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

[Tomasz Ganicz]

> It is disappointing that no organization has readily come forward in
> reply to my original question with their pre-calculated
> "program:fundraising:administrative cost ratios" (I love this way of
> conceiving of the ratio) it would be really handy to be discussing a
> real case at this moment. I will have a bit more time in a couple of
> weeks, at which point I will happily dig into the standards you have
> linked to, and then pull these out of an example past report, if I can
> find a good set of numbers in one of the large chapters (WMDE, WMUK?)
> or even the WMF, so that we can discuss the meaningfulness of starting
> to make this ratio a top level indicator for all our movement
> organizations.

If you want, we can try with Wikimedia Polska. Here there is a rough table:

http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/U%C5%BCytkownik:Polimerek/Spraw_zarzadu#Finanse

just showing our ratio of operational costs and other parts of our
costs for 2012.

In our case the operational costs are well defined by general rules of
accounting, but they differ from your definition - i.e. it does not
cover all salaries if they are integral part of the projects, but does
cover salaries of our secretary and accountant. But for example it
also covers cost of our toolsever and internet domains...

IMHO the general reporting could be like this:
*General operational/office costs (salaries of office workers, cost of
maintaining office, cost of legal stuff, cost of travels and meetings
of workers and members of the boards and other "decisive bodies")
*Technical infrastructure costs (servers etc. + salaries of
technicians who maintain it )
*Costs of projects and special programs (overall, salaries, meetings,
travel, technical, others) - maybe spread by a type of program (ie.
producing content, software improvement, outreach, promotion, others)

+

*General info about overall costs of all salaries (easy to calculate
and define).
*General info about costs of all travel reimbursements (easy to
calculate as well)
*General info about costs of all meetings and conferences.


-- 
Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz
http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek
http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/
http://www.cbmm.lodz.pl/work.php?id=29&title=tomasz-ganicz