Daniel Mayer wrote: We are finding out how to best transfer the donations (i.e. buying servers directly or sending the money to the foundation) without getting in trouble with german association law. Henriette, our treasurer, was busy with organizing the 21C3 lately, so I hope there is some progress soon. The decision to buy servers has been taken already, the open question is now how to do this. Other things we did with the donations: * Wikimedia Deutschland pays half of the plane tickets for Brion and Tim to Berlin * the second big sum is the legal expertise we ordered (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Urheberrechtsfragen/Sammlung) * some promotion material... My proposal would be that you contact henriette (Henriette.Fiebig (at) snafu.de) directly and establish ways to transfer the money, maybe involve also one of the developers to tell us which hardware is needed. greetings, elian

Leaving aside Daniel's concerns over how Wikimedia Deutschland currently uses the dough (somebody from Wikimedia Deutschland should answer that), Walter's email is an important reminder that we really should get going about offering the EU standard bank transfer to EU donors. What we need to provide so people can do these transactions: * our BIC (Bank Identification Code) * our IBAN (International Bank Account Number) * the full international postal address of our bank (because some banks want this data as a fallback mechanism, in case there's probs w/ the BIC/IBAN data. Note that the full postal address is currently missing from http://www.wikimedia.de/spenden.html. EU donors (even if they are totally unfamiliar w/ EU standard transactions) can then take that info to their bank and get going sending the money. The donation page should explain a bit about EU standard bank transfers -- because EU standard transactions are still fairly new and not even all EU citizens know about them. (I think I was one of the first people to do them at my bank, but I now do one every one or two months -- easy peasy.) It should be made clear that these transactions CANNOT, by EU law, cost more than national transactions and that every EU bank has to offer them. In other words, for anyone with an EU current account, an an EU transaction is probably the cheapest way. (Admittedly, in terms of convenience credit cards still have an edge, because EU standard transactions require the user to do the transaction through their bank (instead of punching in a few numbers on our site) and not all banks let their customers do EU standard transactions online yet. Pretty redundant info, just in case: EU standard transactions are bank transfers between two EU banks. The donor needs an EU bank account and we need one. They're cheap, they're ''relatively'' fast (still can take up to a few days till funds fully register in the recipient's account) and once you've got the above data, EU transactions are quite painless (as opposed to any other international transaction). It really, truly does not matter what EU bank account we use for accepting EU standard transactions. It could be a current account in any EU country and we DON'T need an account in each EU country from that perspective. The only advantage to having multiple EU current accounts would be that donors from a respective country could then also use their "old" national bank transfer mechanism to donate, and they might be more familiar with that. So maybe to offer separate accounts for the bigger countries would be good -- and, yes, it's especially good to have/offer a bank account with Germany, because German's mostly just don't get^W, sorry, do credit cards and the country's the most populous of the EU. -- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com

Actually, any country to country transfer, even in the Euro-zone, in euros, involves a fee (go figure ! banks could not let go such a source of revenue). Of course, ALL donation pages in ALL the languages, should clearly present the best way to give (ie. the cheapest both for the donor and the receiver depending on the donor's location and currency). Maybe in the long run the French and German chapters should look into having a special tick box which would allow donors to choose where their money goes (ie. specifically the local chapter - providing the local chapters have an idea of what to do with the money on a local basis - or Wikimedia Foundation). This would allow for the local chapter to transfer the money to Wikimedia Foundation (or, as elian says, depending on laws allowing it or not, buy servers for the Foundation etc.). My two cents (of a euro). Delphine PS. The French chapter will soooon be done and have its bank. :)