, as you describe it in your mail?
Andreas
[1]
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 8:42 PM Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com> wrote:
An uncharitable + personalized take, Andreas... But
an important topic.
That grantmaking line you found doesn't seem to include APGs; Indonesia
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2020-2021_round_2/Wikimedia_Indonesia/Progress_report_form#Revenues>
and CIS
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2020-2021_round_2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Progress_report_form#Revenues>
would be another $500k.
My view:
+ Grants, exclusive of APGs, are mostly going outside of NA + Europe.
– Few new organizations lately have reached the size / capacity of having
regular APGs. This greatly limits what we can accomplish regionally.
= The other limit on $ diffusion right now is a shortage of good ideas
for how to use funding locally to advance the projects, and people to
implement them. We can't fund communities that don't have funding
bottlenecks, or that don't exist. Recent proposals
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Alliances_Fund/Proposals> are
a mixed bag.
+ The new grants program is giving community members experience in
evaluating + soliciting ideas, and increasing the supply of funds. Which
starts the bootstrapping process. +10
– We're starting in a valley: total funds disseminated outside the
foundation has been low for years, due in part to the WMF encouraging other
orgs to limit growth.
[Q for former-APG affiliates: how is this changing for you? how are you
setting budget targets?]
Outside grantmaking, more Foundation efforts seem to be focusing on
underrepresented regions, and community members have been hired by WMF from
those regions as liaisons and facilitators. We'll have to see if that is
effective. (There are also negative side-effects from any framework where
most funds go to salaries, and from engaging active multilingual community
members in a way that obliges them to a central org. We need to watch out
for these.)
I'd like to see us develop a better movement-wide understanding of a few
interrelated goals, before getting worked up about the specifics of current
resource allocation: Five questions
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Sj/Design_chats/Funds_dissemination>
:
* . **Bootstrapping**: *How should we support + invest in regions w/ no
current community?
: *Subsidiarity*: How much of this work should be run by local UGs,
hubs, WMF, other [UNRWA]?
*⋮ **Diffusion**: *Where we have full capacity, what are healthy
distributions of $, labor, focus?
*᠅* *Tactics*: In equilibrium, do all orgs grow/shrink together? How do
we prioritize across orgs?
⸭ *Peter paradox*: Under what conditions does paying people strengthen
local community?
We may have answers to most of these questions implicitly embedded in
current processes. But I have not seen explicit answers or discussions in
many years.
SJ
(apologies to anyone who feels individually called out above. except AK,
who invited it :)
On Thu, Jun 2, 2022 at 9:13 AM Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
----
“*More than 75% of the money we raise globally* goes to two things. One
is to *give money back to the volunteer community* so they can launch a
new language. Two is about *half of it goes to the infrastructure.* You
need to have databases and put it on the cloud and make sure it’s
reliable,” he said. Although a lot of the money is raised in the more
developed Western markets, *most of it is actually flowing into the
global south,* where the growth will come in languages and users.
----
This diverged sharply from my understanding of WMF finances. So I looked
at the records to try to fact-check these statements.
I found the Foundation raised $163 million in the 2020/2021 financial
year.[1] But it actually only spent $112 million of it (69%).[1] If the WMF
kept 31% of its revenue to itself, it obviously can't have spent "more than
75%" (i.e. over $120M) of the money it raised on anything.
This is a trivial point. But I was even more astonished by the other
statement in the article, that most of the money raised "is actually
flowing into the global south".
Raju was talking to an Indian audience. This article was timed to
coincide with the start of the Indian fundraiser – Indians are currently
faced with fundraising banners on Wikipedia as well as emails soliciting
repeat donations.[2] So I appreciate it is a good soundbite that might
motivate Indian citizens to reach for their purses and wallets. After all,
few people in India feel it is their job to send financial aid to the US,
right?
But is this soundbite really true?
To fact-check that claim, I looked at the official figures in the latest
(2020) WMF Form 990 tax return detailing WMF spending outside the US.
According to the Form 990 section "General Information on Activities
Outside the United States", spending on activities outside the US amounted
to a total of $20,076,181 in 2020.[3] This means well over 80% of WMF
expenditure was in the US.
The Form 990 also provides a breakdown by global regions, detailing the
precise amounts the WMF spent in each region. Again, I found this paints a
very different picture to what the Indian public has been told in the
Indian Express.
First I added up all the amounts (Program Services, p. 29, and
Grantmaking, pp. 30–31) that were spent in Europe and North America
(excluding the US). I arrived at a total of $14.8M – which means that 73.5%
of the total spending on non-US activities was in these regions of the
affluent north.
This left only $5.3M, or about 3% of total WMF revenue in 2020/2021, for
the entire rest of the world, which also includes countries like Saudi
Arabia, Russia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which are not usually included in
the Global South. The actual money flowing into the Global South is thus
even less than 3% – hardly "most" of the money raised.
Raju mentioned the volunteers. I thought, let's leave Program Services
expenses (which presumably would include servers and caching centres
abroad) out of the equation and look at Grantmaking alone (pages 30 and 31
of the Form 990).
The Grantmaking total for activities outside the US given in the Form 990
is $3,475,062.
Almost exactly $1.2M (35%) of that went to Europe and North America
(excluding the US).
So total grantmaking in the entire rest of the world outside Europe and
North America was $2.3M, or 1.4% of the money the WMF raised in 2020/2021.
Again 1.4% is not "most of the money raised", by any stretch of the
imagination. And the Global South only accounts for a part of that 1.4%.
Lastly, as Raju was speaking to the Indian public, I wanted to find out
how much money the WMF actually spent on grantmaking in India. The Form 990
only gives grantmaking totals for "South Asia" – which along with India
includes other major countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan.
These totals are $75,198 (grants and other assistance to 22 individuals,
certainly not rank-and-file Wikipedians, given the average amount) and
$3,339 (grants to organisations). This yields a total of $78,537 for all of
South Asia.
I make that 0.048% of the WMF's 2020/2021 revenue. Only a part of that
may have been spent in India.
Please verify these figures for yourselves; I have provided the sources
below. If I have made a mistake somewhere, please tell me.
It occurred to me that perhaps some grantmaking figures in 2020 were
particularly low because of the Covid pandemic, which began in the spring
of that year. But Covid was a global pandemic affecting countries around
the world. So all countries would have been affected equally. And Covid was
not as serious in India in 2020 as it was in 2021.
I also know the WMF increased its grantmaking budget for the current
year. But even if grants to South Asia were to increase a hundredfold
compared to 2020, they would still represent only 5% of WMF revenue.
Such is the gap between what is said in the Indian Express and the reality
on the ground.
Allow me to make an appeal to your conscience.
The Wikipedia idea is to provide neutral and accurate information to the
public. I would say that Wikimedians – especially Indian Wikimedians – who
believe in that idea have a job to do here, because based on the above,
what the Indian public has been told in the Indian Express simply does not
match the reality.
Look at it like a Wikipedia article. If you found an article making
claims so wildly at variance with published facts, would you let them
stand? Or would you at least start a discussion on the talk page, to try
and find out why there is such an apparent discrepancy?
Let's have that discussion now, here and on social media.
Best,
Andreas
[1]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation…
– see also
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Fundraising#Indian_email_texts
[3]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikimedia_Foundation…
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