Chris Keating, 27/10/2011 19:51:
3) It's also relatively unusual for a Wikimedia
organisation to provide
support to someone else to apply for third-party funding in a
competitive tendering process, but in this case the Wikimedia UK board
thought it was quite justified in pursuit of our objectives.
Our characteristic of being a (de facto) network of associations in most
European countries (and many others) must not be underestimated: it's
very useful, for instance, to participate in EU funds. WM-DE is a good
example with RENDER. Universities, on the contrary, spend a lot of
energies to build international (more or less fake) networks with lots
of paper (and signed documents travelling all over the world for months
or years) for consortium agreements etc., which usually don't go anywhere.
Nemo