Thomas Dalton wrote: > 2009/10/8 Gregory Kohs <[email protected]>: > >> Despite an overall three-star rating (out of four), WMF was only rated two >> stars for Organization Efficency. This is described by Charity Navigator as >> "Meets or nearly meets industry standards but underperforms most charities >> in its Cause". The Charity Navigator site further states: >> > The WMF is unique in being so massively volunteer driven. The WMF > exists to run the servers and handle the admin, almost everything else > is done by volunteers and doesn't appear on the income statement. It's > inevitable that the WMF will spend a lot of its money on admin. If you > include volunteer time on the income statement, even at a nominal rate > of $1/hr or something, then we would be spending almost all our > resources on programmes. > This is true enough in general, though as mentioned there are other nonprofits that also benefit from volunteer resources on a large scale. But that's often not something a ratings site will consider in determining "similarity" of organizations, when it even gets beyond evaluation with one-size-fits-all formulas. Not that these issues are easily reduced to formulas, as we have already found in various settings where it's a challenge to adequately express the scope of what Wikimedia volunteers do.
We do pay attention to the efficiency of operations and how funds are spent, not merely for the sake of appearances but as something valuable in its own right. With that in mind, it's more useful to look directly at ways of achieving greater efficiency than to debate how important it is for us to meet arbitrary standards. So in that sense I'd actually consider arguing over the propriety of covering meal expenses, even with the possible cultural insensitivity involved, a more valuable discussion. --Michael Snow _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
