On Sun, 1 Dec 2019 at 11:09, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote: ...
What I have noticed is that once consensus has been reached, we do not want to be confronted with the consequences of our actions. Wikipedia Zero has damaged our outreach and what the BBC info reminds us of is that Internet, the cost of Internet, is not comparable in Africa with what we are used to. It means that we no longer reach the girls and boys in Soweto as we showed in our film clip at the Erasmus award.
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The disconnect between what matters and the different realities we live in is easy to see when a fundraising appeal for the WMF was based on virtual charity tin rattling to raise $3 being the "price of a coffee".[1] For some, $3 pays for our Sunday lunch.
We should accept that it is impossibly hard for Wikimedia Foundation employees to take to heart that San Francisco or the Trump dominated America is not the "real world", and the ever thin rationales to keep on funding the WMF head office there, rather than relocating to anywhere else in the world that would in every practical way be run at half the cost has been a jarring reminder. The "Wikimedia Community" has never been the Wikimedia Foundation, and yet the Wikimedia Community is failing when it leaves decisions like Wikipedia Zero to be created and cancelled entirely under the authority of the Wikimedia Foundation.
In the long term, the Foundation does not bear the responsibility for these actions, it is us. It is up to us to find better and more transparent ways to govern the operational business that acts in our name and which left to its own devices will become less transparent every year, and less accountable for why high budget and staff/contractor growth is a "good" thing when money for volunteer activities flatlines.
Link 1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oversized_donation_notice.png
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