Daniel Mayer wrote:
Volunteering time to create articles is one thing, paying travel expenses for board members to attend meetings is very different. They are not comparable and also note that the board members would *not* be paid for their time to attend the meetings, they would be reimbursed for any direct expenses they paid to travel to and stay at the meeting site for the duration for the meeting. They would *still* be volunteers and would *not* be making any profit - just like the rest of us.
I don't see it as very different. Many Wikipedians have spent their personal money in contributing to quality articles, including buying out-of-copyright books from eBay in order to scan in images, to name just one example. We don't have plans to reimburse people for this expense.
Besides, if we *were* going to start reimbursing people, Jimbo would be the obvious person to start with. I think of the five trustees, he has by far incurred the most personal expenses as a result of this project. The next-most of the five board members would probably be the other two initially-appointed board members, who I believe are co-owners of Bomis, which has incurred significant expenses in the running of Wikipedia (and continues to not be reimbursed by the Foundation for the cost of its bandwidth).
There are plenty of things that would be nice, but none of which I think the Foundation's money should go to. For example, developers may well be able to coordinate faster if they all flew to one location for a weekend to draw up plans in person, and then flew to the colocation facility to set up new machines in person rather than relying on ssh and occasional phone calls for someone to reboot the machine locally. But they get by without this luxury.
-Mark