hi Gerard,
you seem to mix two things: one is the FDC, the other is WMF and its funds processing practices. I can only speak for my part in the FDC (but I generally agree that funding scheme and policies require thinking over, and I definitely do not think there should be a "second class citizenship" approach).
I am confident that none of the FDC members wanted to "punish" WMDE. However, we did have very serious concerns about governance, frugality, effectiveness of the programs. Is it your view that we should not reduce our recommendations based on these in any case, when staff or activities reductions would follow?
Similarly, no-one is "punishing" the Dutch chapter. The FDC would only like to encourage more efforts in fundraising (and often just making an effort will be fine, results may be a bit contingent, as we all know), just so that we have more diversification of sources. This is valuable for our movement as a whole, as we should not assume that the current model of funding will certainly stay with us forever (many other organizations, including F/L/OSS ones, face trouble in global fundraising; if there are possibilities to get some local support, it is better to check them when the times are still good).
Thomas:
On Sun, Nov 23, 2014 at 9:34 AM, Thomas Goldammer thogol@gmail.com wrote:
But you wanted a comment on the FDC. The only thing I can say is: To base such a decision on things like "the FDC feels" and "to appear" and "it is likely" (all quotes from their text within a single paragraph) makes me think that they get very poor information and instead of trying to get it richer (for example by talking to *all* relevant people), they make a very poor decision out of it.
I am puzzled that you assume that we based our recommendations on poor information just because of polite wording. Not making definitive, absolute statements about reality does not indicate our uncertainty about data. In previous rounds whenever we felt the need to get more data, we reached out to get it (and sometimes even received it from chapters in time).
However, I have insist that it should be primarily the responsibility of the people preparing projects to make them as detailed as needed. In this respect, I have to really commend and appreciate many of the projects in this round - as a volunteer myself, I really can recognize the amount of work needed to prepare detailed budgets and projects. This is particularly impressive when compared to projects developed by large, "professional" chapters, which at least in theory should be light years ahead in terms of detail and accuracy.
best,
dariusz "pundit"