On 2/28/07, Jakob Voss jakob.voss@nichtich.de wrote:
Any File wrote:
It might be a good thing to add the ability of bank transfer, maybe even through a WMF-account that they transfer it together to you? (to reduce costs for international and inter-valuta traffic)
This may be a good idea, but it may have some legal implication. Who would be the entity that collect the money and at what title would do that. [...] If such a thing would be set up, not only the people in that country could benefit, but also the people in many other countries in Europe since the transfer fee to another EU country would be minimal compared to an EU/Taiwan transfer.
In 2005 Wikimania Foundation was given access to a bank account held by Wikimedia Germany. I don't know whether Wikimania Germany can offer this for Wikimania 2007 but I'll ask our treasurer. A bank account within the EU would at least help EU citizen because transfer fee within EU is zero (of course there is transfer fee between EU and taiwan but it's probably less if money is transfered collected). Maybe we could set up a procedure where you weekly send Wikimedia Germany the list of people with keywords and Wikimedia Germany checks whether money has been recieved or not.
No need to ask the treasurer, we can't do that :-)
"opening an account in the name of" is not as trivial a thing as it seems. There are many considerations involved. In Germany, for example, you need to have a representative, ie. a subsidiary or some such. It also involves tax questions and such weird things that are not easy to straighten out just "for an event" (they're already not easy "for an organisation" -- believe me, it's not like I haven't been trying ;) )
On the other hand, bank transfer is not always the means of payment of choice. My point being, the Italians may want bank transfer, as the Germans would, but the French or the Americans would simply never use it. In the end, we will never be able to accommodate, at least in the near future, everyone. Paypal with its credit card solution might not be the *best* solution *for everyone*,but at this stage, it is definitely the best solution available to us, with the means we have and the possibility we've explored.
Cheers,
Delphine PS. Ah, and using 5 different accounts to track donation money/wikimania fees/whatever else is *not* a good idea. The Belgian account is not a satisfying solution at this stage, for other reasons.