On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 7:09 AM, Tim Landscheidttim@tim-landscheidt.de wrote:
Why? If a chapter can pay a hosting company for their servi- ces with a donation, they should be able to pay WMDE for their services as well. There is no need to "move a donation to another jurisdiction".
As soon as there is cash flow from one chapter to another, you are affectively moving donations from a jurisdiction to another.
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 19:04, Aryeh GregorSimetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
My understanding (IANAL anywhere, especially not Europe) is that they can let WM-DE host and manage the servers, but they might not be able to just give them to WM-DE. Charities can't necessarily give away assets to non-charities, otherwise there would be an obvious loophole in the whole "not for profit" idea (accept donation, give away to for-profit corporation you own, pocket as profit).
WM DE is a non-profit, so the problem is not there. Or I didn't understand your statement. The question has a lot to do with what we do.
As you point out, hardware is an asset, and it is harder to file as "mission oriented" to start with, wherever it is located.
On top of that, some countries have restrictions inherent to their non-profit legal frame. Regardless of the donor's point of view, which, with good PR, can always be turned around to show that supporting the German tolserver is within the mission, the money simply cannot go to "another organisation", because it implies legal ties or afiliations that are hard to translate into "mission oriented" projects. Moving cash around in the non-profit world is really complicated.
As far as i know, for example, most of the donations that Wikimedia PL receives come with strings attached, and Wikimedia PL can only spend that money _within Poland_. None of their doing, it's the law, you can't do anything about it. It goes with their non-profit status. In France, for example, it would take a lot of explaining to the tax office to say why we're "funding" Wikimedia Deutschland, but it would all depend on the amount (and the percentage of the chapter's financial means it represents).
My take is that as chapters grow, it will be easier to fund the German toolserver as the amounts needed will be smaller for each chapter (relatively) and can be more easily explained to the national tax offices.
So we'd have a lot of servers owned by a lot of different foundations in different countries. If you need new hardware for this server you have to get the money from this person, for this server you need this person. You get a dozen different support contracts and warranties instead of one per vendor/manufacturer. I don't deal with the hardware at all, but it looks like enough of a pain for the admins to just have to deal with servers owned by one or two groups.
So it would be nice if one organization could own all the servers and manage all the support contracts. Like Wikimedia Deutschland. But apparently that's not easy to do, either legally or politically.
Spot on, this is the headache we're facing. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Efficiency is reduced if you have to go to X for one machine, and Z for the next one.
Delphine (who knows nothing about toolservers, but a little more about chapters and chapters' finances ;-))