Gerard Meijssen wrote:

Do not be daft. The Wikimedia Foundation centralised its fundraising. It said that it would do a better job. Seen from a central periphery model, it probably does, However seen from the Netherlands it is rather silly.,

Pooh poohing this away with "you can donate time as well" is fine when you are in the centre.

I see a few inter-related questions here that I think must be resolved during the drafting of the next Strategic Plan:

* who should primarily be responsible for collecting donations?

* how large, in terms of staff and budget, should the Wikimedia Foundation be?

* how large, in terms of staff and budget, should individual chapters be?

* should the Wikimedia Foundation continue to be headquartered in San Francisco?

* how do we measure effectiveness/impact of programs by the Wikimedia Foundation and chapters?

I personally don't think the current model of having so many staff in such an expensive area of the world is practical or sustainable. The cost of being in San Francisco, California seems to _far_ outweigh any benefit it's providing. It's been six years since the Wikimedia Foundation moved out to San Francisco and what do we have to show for it? Weekly lunches with Wikia? Ugh. Is $60 million a year really needed? I doubt it, we did just fine with a fraction of that amount. But these questions and their answers all need to be thoroughly explored, in my opinion.

so where should this money come from? the easiest and cheapest is: take the money from the website. coupled with a more flexible, localised spending scheme. so WMCH or WMUK could pay this without headache. but WMF does not want this. out of 60 mio usd income, 52 mio or 86% is spent by the wikimedia foundation, yearly increasing. and most of it is spent in the united states.

A big theme I see here is that we need to hold the Wikimedia Foundation to the same standards as the chapters in terms of funds allocation. There's a process for the Wikimedia Foundation and there's a process for everybody else, and that is unfair and needs to be fixed. I thought we were getting closer to resolving this by having the Wikimedia Foundation budget go through the Funds Dissemination Committee or Annual Plan Grants or similar.

My sense is that currently people are (rightly) deeply offended that the chapters are being held to a much higher standard than the Wikimedia Foundation, particularly in terms of discretionary spending, but also in terms of how programs are measured. The Wikimedia Foundation has made plenty of costly screw-ups but these errors are seemingly completely detached from its budget, unlike chapters. That's not right. I'm hoping we can find concrete and addressable issues to resolve.

MZMcBride