Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Report, April 2009

Spending priorities and increase

> As always, thanks for these reports. I'm curious - 37% is a lot of
> extra money, is there a plan for how to spend it? Has this year's
> spending been increased or will the extra just be carried over to next
> year or just kept as reserves?

As always, you are hugely welcome -- it's my pleasure :-)

I will ask Veronique to reply a little more fully, but here's the gist:

1) That paragraph of the report doesn't cover our full financial picture -- total revenues weren't up 37%, just individual donations as a subset of total revenues. So, there was not a USD 1.49 million "surplus" -- it was less than that, because other areas under-performed against plan in the same period. Also bear in mind that spending varied relative to plan, as well.

2) #1 notwithstanding, we are indeed thinking about what to do with money unspent in a given year. In general, I do not want the Wikimedia Foundation to accumulate massive reserves -- generally, because donors give money in hopes it will be spent usefully. But at the same time, it would be imprudent to have no financial cushion at all. This is one of the issues Veronique and I think about quite a bit, and I know she is hoping that the strategy project will work on it too. How much reserve is enough, when is it time to build towards an endowment.

I'll ask Veronique to comment further :-) - Sue

Your comment is very timely. We are, and have been, thinking about the best solution regarding extra money. First, we want to consider an appropriate "reserve" amount, i.e. this can range from 3 months of expenses for some organizations to 2 years for others. So, we are discussing this; there are lots of theories of the perfect amount. Beyond that, we are considering things like investment strategy, the creation of an endowment, etc.-things that can help towards ongoing financial sustainability. - Veronique

Faster report publishing?

I really like these reports, but they'd be more useful if they came sooner after the events they describe. Will you be able to catch up to a <1-month delay in the near future? (I wouldn't mind if the reports for May, June, and July were condensed, if that's what it took.) - Benjamin Lees

Yes, I've been thinking that. Do we get the reports at about the same time as the board or is the delay due to the need to go through the report checking if anything needs to be redacted? I wouldn't mind combined reports either, but they aren't really meant for us, it's what the board wants that is most important. -Thomas Dalton

The delay tends to be minimal, Sue typically sends information to the community directly after having communicated with the board, although occasionally a portion of a report may be redacted. In this case, the board received the April report yesterday. It was actually out of sequence, because we received her report for May a little earlier, so I expect you should see that one pretty soon as well. As for getting fully caught up, I'm sure that's her goal, although you may appreciate that at times actually doing the work ends up taking priority over reporting on the work that was done. From the board's perspective, she does keep us informed of developments outside the monthly reports as well, so we remain able to exercise our oversight responsibilities, but I would agree that these monthly summaries are very helpful. - Michael Snow

(Adding to what Michael said.)

Yes, we're trying to catch up. May will be posted tomorrow, and June is being worked on right now.

These reports started off as simple staff activity reports (when I joined the Foundation two years ago), and when the staff was small they were fairly easy to put together quickly. Over time, we've added in new structured info such as the comScore Media Metrix data, lists of media interviews, fundraising totals, etc. That takes a little longer to gather -- for example, we don't have finalized fundraising totals until 20 days following the close of month, and comScore data can take even longer. Plus, growth in staff means it takes that much longer to collect and synthesize everyone's input.

Meantime, we've been working towards a parallel data-driven monthly report -- it would include comScore data, financial information, and metrics aimed at assessing participation and quality. The financial information for that report is now regularly produced on a monthly basis, and we are pretty close to having good-enough reach, quality and participation metrics regularly produced as well, thanks to Erik Zachte and others. The goal of the data-driven report is to focus less on staff activity, and more on a high-level assessment of the overall health of the Foundation and its projects.

Once we have the data-driven report in regular production, we can rethink reporting overall. For example, we might decide to publish the monthly data report + a richer text-based staff activities report once a quarter. That would mean the activities report could be less focused on small incremental changes (the staff worked on X, the staff continued Y) and more focused on providing greater detail about a small number of high-priority initiatives, e.g., the strategy project, the usability project, the bookshelf project, etc. Or, we could publish the data report, plus a lightweight, simple monthly activities report focused purely on staff work -- new hires and that kind of thing.

I definitely sympathize with people wanting to be connected and aware of what's going on with the staff. I'd be curious to know what kinds of information people find most useful of what we publish today, and what you'd like to see more of -- and also what you think of the other channels we publish through, e.g., the tech blog, the Foundation blog, press releases, etc. And I do also appreciate your patience as we get caught up on this most recent backlog :-)

Thanks, Sue

Of the monthly reports I find the Milestones and Key Priorities bit you always start off with very interesting and useful. Reports on one-off events that took place during the month (such as the chapters meeting in this one) are usually quite interesting (I was at the chapters meeting, so I already knew about that, of course! Usually it is stuff I wasn't previously aware of.). Tech stuff I usually find out about through out routes (mainly the wikitech-l mailing list, sometimes the tech blog), so I don't pay much attention to that section of your report. The rest I skim through and usually find one or two things of interest, but most of the interesting stuff has usually already been announced or at least mentioned elsewhere by the time the report comes out. More details about what is planned for the next month would be nice, since that gives us an opportunity to comment before it happens rather than just complain afterwards - of course, you need to carefully manage how much time you spend reading replies to your reports so as to find a moment here or there to do some actual work! -Thomas Dalton

Sue, good question - I'm still thinking about my own answer to it. I think I find most of the current publications isolated, hard to comment on or contribute to, but eloquently written. Maybe there is a connection between the two -- it is a pity that there are so few draft and incomplete ideas/essays/priority-sets/discussions from the Foundation about its plans, and that the future calendar/agenda/milestones are only projected a few weeks or months into the future (which, combined with the delay in sharing such information, makes it hard for me to feel engaged in a timely discussion about most topics covered). Similarly, when a hard question is answered, often a very careful and compact reply is given, without any open loops for others to engage. [Open loops are bad on longer timescales, but essential to immediate discussion and brainstorming]

At any rate, these reports are delicious, and I've posted these reports to the Board here on Meta and updated the overall reports page, to show the various Foundation communication mechanisms side by side. -- sj | translate | + 09:18, 12 August 2009 (UTC)