Le 16/04/2014 14:13, Craig Franklin a écrit :
I don't think the message of having a bit of discipline in your budget and making value-for-money a prime consideration is at all a bad thing for chapters to be doing. The way that the message was hammered in was at times arrogant, aggressive, or plain out insulting, but the message itself was a good one.
It actually appears that the message, let aside its form, had other goals than the discipline in budget. This even peculiarly come across the Ting Chen message, when he says: "The reason why I was worried was the funding of WMF, not that of the chapters". These messages were obviously "an effort to curtail chapter growth" (quoting https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Board_meetings/2013-11-24/FAQ which however deny it). It certainly brought some "value-for-money consideration" at the cost of huge volunteer time and efforts to fulfil the requirement as well as impeded projects and activities development.
Large cash gifts made to third parties, in my view, rarely represent good value-for-money. All I ask for is a little consistency.
I would also posit that if WMF donors wanted to donate to a worthy project like MariaDB, they'd donate to that rather than to the Foundation.
This point was addressed above: "other organizations [infrastructural software] have much less visibility". I actually didn't know anything about MariaDB before today...
Le 16/04/2014 14:05, David Gerard a écrit :
The solution would then appear to be to treat the chapters better, rather than others worse.
+++ !!