[Wikimedia-l] WMF core and non core expenses

[Samuel Klein]

A quick reply:

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 10:38 AM, charles andrès
<charles.andres at wikimedia.ch> wrote:
>
> If you consider the WMF financial reserves it's true, but for what I understand, the FDC should decide about the distribution of the forthcoming fundraising and so we can only guess that the movement has no fundings problem. If this winter we cannot reach the total amount fixed, what will happen?

A good question for us to answer before this becomes a problem.
Presumably it will at some point, as long as people are looking for
ways to 'do more with more resources'.  (There are other ways to grow
that involve doing more with a fixed pool of resources, or through
more partners, or... &c.  Some may even be more sustainable than our
current model.  But at present the whole movement has been expanding
in this way.)

> I personnaly agree that the "core" should be
more than only the basics, but there should be
> something between this extremitiy and the actual WMF FDC proposal where the community can
> comment only 10% of the real WMF budget.

Agreed.  If we split movement-wide costs into "essential", "high
priority", and "non-core", I think the FDC should grow to review most
of the non-essential funds.  Which would include more than 10% of the
WMF budget.

This should improve over the first few years of the FDC's operation.
To be effective, these changes should be worked into the WMF's annual
plan in the spring (as the budget line-item for the next year's FDC)
and into the fundraising targets, as well as into individual plans
submitted to the FDC.

SJ