Hi,
I know that I'm still technically on wikivacation, but I'm beginning to feel full of energy again and want to briefly share my thoughts on the matter of bounties and expenses, which has been hotly debated in the last few days.
First of all, I think that Angela should absolutely go to Paris on the foundation budget. This is not an entertainment trip. This is the first opportunity for Jimbo, Anthere and Angela to sit down together and discuss what will happen in the next few months.
Angela went to Berlin from her own money to observe the creation of the German chapter (with me trying to give her a real-time translation of what was going on), and in Paris she would have a similar opportunity to talk to French Wikimedians about the French chapter, both sharing her own experiences and getting new input. This is exactly what board members should do.
Face-to-face meetings are much more productive than IRC simply because real human interaction has a much higher bandwidth than letters in a window on a computer screen. That was obvious at the WOS in Berlin, as I know that some people are still reeling from the whole experience. ;-) Getting Angela to mingle with the French Wikimedia community will benefit the whole project.
Of course I understand the general objections, but calling foundation- related travel expenses "perks" is ridiculous and offensive. Anthere and Angela are giving a large part of their personal lives to this project at the expense of their career and family. Asking them to either fund their own travel expenses or stay at home undermines the whole purpose of the board, which is to keep an eye on the development of *all* of Wikimedia, and for that it is absolutely necessary to actually meet with real human beings.
It would be a shame if we returned to our usual anglocentric way of doing things while Jimmy is still on his missionary trip through Europe. Wikimedia is an international organization, and real world board meetings should take place in different locations to give Wikimedians from the whole world an opportunity to directly talk to the trustees they voted for. Now just because these experiences might actually be enjoyable to the trustees doesn't mean that they aren't valuable to Wikimedia as a whole as well.
I do believe that funds which were not explicitly designated for the purpose of funding foundation organizational activity should not be permanently used for said purpose. So what we should do is clarify on the donations page how much of the money is going to be used for which purpose.
But we will soon get a check over 10,000 euros from the Prix Ars Electronica award, and that money can be designated by the trustees for various purposes, and a certain amount of it (say 2000 euros) should certainly be designated for organization expenses. Temporarily withdrawing the necessary funds from a non-designated pool until we get the check is not a serious issue.
The key here is that everything is transparent and open. The fact that we are seriously debating whether we should give one of our trustees 400 bucks or so to meet with the elected board and discuss the creation of a new chapter shows quite well that we are already much, much more open than virtually every other organization of the same type.
Now, designating money for org. expenses does not preclude us from doing the same for development expenses. As some of you know, the creation of a development bounty system was a core part of my election platform. From communicating with Jimbo and Angela I got the impression that they share the belief that selectively funding specific tasks would be a good idea. I don't know where Anthere stands on the issue.
Again, we could use a certain amount of money from the Prix Ars Electronica funds for a first test drive (I'd suggest $2000). If it turns out that such a bounty system does more harm than good, we can always stop doing it. It is unlikely that a single experiment will have devastating effects, but it is quite possible that it will lead the way toward a complementary development process.
The key question is how to define priority tasks. Because the developers are the benefactors of such a system it is somewhat dangerous to let them alone make the decision, even if that is done through voting. On the other hand, non-developers often do not have the understanding necessary to make these decisions.
I do not yet have a final answer to this question. For the experiment phase, I think appointing one developer and one technically-minded non- developer who have to reach consensus would be a simple solution. I would like to nominate Tim Starling and Daniel Mayer for these two roles. If Tim doesn't want to do it, I would suggest Jens Frank, who has already said that he wants to leave bounty tasks to others, so he would have a certain level of objectivity.
(I'm not nominating myself because I would consider participating in the bounty system, and because I think I'm a little too biased in favor of certain tasks to be an objective judge.)
Essentially, these two people would be in charge of evaluating "grant proposals", which could be made by anyone (developers or users). In the long term, I believe it would make sense to replace them with an appointed or elected committee, which would have to include at least one leading developer representative with the power to veto certain proposals (for being infeasible, impractical, incompatible etc.).
But again, we should experiment with different approaches.
The amount of money for each task should of course be related to its complexity, and be decided by the bounty managers. The bounty would be paid if the developers and the bounty managers agree that the task has been completed.
Regarding Erik Zachte's remark that $100 is not a lot of money, that is of course correct. However, the purpose of this system is not so much to give participating developers a salary, but to provide a little extra incentive for completing tasks which we all agree need to be done, but which have been largely ignored for months. We can always raise the bounties if it turns out that they are ineffective. $15/hour seems like a reasonable starting value. I know Java programmers who work for less than that.
To preempt the inevitable comment that we don't do the same thing for articles or wikibooks, that's true, but that doesn't mean that we never will. If this bounty system works, it is quite possible that we will try a similar approach to fill important gaps in the various Wikimedia projects. As always, it is of key importance that any such process is open and transparent, and that all funds which are used for this purpose have been designated for it from the start.
With all this talk about expenses, we have to keep in mind that Wikimedia will quite possibly be an organization with a multi-million-dollar budget in just a couple of years. I am very confident that we will be able to raise $100K or more through grassroots donations this year. Like the energy of our content contributors flows into many different areas, the money which is given to Wikimedia should flow wherever it can be usefully and productively spent.
A lot of our money will be going into hardware purchases for quite some time, but it would be irresponsible not to carefully consider and explore other ways in which money can help along our mission of educating humanity.
All best,
Erik