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

[Samuel Klein]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 1:13 PM, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>

> 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)?

Yes.  We can invest in freeing closed-license knowledge, and
closed-source software, and private databases that are essential to
our work.

We can invest in [timeshares of] videoconferencing hardware at
hundreds of centers around the world so that most volunteers have
close to a F2F connection with others without paying the fuel, time,
and pollution costs of flying around the world.

We can invest in providing access to closed repositories of knowledge
(for those repositories so large that we can't directly buy out their
copyright) for our active contributors.

We can invest in public contests, awards, and other recognition that
both elevate the best work we have and that reach out to content that
we admire and would like to make more available to the world through
our projects.

> 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.

There is still a huge demand for knowledge packaged in formats that
can be put in a box and delivered to someone's door.   We could either
invest in this directly (through production, presentation and
shipping) or indirectly (through building and supporting partners who
do these things).

> 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.

+1

SJ