[Foundation-l] Charity Navigator rates WMF

[George Herbert]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 11:28 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/10/8 George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>:
>> The WMF is not entirely unique in that regard; many other charities
>> are largely volunteer (cf Red Cross).
>
> According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Cross#Activities:
>
> "Altogether, there are about 97 million people worldwide who serve
> with the ICRC, the International Federation, and the National
> Societies. And there are about 12,000 total full time staff members."
>
> That is a ratio of about 8,000 volunteers per staff member.
>
> The Wikimedia movement has perhaps 40 staff including the WMF and
> chapters. At the same ratio, that would give us 320,000 volunteers. I
> don't know how many volunteers we have, but I think it is rather more
> than that. Obviously, just counting volunteers doesn't give the whole
> picture, but it's the best I can do without lots more research. So,
> perhaps we aren't quite unique, but we are more extreme that any other
> similar charity movement I know of.

It's hard to compare volunteer activity levels across different types
of projects - WMF, Habitat for Humanity, the Red Cross, etc.

One could attempt to, grading them by involvement and committment
level (Arbcom, OTRS volunteers, normal admins, active editors,
inactive or intermittent editors, distinct IPs who contributed
something, etc).  There are on and off discussions about those
statistics.

Red Cross volunteers do a little bit of prep work, typically, and a
little training each year.  And then a disaster hits and they drop
everything and respond.

It's hard to compare committment to drop your life and work and go
rush off to a disaster for a few days or week, with the constant low
to moderate involvement of our core volunteer groups.  They're
qualatatively different types of committment.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com