Hello everyone again.
Thank you those of you who replied to me either on this thread or privately. I've already replied to them off-list where appropriate.
I apologise that my intentionally harsh words in the original mail and subsequent public replies may have been construed as bad-faith personal attacks against certain members of WMF staff and the FDC. In particular, I recognise that my anecdotal use of the words "foul play" may have hurt people's feelings; I apologise and retract this remark. I have already filed a formal complaint in my personal capacity to the FDC ombudsmen. I'm determined to step away from Wikimedia administration matters, so I won't comment any more on this matter.
Thanks for reading and I'm glad to see some positive suggestions coming out of this thread. I urge the WMF and FDC to implement the proposed supportive measures for local volunteers.
Deryck
On 28 April 2013 23:52, Deryck Chan deryckchan@wikimedia.hk wrote:
Dear trusty Wikimedians,
The FDC decisions are out on Sunday. Despite my desperate attempts to assist WMHK's board to keep up with deadlines and comply with seemingly endless requests from WMF grantmaking and FDC support staff, we received an overwhelmingly negative assessment which resulted in a complete rejection of our FDC proposal.
At this point, I believe it's an appropriate time for me to announce my resignation and retirement from all my official Wikimedia roles - as Administrative Assistant and WCA Council Member of WMHK. I will carry out my remaining duties as a member of Wikimania 2013 local team.
My experience with the FDC process, and the outcome of it, has convinced me that my continued involvement will simply be a waste of my own time, and of little benefit to WMHK and the Wikimedia movement as a whole.
My experience with the FDC process has confirmed my ultimate scepticism about the WMF's direction of development. WMF has become so conservative with its strategies and so led into "mainstream" charity bureaucracy that it is no longer tending to the needs of the wider Wikimedia movement.
My experience with the FDC process has shown me that WMF is expecting fully professional deliverables which require full-time professional staff to deliver, from organisations run by volunteers who are running Wikimedia chapters not because they're charity experts, but because they love Wikimedia.
My experience with the FDC process has demonstrated to me that WMF is totally willing to perpetuate the hen-and-egg problem of the lack of staff manpower and watch promising initiatives dwindle into oblivion.
WMHK isn't even a new chapter. We've been incorporated and recognised by WMF since 2007. Our hen-and-egg problem isn't new either. We've been vocal about the fact that our volunteer force is exhausted, and can't do any better without funding for paid staff and an office since 2010. Our request for office funding was rejected. The year after, our request to become a payment-processing chapter was rejected. The year after, we've got Wikimania (perhaps because WMF fortunately doesn't have too much to do with the bidding process), which gave us hope that we might finally be helped to professionalise. But it came to nothing - this very week our FDC request was rejected.
And the reason? Every time the response from WMF was, effectively, we aren't good enough therefore we won't get help to do any better. We don't have professional staff to help us comply with the endless and ever-changing professional reporting criteria, therefore we can't be trusted to hire the staff to do precisely that.
My dear friends and trusty Wikimedians, do you now understand the irony and the frustration?
Wikimedia didn't start off as a traditional charity. It is precisely because of how revolutionary our mission and culture are, that we as a movement have reached where we are today. A few movement entities, particularly the WMF, managed to expand and take on the skin of a much more traditional charity. But most of us are still youthful Wikimedia enthusiasts who are well-versed with Wikimedia culture, but not with charity governance. Imposing a professional standard upon a movement entity as a prerequisite of giving it help to professionalise, is like judging toddlers by their full marathon times.
Is this what we want Wikimedia to become? To turn from a revolutionary idea to a charity so conservative that it would rather perpetuate a chicken-and-egg problem than support long-awaited growth? I threw in days and days of effort in the last few years, often at the peril of my degree studies, with the wishful thinking that one day the help will come to let WMHK and all the other small but well-established chapters professionalise.
I was wrong.
With the FDC process hammering the final nail into my scepticism about where WMF and the movement is heading, I figured that with a degree in environmental engineering from Cambridge my life will be much better spent helping other worthy causes than wasting days on Wikimedia administration work only to have them go unappreciated time and time again.
But I feel that it is necessary for me to leave a parting message to my fellow Wikimedians, a stern warning about where I see our movement heading. I feel that we're losing our character and losing our appreciation for volunteers, in particular the limitations of volunteer effort.
I leave you all with a final thought from Dan Pallotta: charitable efforts will never grow if we continue to be so adverse about "overheads" and staffing. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pallotta_the_way_we_think_about_charity_is_dead...
With Wiki-Love, Deryck
PS. I wish there was an appropriate private mailing list for me to send this to. Unfortunately, most of the important WMF stakeholders aren't subscribed to internal-l, and most veteran chapters folks know what I want to say already. I just hope that trolls wouldn't blow this out of proportion. Or perhaps I do want this to be blown out of proportion so that my voice will actually be heard. Thanks for reading.