Talk:Chapter-wide Financial Trends Report 2013

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

India Access To Knowledge?[edit]

Hello Finance Fellows and welcome to the wikimedia movement,:-)

This Movement-wide Financial Report is a great project and has the potential to capture and organize data in a way that is quite useful for auditing and decision making about the best way to use wikimedia movements funds. Personally, I would've found this type of information helpful as member of the Fund Dissemination Committee when making recommendations to the WMF Board about Annual plan grants.

It would be great if you could include Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)'s India Access To Knowledge program. See India Access To Knowledge/Work plan July 2014 - June 2015 for their future work plan which runs through June 2015.

Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) went through the Fund Dissemination Committee last year when it requested funds from the WMF for this program, so there should reporting available. It would be valuable to capture and analyze the information from them since we need to make future decisions about whether partnering with them or similar organizations achieves equivalent impact to other movement organizations.

Looking forward to following your work. Sydney Poore/FloNight (talk) 19:14, 30 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Sydney, yes we can include CIS in the project.GByrd (WMF) (talk) 21:05, 30 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, Sydney Poore/FloNight (talk) 21:24, 30 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Sydney Poore/FloNight

Thank you for the warm welcome. We are very excited and honored to be working on this project and contributing to the movement. Yes, we most certainly can ☺ For our research, we will be looking at financial reports that run up to December 2013. Based on this time-scale we believe there should be enough available data to cover this period. —Seyi Olukoya comment by Oolukoya (WMF) (talk) 2014-10-30T21:39:59

That sounds great. Sydney Poore/FloNight (talk) 21:50, 3 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Questions and concerns from wikimedia-l[edit]

Dear Finance Fellows, thank you for this description of your focus, and welcome! Below are some concerns raised by Richard Symonds on the mailing list. –SJ talk  00:03, 5 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

  • Your team can't create entirely new definitions for organisations to report to (because we simply can't afford to increase our finance team to report to another definition - we already report to three different definitions). There is very little appetite in the movement for bigger or more professional finance teams and any big changes to reporting requirements simply won't be possible without more resources going that way.
    • The team will not be creating new definitions. We will work from your budget and your financial statements. For example, one of the items the team plans on collecting is travel cost. We do not need to define travel cost, just capture what you have in your budget or financial statements.GByrd (WMF) (talk) 21:56, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • Your team may not be able to get all the information they need from participants because participants are simply too busy - in which case, the results of the report will go ahead and be used by the movement even though it may not be accurate or indeed fit for purpose. If the FDC process then goes ahead and uses the report outcomes to ask for financial information, then it means that the inaccurate report will have a direct effect on the metrics we're marked against, and thus a direct effect on movement funding.
  • As WMUK, I fear that the less effort we put into involving ourselves in the process, the greater the chance that the final outcome will be a poor one for us. This in turn means that this actually has to be something that WMUK put a fair amount of effort into influencing, to ensure that our views are listened to and that the final report is something we can actually report against! I worry about how smaller chapters, like Ghana, Ukraine or Hungary - or the fledgling user groups - will manage, if the final definitions don't reflect their views at all.
  • You say that if an organisation can't give your team the information they want, a phrase will appear in the final report along the lines of "there are concerns about the quality of the data provided by Wikimedia UK"... which won't be true, and will be read into by the community as "WMUK has been audited and found wanting"!
  • The report is intended to make data* "consistent, meaningful and comparable among the chapters, thematic organizations, and the Foundation" *- a laudable goal and one I fully support - but it appears that the Foundation aren't being consulted by the Finance Fellows at all. Where will their views and date be taken into account - will they be using the same process as everyone else, or a different process? [I] worry that unless the WMF go through the same process, the end result will be relatively easy for the WMF teams to accomplish and rather harder for the rest of us! This increases our back-office costs and makes thorgs appear less efficient when that won't necessarily be the case.
    • All organizations including WMF will be included in the report based on the available data. The team is working under my supervision and I will be reviewing the final report before it is released. The report is not designed, nor will there be enough data to come to any conclusions except to state things like the movement spends in the range of X $USD on travel.GByrd (WMF) (talk) 21:56, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • [This] is a good first approach, but I worry that the first approach will become the only approach, and that the results will be used even if they're too "rough" to use.
    • All grant receiving entities are evaluated by their grant reports and grant applications. This report is not designed to inform or affect that process. It is simply designed to give us a starting point for important conversations about the role of various types of expenses in our movement.GByrd (WMF) (talk) 21:56, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Dear SJ Thank you for the welcome and your appreciated contributions thus far, a detailed response will be provided soon. —Seyi Olukoya

Cost to surveyed entities[edit]

I'm getting contradictory information from the mailing list:

The project has been designed so that the fellows will be using existing data provided by movement entities and the Fellows will only be reaching out to movement entities with clarifying questions. So there should be no material increase in staff/volunteer time to provide information for this project.

If you ask questions, you are increasing the staff/volunteer time cost. So I'd like to have confirmation that at least the first N months will focus on gathering, revamping and tidying up the public information (ideally ending up in durable and sustainable ns0 Meta-Wiki pages). This includes searching all Wikimedia websites (WMF-hosted wikis, wikis, blogs, other websites), all mailing lists archives, all existing literature on local laws/customs when needed to interpret something; and also translating stuff yourself.

This process is already being done and this team is coordinating with Learning and Evaluation to use data they have also.GByrd (WMF) (talk) 21:59, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

--Nemo 08:09, 5 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

P.s.: WMF has a long track of asking the same information N times (e.g. contacts; who is able to count the WMF staff who asked chapter contacts across the years, over and over?) and of doing "evaluation" where all the research work is actually asked from the community. Sorry for this bias. Maybe the Nth time will be the right one.
We are working hard to avoid this. If this happens with this project, please let us know.GByrd (WMF) (talk) 21:59, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'll cross fingers then... --Nemo 10:16, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Movement-wide[edit]

I don't actually understand this word. Are you going to include the costs and investments volunteers make for editing, for instance? I doubt it. I also don't see the WMF among the surveyed entities. It sounds like a better title would be All-affiliates financial summary, or something similar. (To also avoid the term "financial report" which has specific and sometimes legally-binding meanings.) --Nemo 08:09, 5 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I believe the idea is to include the WMF; hopefully this will be answered in the questions above. Including the costs and investments of volunteers would be useful, but afaik no such report exists today. This iteration of the project seems to focus on aligning and summarizing existing reports. Perhaps a section of the result could include estimates of such things as volunteer time and personal costs. –SJ talk  18:56, 5 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Nemo

Thank you for your contribution, please see our response below:

I don't actually understand this word.

  • By definition, a movement is a series of organized activities working toward an objective or an organized effort to promote or attain an end (source:merriam-webster). Hence, the project is referred to as movement-wide because it involves Wikimedia Chapters, Thematic Organizations, and the Wikimedia Foundation contributing towards making financial data and statements more consistent and comparable for the benefit of all involved parties.

Are you going to include the costs and investments volunteers make for editing, for instance?

  • No, not at the moment.

I also don't see the WMF among the surveyed entities.

  • WMF will be included in the final report.

It sounds like a better title would be All-affiliates financial summary, or something similar. (To also avoid the term "financial report" which has specific and sometimes legally-binding meanings.

  • With regards to the comment on financial report being legally binding, please can you provide a citation or reference source for further understanding.

Thank you. —Seyi Olukoya

Nemo does have a point. The movement is fundamentally tripartite in structure: volunteer editors, WMF, and affiliate-based and other offwiki functions. But it's a bit late to change the term now, and people probably understand what it means. Tony (talk) 11:50, 11 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Why not public?[edit]

Why was there a last minute change to chapters only --Isderion (talk) 21:46, 30 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I doubt there is any special reason. There is a history of "reports" which were published too early and ended up being a massive misinformation campaign. Sharing outcomes with the surveyed entities is a standard practice; addressing feedback and preparing a publication is a work on itself, which can be continued later if the interns consumed all the time they had. --Nemo 18:34, 31 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, just to confirm Nemo's statement. We plan to make this public, however due to lessons learned from previous reports, we want to ensure all key stakeholders are involved in the review process and all feedbacks are adequately included for a more accurate report. Thank you. —Seyi Olukoya 11:19, 01 June 2015 (PT)

FASB 117[edit]

In this report costs are split into other, operating and events. FASB 117, a standard for Financial Statements of Not-for-Profit Organizations, would split costs into programs, management and general and fundraising. The latter type of functional allocation is also used in the financial reports of the Wikimedia Foundation. The display in the report is very hard to interpret for me.
Through the fundraiser banner the Wikimedia Foundation collects money across the globe. I couldn't locate a graph or table displaying a breakdown of revenue by the WMF per region or country in this report. Some countries/chapters receive grants from the WMF through the Funds Dessemination Committee. A comparison per country of money collected by the WMF and dessiminated would have been insightful. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 19:55, 8 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ad, we considered adhering these standards but due to different characteristics of the data it was hard to reconcile. Also, we found this standard not comprehensive enough, since it didn’t converge with the majority of the chapters’ data. Instead, we started from the data and built a template from there, inspired by the IFRS standards.
We agree that the comparison between inflow and outflow of money raised by WMF would certainly be insightful, but it was beyond the analysis of this report. We will consider including that analysis if this report is to be repeated. Walter 14:19, 09 June 2015 (PDT)

No :projects entry[edit]

I wonder why there is no projects entry in the report but only events and organizational development. Chapters are doing not only events but also projects leading to improvement of free content and data - such as colaboration with GLAMs, software developement, developement of wikidata, microgrant systems etc, which are hard to call events and they are also not organizational developement. Polimerek (talk) 10:31, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This is definitely something we will need to discuss further. We would like our template to be all inclusive and we agree the events, projects/programs and organizational development line items are currently not well defined or missing. At the moment, events and organizational development are one of the least accurate line items under the Expenses. This is mainly because chapters use the names (events, programs and projects) interchangeably and few chapters are able to clearly define the costs of those activities (e.g. the percentage of reporting chapters). Some chapters report event/program/project costs under other line items without being able to filter them out.
Although it currently may not be very accurate, we do believe it would be great information to have when our definitions for those items are more clearly defined, better aligned with the chapter’s activities and when chapters are able to clearly report on these costs. To be able to do so, we definitely need more input and a shared understanding with the chapters. Lene Gillis (talk) 2:40, 9 June 2015 (UTC)

WMAT numbers[edit]

I reckon we should not really edit the report itself, therefore I post my remarks here: The numbers for WMAT in the report are not for the calendar year - back in 2013 our fiscal year started in September 2012 and we just switched the system to fit the calendar year (so the last report is on a short fiscal year). Hence, the numbers are smaller than in our annual budget which might be misleading. This information should be correct and visible in the table. Cheers --CDG (WMAT staff) (talk) 13:49, 9 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Claudia - Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We also addressed this during the data validation stages and wanted to be sure the data covered one year including December 2013. It was hard for us to take action upon that matter. Where can we read more about the specifics? If we understand this correctly, the data in the report only covers September 2013 through December 2013? We will make sure this is noted more clear for Wikimedia Österreich. Lene Gillis (talk) 2:51, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
Lene - please understand that any additional work on reporting is a huge strain on chapters with lean staff like ours - as discussed with our auditor in the process, we have a financial statement for the complete fiscal year 2012-13 and the short fiscal year until end of 2013 (doing a third one that matches the calendar year just for this purpose was never demanded and would honestly not been possible for us in terms of manpower). All this information was available on Meta - on the WMAT reporting page and in our FDC reports and I pointed it out to our auditor. --CDG (WMAT staff) (talk) 08:30, 10 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Global North/South[edit]

Why is Ukraine considered Global South?--Ymblanter (talk) 18:03, 10 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ymblanter, Hi, we worked with an existing list which placed Ukraine under the Global South as at 2013. We are aware that there are current conversations around the rightful placement of Ukraine but since this report is based on retrospect data, Ukraine still falls within the Global South classification. Thank you. —Seyi Olukoya 11:21, 10 June 2015 (PT)
Thanks, but it would be nice to know who placed Ukraine on the Global South in the 2013 list. Not that I care so much, but I guess Ukrainians would be offended (in particular, since Russia is classified as the Global North).--Ymblanter (talk) 18:32, 10 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Just found it myself, List of_Countries by Regional Classification, thanks again.--Ymblanter (talk) 18:37, 10 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I was just about to send you that link, that is indeed the explanation behind the classification. Lene Gillis 2:01, 10 June 2015 (PDT)
Retrieved from "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Chapter-wide_Financial_Trends_Report_2013&oldid=12415048"