Geoff (and others from WMF), in the situations like this one is, it is much less important why you did something than how you did something.
Global tensions are high, they could become the past in a year, but we could be the main losers of the present tensions.
We depend on trust of people all over the world that we are doing one extremely important and noble thing.
If you really didn't have any option to direct donors to Wikimedia Russia, just one more sentence inside of the message would change the attitude: "We don't run fundraising in Russia at the moment AND we are working to solve the issue as soon as possible." -- if you give a link toward a blog post where you are explaining what's the problem, even better. That makes the difference.
Everything is fragile now and I am not willing to elaborate the worst-case scenario. The point is that it's not anymore about things which could be solved with a good will gesture inside of the movement. If something starts going wrong, it would be extremely hard to fix it.
So, please (in Serbian, we use "please" just in exceptional situations), be careful. One not well worded message could cost us a lot. On Nov 13, 2014 9:08 PM, "Geoff Brigham" gbrigham@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hello rubin16 and all,
I wanted to follow up on Lisa's email. As she said, the decision to limit fundraising in Russia was not a political decision or a response to sanctions or US laws on Russia.
We are a diverse, global movement that spans the world, and we exist mostly online. However, our work takes place in the physical world, and each country has its own unique operating environment. At the WMF, we are constantly assessing what this means for the work of the movement.
In that context, we feel that laws in Russia offer a number of possible interpretations. So, out of an abundance of caution, we are not taking donations from Russia right now. If we feel the situation changes, we'll let people know.
As Lisa also said, this does and will not have any impact at all on how the WMF continues to support the Russian language Wikipedia, and its sister projects. We pool our funding and make our budget decisions independently from the geographical source, if any, of the funding.
We hear your point on transparency and advance notice, and it is a fair one. That said, sometimes we will need to quickly pause fundraising operations in different places while we gain clarity around how best to operate. We are making numerous decisions every day to respond to a wide variety of issues and considerations. I would like to commit to advance notice, but I don't think that will always be possible given the need for flexibility and speed at times. Nevertheless, I am reflecting on how to better address an issue like this in the future.
I appreciate the additional questions, but, as these are matters currently under consideration, I'm not in a position to share further right now.
Thank you,
Geoff _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe