--- Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
.... I think that though most issues may be solved in irc and emails discussion, it is very highly suitable that the board meets in real life at least once in the year, and this meeting in Paris is the lowest cost opportunity to do so. I deeply believe that on-line discussions can be improved when people have met around a beer once. Hence, I hope Angel will come to Paris. It will strengthen the community to do so. And I do not think a project like our own project, does rely ONLY of hardware considerations; it relies a lot on PEOPLE. And using a bit of money from the Foundation to strenghten the bonds between people does not seen to me to be a waste. Many issues can be fixed on face to face meeting, so that is not inefficiency either. And finally, talking of corruption is perhaps a bit premature Mark. ...
I very much agree with this. The trustees do need to meet face-to-face at least once per year. The budget committee needs to work out a way to make at least that happen and also look into the possibility of having quarterly face-to-face meetings of the trustees. Those meetings could be conducted in different parts of the world and coincide with Wikimedia meet-ups. Video streaming and phone conferencing could also be set-up so that non-board member officers could virtually attend the meetings (such as the financial officer ;). But it is very important for at least Jimbo and the representative board members to actually *be* there. Thus we need to reimburse at least those board members for travel expenses.
For now we could depend just on the Ars-Electronica award for this, but in future fund drives we would just say up front something like "no more than 10% of the money generated from this fund drive will be used for non-server-related expenses (such as office or meeting/travel expenses of the board)."
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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