Thank you Garfield for your quick reply - and with welcome news in it. I am heartened to see your clarification/confirmation that this project is specifically intending to re-use existing documentation and not to increase the "red tape" or compliance-requirements of chapters. Also, as mentioned in my first email, I would like to reiterate my support for the idea that (especially smaller/newer) chapters have a dedicated contact person. This will be very helpful for many.
On the other note I raised, could you/anyone also address whether the chapters had prior-awareness of this new project's existence or planned creation before this email announcement?
On Friday, 31 October 2014, Garfield Byrd gbyrd@wikimedia.org wrote:
Liam:
My apologies for the language you noted, it was not our intent to, even inadvertently, to degrade anyone. We fully appreciate the abilities of our community and I know from my meetings with members of our community how smart and engaged they are in a variety of issues impacting the Wikimedia movement.
I want to clarify that these Fellows are not auditors. They will be working from data as presented by the movement entities. The project has been designed so that the fellows will be using existing data provided by movement entities and the Fellows will only be reaching out to movement entities with clarifying questions. So there should be no material increase in staff/volunteer time to provide information for this project. If this not the case, please let me know.
Best regards,
Garfield
On Thu, Oct 30, 2014 at 11:10 AM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt@gmail.com javascript:;> wrote:
Interesting development. Probably a very good idea for transparency and good use of the movement's money, and consistency of reporting to make things comparable is a great goal. I especially think that for smaller chapters there is lots of value in having a dedicated contact person!
But I find the self-description of the Fellows as "an elite group of
global
operatives"[1] a bit degrading to the rest of us...
I presume it's taken a fair while to recruit the team and scope the
project
too (I see one linkedin profile which says they've been working already
for
two months[3]). So, I wonder - did the Chapters who have been allocated
to
each of these new auditors[2] have any notice that this new process was being created before it was announced today - so they were able to make
any
other time-commitments without being surprised by a new layer of
paperwork?
Also, I presume that the increased amount of staff/volunteer time needed
to
comply with new paperwork will be offset by streamlining this with other WMF-compliance paperwork?
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement-wide_Financial_Report#Who_We_Are
[3] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/seyi-olukoya/59/b09/a7
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