The discussion about a budget line item being appropriate in one context and not in the next has been very interesting to me. And especially in this case as it involves the provision of food, which is one of the most deeply held cultural norms in many communities.
Frugality is certainly a consideration for the WMF. I can say with my staff hat on that while we do get generous grants from foundations to help support your amazing work, everyone here also thinks about the $5 that was donated by a student and feels a responsibility to that student.
However the word and concept of "frugality" differs significantly across cultures. In my experience with many non-Western cultures, asking people to bring lunch from home or spend their own money for it would not only exclude participation, it would insult people. If the purpose is to encourage participation and commitment to a newly forming organization, it seems it would be very important not to insult people.
In many cultures I've worked in, if you didn't bring cigarettes, you couldn't get a goat to listen to you. These may seem to be extreme cases, but I'm thinking about WMF and the Wikimedia movement as truly global. So I don't think we should dismiss this concept just because currently we aren't working with any people who require cigarettes before thinking about editing a Wikipedia.
I have no idea what the cultural norms for providing food at initial meetings are in Portugal or many other places. I just add my crumb to the discussion as a reminder that if we are wearing limited cultural lenses when we create policy, it will forever limit us to working within communities who are interested and able to live within those restrictions.
Jennifer Riggs
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Today's Topics:
- Re: Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 (Thomas Dalton)
- Re: Use of moderation (Austin Hair)
- Re: Do we have a complete set of WMF projects? (Mike.lifeguard)
- Re: Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 (Pharos)
- Re: Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 (Thomas Dalton)
- Re: Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 (Thomas Dalton)
- Re: Do we have a complete set of WMF projects? (David Gerard)
- Re: Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 (Chad)
- Re: Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 (Thomas Dalton)
- Re: Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 (Gerard Meijssen)
- Re: Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 (Thomas Dalton)
Message: 1 Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:41:07 +0100 From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: a4359dff0909101041q3d6d869foe02cb48c012cbcd7@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
2009/9/10 Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org:
Hi Thomas!
Sorry to top-post, and to be late replying. I believe that all 26 proposals are up now on the meta page. Let me know if you can't find it, and I can post the link tonight when I'm back on my laptop.
The proposals are up, but not the details of which were accepted and which weren't. It would be useful to have that information when considering what to request funding for in future.
Message: 2 Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:06:20 -0500 From: Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Use of moderation To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: e2a50e360909101106m6cc6a0eao51f41424f86c20db@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 12:15 AM, Henning Schlottmann h.schlottmann@gmx.net wrote:
Austin Hair wrote:
My ideal, personally, is something more like nntp--and while I'm perfectly happy to turn over the list to some other technology, I don't know that this is the magic solution, and I agree with Tim that it risks killing what good we do have with the existing methods.
I'm reading and posting to the list using nntp. foundation-l is distributed by gmane.org as the (pseudo) newsgroup news:gemane.org.wikimedia.foundation on the server news.gmane.org along with all the other Wikimedia mailing lists and it is by far the most comfortable way to read the list.
Yes, but as gmane is simply a mail -> news gateway, the fundamental operation of the list remains the same. The content management issues aren't affected.
Austin
Message: 3 Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:18:50 -0300 From: "Mike.lifeguard" mike.lifeguard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Do we have a complete set of WMF projects? To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 4AA9511A.2090902@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
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Brion Vibber wrote:
IMO we need to do that for the projects we already have before we take on new obligations!
We still have very poor software support for:...
Thanks Brion, it is good to know that the tech team is aware of these issues and will be expending energy to improve how the software supports the non-Wikipedia projects. I'm looking forward in particular to seeing how the grant money will be spent for improving Commons' software, and what ideas may come about for giving Wikibooks some in-software structure.
- -Mike
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Message: 4 Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:27:07 -0400 From: Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: ddc4b4860909101227s1701f247ifc8991c82eb939dc@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 1:41 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/9/10 Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org:
Hi Thomas!
Sorry to top-post, and to be late replying. I believe that all 26 proposals are up now on the meta page. Let me know if you can't find it, and I can post the link tonight when I'm back on my laptop.
The proposals are up, but not the details of which were accepted and which weren't. It would be useful to have that information when considering what to request funding for in future.
There are 21 accepted proposals listed on this page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/Reporting_Guida...
Since 26 were accepted in total, I guess this list in not quite complete yet; but still it makes for very useful reading.
Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos) Wikimedia NYC-personal view
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Message: 5 Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:40:32 +0100 From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: a4359dff0909101240w76c3cbf8h152859ce4ee7348e@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
2009/9/10 Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com:
There are 21 accepted proposals listed on this page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/Reporting_Guida...
Ah, well found! I didn't think to check that page - the title doesn't suggest it would contain such info.
Since 26 were accepted in total, I guess this list in not quite complete yet; but still it makes for very useful reading.
They may still be waiting to hear back from the other chapters.
Message: 6 Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:53:49 +0100 From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: a4359dff0909101253w60b72858x4e19ed4ba35b4a60@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
2009/9/10 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/9/10 Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com:
There are 21 accepted proposals listed on this page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/Reporting_Guida...
Ah, well found! I didn't think to check that page - the title doesn't suggest it would contain such info.
I must say, I am amazed that this was approved:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/WM_PT/Start-up
WMUK managed to get set up without paying for any meals and all meetings have taken place in pubs or rooms we've got hold of for free. Paying nearly $3,500 for that out of charitable donations is patently ridiculous.
Message: 7 Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:00:16 +0100 From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Do we have a complete set of WMF projects? To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: fbad4e140909101300i5f3a3289vdbd8acded92d8a26@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
2009/9/10 Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org:
IMO we need to do that for the projects we already have before we take on new obligations!
Oh yesss.
We still have very poor software support for:
- Commons -- We need a sane upload and post-upload workflow (eg review
and deletion), and a clean system for handling structured metadata (descriptions, authorship, licence info). Some of this is being worked on now with Michael Dale's video & media work, and the Ford Foundation grant will let us put more resources into the workflow & metadata side, so this is the one I worry the least about. :)
Categories as tags with arbitrary Boolean queries? Huh? Huh? Huh?
- d.
Message: 8 Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:02:22 -0400 From: Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 5924f50a0909101302tb9ec3ffv51050b18ca4b6a0b@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 3:53 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/9/10 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/9/10 Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com:
There are 21 accepted proposals listed on this page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/Reporting_Guida...
Ah, well found! I didn't think to check that page - the title doesn't suggest it would contain such info.
I must say, I am amazed that this was approved:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/WM_PT/Start-up
WMUK managed to get set up without paying for any meals and all meetings have taken place in pubs or rooms we've got hold of for free. Paying nearly $3,500 for that out of charitable donations is patently ridiculous.
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I hadn't read that either. Ridiculous, I agree. I doubt people are donating to the WMF for them to send the money to the Portuguese chapter for their lunches.
The only part of that budget that makes sense to me is the legal fees, and they're certainly not a back-breaking amount either.
-Chad
Message: 9 Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:04:40 +0100 From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: a4359dff0909101304s242951b6vf4b45625a2e28d4@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
2009/9/10 Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com:
I hadn't read that either. Ridiculous, I agree. I doubt people are donating to the WMF for them to send the money to the Portuguese chapter for their lunches.
The only part of that budget that makes sense to me is the legal fees, and they're certainly not a back-breaking amount either.
I have no objection, in principle, to travel and admin costs - WMUK paid for them out of our first membership fees. We didn't travel that much, though - I think there was one face-to-face meeting to actually sign things, everything else was done online.
Message: 10 Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 22:12:22 +0200 From: Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 41a006820909101312m59574349nef27e6bc3c6cbe0e@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Hoi, I think it is not reasonable to judge others by how you do things. Please remember that there are different cultures where things are done in different ways. I am sure there are things in the history of the WMUK that you do not wish onto others.. Everyone has to deal with the local environment. This is one reason why we have different chapters ... Thanks, GerardM
2009/9/10 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com
2009/9/10 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/9/10 Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com:
There are 21 accepted proposals listed on this page:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/Reporting_Guida...
Ah, well found! I didn't think to check that page - the title doesn't suggest it would contain such info.
I must say, I am amazed that this was approved:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants/WM_PT/Start-up
WMUK managed to get set up without paying for any meals and all meetings have taken place in pubs or rooms we've got hold of for free. Paying nearly $3,500 for that out of charitable donations is patently ridiculous.
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Message: 11 Date: Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:21:07 +0100 From: Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: a4359dff0909101321i684d792cv888608a70a5b2205@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
2009/9/10 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, I think it is not reasonable to judge others by how you do things. Please remember that there are different cultures where things are done in different ways. I am sure there are things in the history of the WMUK that you do not wish onto others.. Everyone has to deal with the local environment. This is one reason why we have different chapters ...
Nonsense. If British Wikimedians can afford their own food, so can Portuguese Wikimedians. They can bring a packed lunch from home if they want - they would be eating anyway.
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End of foundation-l Digest, Vol 66, Issue 38