starting a new thread, as the old one totally drifted away again.

2008/5/1, Sebastian Moleski sebmol@gmail.com:

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 3:09 PM, effe iets anders effeietsanders@gmail.com wrote:

...

A measure by Financial turnover sounds dangerous to me as that would only enthusiast chapters to count everything as money, while the most work is done by volunteers generally. I prefer to think in terms of volunteers and activities over money.

I find representation solely based on members or funding quite problematic. The point of chapters is to advance the free sharing of the sum of all knowledge. It's not to recruit members or funds (both not that hard to do with a little dedication) for the sake of influence on the foundation's board. Representation by activities would be interesting although I'm not sure how one would objectively assess and compare the level of activity between chapters. Perhaps a scoring system might be an option that accounts for a multitude of things which would allow chapters to have share of the vote based on how they decide to fulfill their purpose (e.g. fundraising, membership, volunteer hours, cooperations, press management, lawsuits, etc.).

Sebastian

OK, after having given things another thought, and maybe there is a way to take money as a measure in some weight. We all seem to agree at least to some extent that members are important as a measure. But I think we all know that the membership fee is different, which would give false numbers.

So an easy measure could be the income gathered from membership fees. It's still not ideal, but it gives a measure how "popular" a chapter is amongst it's members (how much is it worth to become a member combined with the number) which will probably be related to the activity of the chapter.

The bad side is that this only scales very poorly. As long as we only take Western Europe (or even the whole "First world" in economical perspective, including Australia, Taiwan etc) into account, sure it is maybe something to consider. But if there would ever be a Wikimedia Zimbabwe, this system would very much fail of course.

But does someone have a better idea? This might though be a pro tempore solution, for the current situation (with Argentina maybe as the poorest country around, for the rest there is not so much). A more complicated solution would be to correct this number with the Bruto National Product (I hope in English you use the same terminology) by some devision or so to get a factor.

Any better thoughts to find some kind of measure for activity?

Lodewijk