[Wikimedia-l] Question: How much does administration in Chapters cost the Wikimedia movement?

[Delphine Ménard]

Hello,


On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Christophe Henner
<christophe.henner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Quick email, for WMFr internal budget. FTE are split between each
> projects. So when calculating our administrative costs we only count
> the money equivalent of the time spent on administrative stuff.
>
> Including all salaries is not a correct way to calculate
> administrative cost as, for programs, most of the spendings are human
> time (ie salaries).

I have to agree with Christophe here. You cannot count salaries as a
lump sum towards administration costs, this makes no sense. Of course,
some salaries/external fees will be purely "administrative" (i'm
thinking accounting, human resources fees/management, legal and such),
but some salaries will be counted, in part or in full, in the program
section, since they actually allow those programs to happen in the
first place.

Over the years I have always found extremely interesting how Wikimedia
in general is extremely reticent to "paying" people to "do" things. It
makes sense in a volunteer culture, even more sense in *our* volunteer
culture since the Wikimedia organisations would not exist were it not
for the Wikimedia projects and those in turn would not exist were it
not for the countless volunteer hours that are put in by the
communites. But is there really anything tangible we can invest in
(apart from the technical costs to run the servers and improve the
software)? We don't buy stuff that we can sell, we don't need raw
materials, we don't produce anything that you put in a box and deliver
at someone's door. Therefore the only field in which we can invest in
a productive way are people. People who will support projects run by
the communities, people who will help develop new ideas, etc.

Apart from this I fully support the idea of having Wikimedia
organisations measure their administrative costs against a common
scale, although of course we'll have to take into consideration local
specificities where applicable.

> On 19 April 2013 12:14, Fae <faewik at gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]

>> It would make a great top level key performance indicator for our
>> organizations if this could be reported using an agreed standard
>> definition as to what administration means, with such a definition we
>> could even make this an expectation for the public annual financial
>> reports. Hopefully reporting such a ratio could then be a target for
>> improvement and any strategic plans for growth could be accountable
>> against this and other top level performance measures.

I find this to be an extremely interesting path of strategic
development. With the caveat expressed above (local specificities
mainly).

>>
>> My rule of thumb would be that "administration" is composed of:
>> * Staff salaries, contractor payments and professional advice fees

See above.

>> * Offices and fixed or hired assets used for non-project activity
>> (such as financial reporting, accounts, board meetings)
Yes.
>> * Expenses for non-project activity
Yes.
>>
>> I have yet to have a confirmed figure for WMUK, but I would be
>> interested any any current figures for other chapters for
>> comparison/benchmarking and any lexplanation of the 'norms' we might
>> expect to calculate these.

Wikimedia Deutschland has established this year an "evaluation"
department, which will mainly work at making this a reality. I know
Ikimedia france for example, by law, is required to issue a report
that presents the financial statements in a different way than the
pure financial statement, which for example takes into account
volunteer hours, and splits costs into programmatic activities and
administrative costs etc. I am sure there are more ideas and things
happening out there that we can build upong to find a suitable scale.

Cheers,

Delphine
-- 
@notafish

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