[Foundation-l] Corporate Social Responsibility

[phoebe ayers]

On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 6:42 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 20, 2010, at 6:00 PM, Noein wrote:
>
>> Thank you everybody for explaining your views.
>> Most of the US inhabitants who answered me seem to be living and
>> believing in a hierarchical and competitive world where the highest
>> ranked ones- who are praised as gods - take from the lowest ones - who
>> are just good enough to give their money and effort. As a matter of
>> fact, their society seems organized to maximize money and it is echoed
>> in their opinion about how to manage this huge collaborative effort
>> about knowledge called Wikipedia.
>
> I think this is a gross misrepresentation of what I've seen from the replies so far. I think a more accurate representation is that you place transparency as a higher priority than personal privacy, even when such transparency is beyond what is necessary and would cause harm to the individual, on the sake of principle; you also seem unwilling to accept that employees can be paid a competitive salary and provide a valuable service to the foundation that merits such a salary ...

Incidentally, San Francisco and surrounding area is not an especially
cheap area to live in. For those unfamiliar with the area, here are
some housing prices for the area that the office is located in:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa?query=soma&srchType=A&minAsk=&maxAsk=&bedrooms=

I'm sure everyone is used to doing the math of whether it's possible
to live somewhere on a given salary or not (take off 25-35% for taxes,
figure in rent, add internet and cell phone, figure that you might
need to eat occasionally etc. etc.). I think that it is fair to state
that the WMF is not enabling extravagant lifestyles. If we were, then
that would be something to worry about. But we're not.

But this is basically beside the point, which is that the major
decision is deciding whether or not the WMF should hire someone to do
a particular job -- do we need a staff person in that role? What would
that role contribute to the whole organization? -- then finding the
right person for that role. Once that's done I'd argue we have a moral
imperative to pay that person a fair and comfortable living wage, one
that indicates that we value both them and their work; while also not
abusing the trust of those who donate their own hard-earned money to
fund the organization, and recognizing that as a nonprofit none of us
are in the business to get wealthy and that often we must in fact
scrape by on a shoestring. However, each person in the organization is
an investment -- and as such the organization should take care of them
and pay for them fairly, if possible, even if it's generally not at
all up to market rate.