Michael Snow wrote:
This is not a precedent that the Foundation will start
paying travel
expenses for all meetings, because it is also not a precedent as to
how future meetings will be held. I'm sure that Angela, Anthere, and
Jimbo will have several more meetings during the year, but they will
probably conduct these by telephone or IRC or some other means.
This is not how I understood it. If it were a single meeting, done
because of convenient circumstances, that would not be an enormous
issue. However, the email introducing this issue (the first one with
the subject "Funding for the newly elected Board Members") said:
"...I would like to propose that we cover certain key expenses for our
elected board members relating to their participation in Wikimedia work.
For instance, telephone calls overseas should be covered by the
Foundation, and not the elected representatives. A broadband connection
should be covered by the Foundation as well."
This sounded more like a routine budget than an extraordinary one-time
expense. Several other people also do seem to explicitly favor regular
in-person meetings, with the one in Paris being merely the first of
many, and even an overhead/expenses budget allowed to run as high as 10%
of our total income. Those are different sorts of matters than a single
one-of-a-kind trip.
-Mark