On Sun, Aug 28, 2011 at 12:01 PM, Theo10011 de10011@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Risker
I would like to ask your opinion on WMF's stewardship of the money. The Foundation has fulfilled its legal obligation as a non-profit but as a community member from english wikipedia, do you feel it has been accountable to you or spent it on worthwhile activities for the community? the reality is WMF raised several times more money than all chapters combined, this year's target is 30% or so more than previous year's. Do you think concentration of all that money with one organization and one entity is a smart idea with a global movement like ours?
In what way is devolving money to many organizations in many countries an *improvement* for accountability, particularly when the standards for transparency and fiscal responsibility are minimal or non-existent? I don't know about Risker, but I don't personally believe the Foundation's money is being misspent. It helps that I know the Foundation is a professional operation, and that it's spending and priorities are disclosed.
More to the point, according to [1] nearly 80% of the total fundraising take was from North America. Participation by chapters in the fundraiser is not, in anyway, an alternative to concentrating money in the WMF.
[1]https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Av5TeXEyGuvpdGRyNDJHS19RZmRqbWl...
Its going to be the end of activities and projects like those, if chapter independence to raise funds is taken away. I completely agreed with Birgitte SB's take on the matter earlier.
Do you want WMF to be the sole and only authority for what the entire movement does? Every project, every little activity in their slice of the world or their online community has to be individually approved and sanctioned by WMF. It's taking away independence of these small groups in deciding what's best for their own part of the world or community, somewhere along the line this is getting conflated into issues of accountability that no one really disagrees with, not the chapters themselves. the only solution because of certain chapters mismanagement, is to make every chapter more or less a branch office of WMF.
Theo
First of all, the chapters can continue to fundraise how they like. There are other methods of fundraising, and many thousands of other non-profit groups that manage to fund themselves without the WMF drive. If your goal is chapter independence, then you should be encouraging chapters to engage in their own fundraising efforts. If they have no source of funding other than the Wikimedia Foundation annual fundraiser, then they are fully yoked to its continuing goodwill and approval.
Second, there is no reason to expect that every little expenditure will have to be approved by the WMF in advance. I haven't seen outlines for requesting grants from the Foundation... have you seen documents that suggest the requirements for receiving a grant will be particularly onerous? Perhaps a chapter will establish a budget, submit the budget to the WMF, and have the whole budget funded. That's more along the lines of what I remember Phoebe and others suggesting.
Nathan