Talk:2011-12 Fundraising and Funds Dissemination process/Pros and cons

Purpose

This page was split off from Fundraising and Funds Dissemination/Recommendations on request of Sue. She proposes doing the following with it:

I'd propose that it start with the existing text, but be open to editing by everyone, with the goal of neutrally capturing at a high level what we know at this point, about the pros and cons of various arguments. Not with the goal of containing lots and lots of data and analysis (that could happen on its talk page), but with the goal of summarizing what is known and not known, at a fairly high level, in document mode not discussion mode.

To be clear: as I understand it, there are two competing potential models for payment-processing on the non-chapter Wikimedia sites. 1) The Wikimedia Foundation handles all payment processing on the non-chapter sites, and 2) A mixed model, in which the Wikimedia Foundation plus some/many/all chapters payment-process on the non-chapter sites. Nobody is proposing a model in which the Wikimedia Foundation does not payment-process, because of course there are many countries in which there is no chapter. And, obviously, nobody is proposing that chapters not payment-process on their own sites.

Please help edit this page into a clearly readable, high-level summary of arguments pro and con centralized payment processing by the Wikimedia Foundation as opposed to the current mixed model. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) 14:01, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Source please

"The Wikimedia movement's experience thus far tells us that in a decentralized payment processing model, it is more difficult to be transparent with donors." I almost added a cite tag there, but will comment here instead. As far as I am aware, it is the possibility to be far clearer to a donor if the collection route (and spending?) of their donation is within the same [country / legal-financial jurisdoction / state] as they live in. Just as it is clearer to me as a UK resident to see what my local council and UK gov do with taxes than I can tell what the EU does. As it would seem to me therefore that the quote should read 'centralized' rather than 'decentralized' could a detailed source be listed for the current version please. --Alison Wheeler 18:13, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. It seems obvious to me that a group of UK trustees are best placed to make decisions about microgrants for people doing things in the UK. Not least because they are best placed to know what sort of transport costs are realistic. Other chapters will be in a similar position, and at our current scale it is practical to use volunteers for this (our UK trustees are all unpaid volunteers). Once you scale up to a global grant giving body you lose that local knowledge, and you cease to be on a scale where volunteers can do this as a hobby so you have to pay a small number of people. They in turn have to do more research in order to scrutinise less effectively. Chapter trustees will have a vague idea of what costs may be reasonable even in a markedly richer or poorer area of their own country. But when you start dealing in costs across borders you find it takes longer to do any sort of reality check let alone one that a local could do. WereSpielChequers 20:59, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Lets stick to basic principals, not implementation details

There has been a lot of detailed discussion of the details of the current fundraising practices and which is more efficient at getting money out of the donors. Can I suggest that this discussion isn't very useful here. If we decide that maximising efficiency is a basic principal then we are effectively deciding to go with a mixed model, with fundraising by the chapters where that is more efficient. It is then up to ongoing research and experiment to find out which chapters can fund-raise more efficiently - whatever the current situation is.

If we decide central fundraising is the way to go then the question of whether chapter fundraising is more efficient is moot; likewise if we decide in principal that chapter fundraising is the preferred model. --Filceolaire 12:53, 13 January 2012 (UTC)