[Wikimedia-l] Lack of community involvement in WMF budget planning

[Samuel Klein]

Hello again,

A few comments inline:

Leslie Carr writes:
> As someone who works for the foundation and has had to deal with
> budget issues in engineering (though this is my personal opinion)
> the budget process is already incredibly long, drawn out, and stressful.

This is a problem that we should address.  A good budget process
should be a helpful planning exercise, aligned with existing work, and
not overly stressful.  Particularly in our movement, where we have the
flexibility to raise funds for whatever seems truly important and
urgent.

Last fall, Erik suggested moving towards a more continuous planning
model and away from monolithic annual plans; we should certainly think
about this and other more natural budgeting/planning models in the
coming year.


> If I had to start the planning in November to get a draft out by Jan 1...

I don't think any /additional/ planning would be needed to realize
Tomasz's suggestion - just faster communication.

The Board already gets a draft of the midyear-review-and-lookahead a
few weeks ahead of its Q3 meeting.
All we need to do is publish a simple version of this for the
community, at around the same time.  That would allow any first-blush
feedback from the community to inform the Board discussion.


On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 5:26 AM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski
<tomasz at twkozlowski.net> wrote:
> Wouldn't it be better if, say, a draft of the budget and plan is submitted
> for community feedback, and only then brought up at a Board meeting so that
> the Board can include community feedback, too?

I would say "shared for community discussion" rather than "submitted
for community feedback".  That is, staff might not respond directly to
community feedback.  But the staff and Board would see related
community discussion and take that into consideration.

You are right to point out that it took too long to publish the final
version of that review after the meeting.  Materials from Board
meetings that can be public -- such as the midyear review -- can be
published right away, without waiting for meeting minutes to be
approved.  We have done this on occasion (especially for materials
from the ED, who has often developed her recommendations directly on
Meta) -- but should make this a habit, linked from the agenda as soon
as it is published.

Sam.