Re: [Wikimedia-l] Funding of decentralized organizational structure

On 10 April 2014 16:23, Dariusz Jemielniak <darekj(a)alk.edu.pl> wrote: ... ... I would add a far more common issue than fraud, and one that costs us far, far more money. Competent management. Our Foundation and Chapters make mistakes, all organizations do, and hopefully they can demonstrate to us unpaid volunteers that they appreciate the importance of recognizing failures, are learning from them, and do not keep on making the same old mistakes every year. However the more decentralized we are, the more likely we are to suffer with poor value for money and making the same mistakes over and over in different organizations. Two years ago I asked the Chapters to report on Efficiency, the number replying could be counted on two fingers, some of the others have vigorously defended ways of not reporting on Efficiency and carefully explained how it would be terrible for them to even attempt to report these numbers (which are already available in their annual reports were anyone motivated to pull them out) or define efficiency in such as way as you would think that closed trustee board meetings were just as effective as delivering edit-a-thons. If 85% of the donor's money is being spent on project work (i.e. NOT administrators, consultants, lawyers, rent, internal facing meetings, non-transparent bureaucracy) then that would be great value. When this drops below 50% (or perhaps 60%) we should ask questions and seriously challenge the continued funding of these incredibly poor value organizations, where the money is being drained away on things that do not directly help our objectives, before it can reach our volunteers and our open knowledge projects. For small chapters that are entirely driven by volunteers, they are astonishingly efficient, as there is no rent, no staff costs, they just need some money to pay for direct expenses for projects = 100% efficient (if you don't count how much it costs the WMF/FDC to give them money in the first place and how much tax is lost in that process). In large chapters having employees is a boon, however making a charity/not for profit registered organization anything more efficient than 75% is very hard work indeed, and requires focused competent managers running a lean team. Few of our chapters with 2 or more employees can claim to be as efficient as this, I suspect none, I would be *delighted* to be corrected. Honestly reporting how efficient we are in spending the donor's money on what they believe they are donating to (preserving and providing access to the sum of human knowledge) and from that learning and publishing their best practices so that growing chapters can benchmark their procedures for non-end-project overheads is something, in my view, our movement has yet to get anywhere near. I see a lot of talk, a lot of meetings and hard to understand over-complex analysis, and sadly increasingly a lot of political dodging of direct simple questions, but I have yet to see reports of *end to end* efficiency that were credible or useful to apply to the majority of our movement's organizations. PS Ting, you should write more of these emails, your views are engaging. :-) Fae -- faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae