On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 7:24 AM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:
Anne, I have mentioned several times in the past few days here on this
list
Sue Gardner's 2008 email suggesting that the WMF enter into an "umbrella relationship/agreement" or "business deal" with Google. In case you
missed
it, here is the link again:
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/sandberg.pdf
Scroll to the very end of the document to see the email in question. I am still interested in learning what the results of that effort were.
Nothing other than establishing some mutual points of contact, as far as I know. [...]
Thanks for your replies, Erik, and this overview.
We did continue to cultivate the relationship with Google and continued to ask for support, and eventually Google made a one-time $2M donation. [1] As you know, Google also was one of the early supporters of Wikidata [2], and Sergey Brin's family foundation has also given to WMF in the past. [3] This was all unambiguously good for Wikimedia, and is all public knowledge.
The gift from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation is of a little bit of interest, because its public announcement[3][5] came a mere three days after the Wikimedia Foundation said[9] it would join Google and other Internet giants in their protest against the proposed SOPA/PIPA legislation – whose implementation would have cost those companies *a lot* of money.
Today, we take it for granted that the Wikimedia Foundation is politically active. But at the time, in 2011, many editors accustomed to practising NPOV in their writing still assumed that the Wikimedia Foundation, as an institution, would and should practise the same neutrality.
It always seemed likely to me that the $500,000 Brin Wojcicki Foundation gift was related to the Wikimedia Foundation's support, especially as Wojcicki, along with Jimmy Wales, was also on the board of Creative Commons, where these matters were also being discussed.
At the time, Google critic Scott Cleland wrote[6], "Google led, orchestrated, politically-framed and set the political tone for much of the Web’s opposition to pending anti-piracy legislation, SOPA/PIPA, because rule of law and effective enforcement of property rights online represent a clear and present danger to Google’s anti-property-rights mission, open philosophy, business model, innovation approach, competitive strategy, and culture."
It left a little bit of a sour taste, because the Wikimedia Foundation seemed to me to have loaded the dice in its communications to the community, painting the consequences of the proposed legislation in the most garish and alarming colours – implying that users might become criminally liable for posting fair-use materials on Wikipedia,[9] that SOPA threatened the survival of Wikipedia, etc. – in order to maximise community support for the blackout.
WMF staffer Tim Starling later posted here on this list what seemed to me a very cogent critique of some of the things the WMF did and didn't say to the community.[7]
This lobbying partnership with Google has continued in the years since then, with Jimmy Wales more recently joining Google's Advisory Council[8] to campaign against European "right to be forgotten" legislation (another law imposing cost burdens on Google).
One may agree with Google's political positions, for quite different and independent reasons, but the fact that money changed hands to my mind tainted the effort.
Andreas
Beyond those donations, we've generally had an informal relationship with changing points of contact over the years. WMF has given tech talks at Google, for example, or our point of contact might help us get some passes for the I/O conference. Part of the mandate of the partnerships hire WMF made last year was to bring more of a systematic approach to these relationships, and as the org stabilizes it might be good to seek a broad conversation as to what that ideally should look like in terms of transparency, lines we shall not cross, etc.
Generally speaking, when WMF did enter into significant business relationships, these are a matter of the public record in press releases and such: Yahoo back in 2005, Kaltura, PediaPress, Orange, the various WP Zero operators, some data center partners, etc. The Apple dictionary integration Brion mentions in [4] is an exception to the rule; contrary to Brion's recollection it actually predates even Sue Gardner and, as far as I know, was not announced at the time.
Erik
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Foundation_ann... [2] https://www.wikimedia.de/wiki/Pressemitteilungen/PM_3_12_Wikidata_EN [3] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Brin_Wojcicki_Foundation... [4] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/082741.html
[5] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/18/brin-and-wojcicki-give-500000-to-ch...
[6] http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottcleland/2012/01/24/the-real-reasons-google-... [7] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-July/121092.html [8] https://www.google.com/advisorycouncil/ [9] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/11/15/wikimedia-supports-american-censorship-...