[Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 9:13 AM, Fae <fae at wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
> Thanks Phoebe. I'm glad to hear that the WMF has used almost no
> donated money in staff costs running this global referendum.
>
> As a member of the board you may want to consider what it means in
> terms of operational accountability if such a large exercise with
> massive impact on our community has no measurable costs due to staff
> not reporting their time against it. I am puzzled at how your
> programme managers ever decide when to cancel projects if the
> resources they are consuming are not reported.
>
> With regard to your comments about massive and possibly excessive use
> of "free" volunteer time, as a UK charity we are interested in
> improving how we measure e-volunteer effort spent on our projects as
> we believe that we should take care to avoid volunteer "burn-outs"
> (which we see too many of) or using up all of the good will that is
> represented by the efforts of our volunteers, of which I am one,
> without maximizing the impact on our mission. Perhaps WMF could
> consider the same issues when judging the success of its projects?
>
> Cheers,
> Fae

Fae -- I'll be really interested to hear the results of what WMUK
finds on the volunteer-burnout front. It's an important issue, and one
we have largely glossed over in our 10-year history -- or just deal
with as individuals.

One note -- me not knowing what kind of staff time was reported
doesn't mean that reports don't exist; the staff don't report to the
board directly. We work on the level of the annual plan, and
divergence from it on a broad scale, so I was just speaking generally
about the resources used... And while this referendum caused way more
discussion than most things the WMF does, and thus had a much higher
volunteer and community time cost, in terms of money and staff time it
is a pretty tiny piece of the overall picture.

-- phoebe