[Foundation-l] An article to read

[Florence Devouard]

Dirk Riehle wrote:
>>> The way the WMF works, pretty much all the money goes on
>>> administrative stuff - everything else is done by volunteers. You'd
>>> have to decide what administrative stuff directly furthers the goals
>>> of the foundation and what stuff just keeps the foundation going (the
>>> hosting would probably fall into the former category, and is a very
>>> large proportion of spending).
>>>
>>>     
> 
> Servers and bandwidth are clearly project expenses, while HQ salaries 
> are typically not.
> 
>> You're right.  The Wikimedia Foundation is an unusual charity in that 
>> almost all of its mission-related (project-related, program-related) 
>> work is done by the volunteers. The staff essentially does whatever's 
>> left over - core technical functions, legal support, keeping the books, 
>> coordinating media and public relations activities, etc.
>>
>> Generally, what Dirk says is true - the smaller the percentage of a 
>> charity's budget going to overhead, the leaner and more efficient the 
>> charity is.  But in this regard, we're not comparable to other 
>> charities, because our spending on overhead is completely dwarfed by the 
>> massive amount of mission-driven work going on, that's not visible in 
>> the financial records.
>>   
> 
> Well, I dug out the WMF 2007 financial reports from the remote parts of 
> my brain/hard drive (by the way they had been really hard to find, and I 
> eventually had got them through TechCrunch).

Grumble mumble grumble. This should not happen.
WMF website: http://wikimediafoundation.org
Then left bar link: "Finance report"

It is odd that they are not easy to find. Can you tell us more of what 
your search experience was ? Did you try to look for them on Wikipedia ? 
  Did you know about the existence of WMF site ? Did you find this site 
? Did you realise information was given through links on the left ? 
Should  more information be proeminently listed on the main page ? Would 
icons on the main page help ? (perhaps like the bottom bar listing 
projects at the end of the main page) ?


  So its true, if the WMF
> were an old established charity, the numbers wouldn't be too great. Not 
> sure this is a consequence of the head-over-heels growth mode or will 
> remain like this.
> 
> It is not immediately apparent to me that the WMF is so much better in 
> terms of volunteers than other leading non-profit organizations. This is 
> not a complaint, just a sign that the WMF is headed towards being a 
> great charity. Wouldn't MSF point to their significant volunteer 
> contributions as well? As far as I can tell, no laurels to rest on, but 
> rather inspiration to keep it up.
> 
> I would probably try to quantify those volunteer contributions 
> nevertheless, even if they aren't part of the core financial statements. 
> Not just for big donors, small fry donors (like myself) look at stuff 
> like this as well. I donate to MSF (Doctors Without Borders), and I only 
> switched from once-a-year-at-christmas to monthly giving when I saw them 
> keeping up their numbers year after year.

It was actually suggested we could do that during our first audit.

What might be possible to do is to differenciate those working on the 
projects themselves (editors) and those working on the organization side 
of things.
We can not really "number" people working on the projects, nor number 
hours spent editing.
However, we could someone track a little bit more easily those working 
to help in communication (comcom, otrs etc...), translation of core 
documents, tech etc... Most of these are done by identified people.
But that still would be incredibly difficult.

Ant

> Dirk
>