Late this past week came two significant news items regarding the Internal Revenue Service: that the agency is finally going to revamp the core annual reporting requirements for non-profits, and that the agency's chief is departing to take over the troubled American Red Cross.
[Both of these changes were reported in news articles which are not online, yet at least: the first item in Friday's Wall Street Journal and the second item in this week's Chronicle of Philanthropy. Both newspapers based their articles on extensive quotes from various parties both on and off the record, and neither item is being denied by anyone.]
The redesign of the federal Form 990 is long overdue; as the Journal puts it the form "has over 100 line items of information in haphazard order, the result of decades of additions by the tax agency without a complete revamp. A reader finds a charity's revenue listed pages before learning what the group does. Questions about officers, directors and other key employees are often scattered many pages apart." The revamp appears to be mainly aimed at reorganizing the thing so it flows in a logical order.
Unfortunately that won't get at the bigger issue which is the lack of any requirement to report actual results other than financial. The head of the IRS's tax-exempt organization unit says, "I'm pretty sure the public doesn't want the government deciding who's effective and who isn't." She's missing it; no one argues for the federal government ranking non-profits' effectiveness. (I mean seriously, can you imagine? Might as well let a federal bureaucracy decide who's best on "Dancing With The Stars".) No, what would be a real step forward would be simply a requirement that non-profits report each year some measure(s) of effectiveness. Let organizations themselves decide what that is and then let the marketplace of informed donors and watchdogs decide who is being smartest about that. The governmental role here would be simply to enable a free market of comparisons, just like it does with regard to investing in for-profit corporations.
Meanwhile New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom broke the story that IRS chief Mark Everson is leaving to take over the Red Cross, which has recently been in some crisis. Whether he is a good fit for that organization is open to debate (I lean slightly towards yes); it does seem like a good sign for them that they can land someone with a resume of his caliber.
The Chronicle rightly notes, though, that Everson has in his four years running the IRS sharply increased the agency's focus on tax-exempt organizations. While some of the specifics of that have seemed weak (see above) or dubious (the NAACP and All Saints Episcopal Church audits had the scent of partisan politics), in the big picture we clearly need more focus on this booming civic sector not less. Hopefully the next agency director will understand that.
Showing posts with label annual budget. Show all posts
Showing posts with label annual budget. Show all posts
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Wikipedia gaining steam
At this recent symposium in Chicago I took notes from an onstage interview of Jimmy Wales, founder and leader of Wikipedia. He covered many issues but most germane to this audience were some interesting aspects of Wikipedia's history and evolution as a not-for-profit enterprise.
I was interested to learn that Wales' mission is not actually the "wiki" information model per se, rather it is creating a free universal high-quality information source. That is, the Firefox of encyclopedias. His first attempt was called "Newpedia" and it was to be a freely-licensed analogue to Encyclopedia Britannica assembled in the same manner: experts writing and editing the articles, as volunteers. It stalled because, as Wales put it, "a good well-sourced encyclopedia article is a lot of work for an individual to write start to finish," and identifying and recruiting them was also a huge difficult job. "We weren't getting anywhere, so we scrapped that and decided to try the wiki concept instead." That experience has made him an evangelist of the wiki model, which is now reflected in the mission statement of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wales is defensive about recent uncomplimentary media coverage (three links there) and would benefit from the wise counsel of someone like this; he modestly declined the interviewer's invitation to crow about the Nature article that found no more errors in Encyclopedia Britannica articles than in Wikipedia ones. He did note that contrary to media reports, "We are not locking articles on Wikipedia. In fact we are locking fewer articles now than we used to. What we are doing is locking out articles from editing by anonymous users and users who have just joined the wikipedia community within one week."
That last has become a core part of their operating concept now, the existence of a wiki community of regular contributors/editors. It numbers somewhere around 1,000 regulars now, and Wales has come to see it as central to the effectiveness of the wiki model, how
accountability happens in real-life practice.
Wales dropped one other nugget which was quite impressive to me: Wikipedia's total operating costs only just recently passed $1 million/year. (Their 2004 Form 990 on Guidestar shows total expenses well under half that so that checks out.) Talk about leverage -- that's quite impressive compared to what the organization has accomplished, regardless of whether you find their theories compelling or not.
P.S. Wikipedia was in the news last week regarding China: in contrast to Google and Yahoo, Wikipedia has bluntly refused to censor its content for that country. Hence Wikipedia has been blocked in China...until October when it was suddenly unblocked, and then last week it was suddenly re-blocked. Wales has no idea why: "We never heard anything from the Chinese government about those decisions, I have no idea what they're thinking now." He seems confident that in the big picture the Chinese government is pissing into the wind, that in the wireless-network era they can't keep that sort of top-down control of Internet access in their country.
I was interested to learn that Wales' mission is not actually the "wiki" information model per se, rather it is creating a free universal high-quality information source. That is, the Firefox of encyclopedias. His first attempt was called "Newpedia" and it was to be a freely-licensed analogue to Encyclopedia Britannica assembled in the same manner: experts writing and editing the articles, as volunteers. It stalled because, as Wales put it, "a good well-sourced encyclopedia article is a lot of work for an individual to write start to finish," and identifying and recruiting them was also a huge difficult job. "We weren't getting anywhere, so we scrapped that and decided to try the wiki concept instead." That experience has made him an evangelist of the wiki model, which is now reflected in the mission statement of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Wales is defensive about recent uncomplimentary media coverage (three links there) and would benefit from the wise counsel of someone like this; he modestly declined the interviewer's invitation to crow about the Nature article that found no more errors in Encyclopedia Britannica articles than in Wikipedia ones. He did note that contrary to media reports, "We are not locking articles on Wikipedia. In fact we are locking fewer articles now than we used to. What we are doing is locking out articles from editing by anonymous users and users who have just joined the wikipedia community within one week."
That last has become a core part of their operating concept now, the existence of a wiki community of regular contributors/editors. It numbers somewhere around 1,000 regulars now, and Wales has come to see it as central to the effectiveness of the wiki model, how
accountability happens in real-life practice.
Wales dropped one other nugget which was quite impressive to me: Wikipedia's total operating costs only just recently passed $1 million/year. (Their 2004 Form 990 on Guidestar shows total expenses well under half that so that checks out.) Talk about leverage -- that's quite impressive compared to what the organization has accomplished, regardless of whether you find their theories compelling or not.
P.S. Wikipedia was in the news last week regarding China: in contrast to Google and Yahoo, Wikipedia has bluntly refused to censor its content for that country. Hence Wikipedia has been blocked in China...until October when it was suddenly unblocked, and then last week it was suddenly re-blocked. Wales has no idea why: "We never heard anything from the Chinese government about those decisions, I have no idea what they're thinking now." He seems confident that in the big picture the Chinese government is pissing into the wind, that in the wireless-network era they can't keep that sort of top-down control of Internet access in their country.
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