Jimmy Wales wrote: You wish! How about this corollory of Parkinson. Work expands to occupy the number of people available for doing it. :-) Ec

On 8/11/06, Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Not serious response: race to semi- or fully protect the Bill Gates Foundation and Bill Gates articles, before the vandals accusing them of trying to buy Wikipedia could hit? Serious answer: I have been watching how Bill is donating money; he seems to be very selective and very engaged in the decision process of who to give money to, but conversely isn't (that I can recall) generally insisting on becoming engaged in the management of organizations he is funding. That is not to minimize the question - if we generalize, if Joe Random Billionare comes to the WMF with a million dollar donation check and asks for a board seat in return, it's still a completely valid policy question. And could well be a realistic problem. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

Let me clarify, that did not say what I wanted it to say. Jimmy Wales wrote: In the early days of Wikipedia, I worried a lot about how we might survive. It seemed to me that if someone came and offered $1 million, then of course we would offer them a seat on the board. Nowadays, we are strong, we are strong because we have broad support from the general public and from ourselves, our own community. We do not fear about surviving. Therefore, to give up any of our independence for $1 million would be a bad decision. I did not mean to imply that $1 million is not a lot of money. Obviously it is. :) But our principles are worth more. --Jimbo

If it comes to the point in this until now hypothetical situation that to get a lot of money the independence of the WMF is affected by selling a place on the board then advertisement should be reconsidered. Myspace.com , Alexa ranking global the 7th place has made a deal with google for advertisement for the amount of at least 900 million dollar for 3 years. $ 900.000.000. That is a lot. Wikipedia is now on the 16th place. I have no idea how much money the WMF could get form a deal with google or yahoo, even if it where a limited amount of adds and not (to) annoying. But it can not be anything other then a very impressive large pile of money. The Wikimedia projects are ad free. That is fantastic. I wonder on what ranking place the next ad free website is listed. The wikimedia websites are probably unique in that aspect. It could have been something form a Seince Fiction movie about a paralleluniversum where there are not ads on the internet. Nevertheless it is so that Wikimedia has a gold mine. The gold is not used out of principle. Instead of living in a castle the WMF lives in very modest house but can manage by donations of visitors. And things are going better. There is some money in the savings account. There are no loans to pay off. There is hope to get some new money without strings on. (grands) And the WMF is still independent. If very large amounts of money could go to the WMF but by accepting so the WMF would lose part of its independence then I believe putting pride aside and selling some ads is much better then selling your soul. Ofcource this is all hypothetical. There is (so far I know) no offer from Bill Gates or similar to give a large truck load of money with a end-user-agreement attached to it. -- Contact: walter AT wikizine DOT org Wikizine.org - news for and about the Wikimedia community

Michael R. Irwin wrote: This is an insult to the board. --Jimbo

Jeff V. Merkey wrote: Check the email archives for a few months prior to the date of the final foundation paperwork. You will find emails messages self allegedly from Jimbo's email accounts stating the intent to stack the Board and discussing specifics of how he proceeded to do so. The perception is neither inaccurate nor misleading. Two more elected rather than Jimbo appointed seats will permanently alter reality according to the bylaws. Whether perceptions, misceptions or urban legends change depends of course upon individual and corporate memories and the long term stability and reliability of our community's electronic records. My empirical observations were personal and not based upon glib dismissal of alleged hearsay from apparently distrusted sources. Perhaps you should check privately with Anthere. As I recall she was participating frequently on the applicable list and stood for election in the formation of the first Board. Did Jimbo really stack the Board or merely state publicly he was going to and proceed to write it unilaterally (perhaps with some assistance from nonexistent cabals or personal advisors) into the original foundation charter? A fact is an insult to nobody unless they perceive it so. If the allegedly stacked Board Members or appointed trustees do not feel the Board was stacked; perhaps they should feel insulted that Jimbo announced on the mailing publicly that he felt it was comfortably designed to be stacked. If you wish the specific URLs and you wish me to do your research for you then drop me a data request at my Wikiversity talk page. My time kibitzing here is almost over. We have active URLs with fine print defining another prototyping period. Fun stuff. Let's all do some work and then cancel again for lack of discouraged participation. Sincerely, Michael R. Irwin

George Herbert wrote: I don't think that this speculation about various individuals gets us anywhere. That's fair enough, but it doesn't require a Board seat. To glorify his ego? There is some comfort to being in a position where we can say "no" to these offers when they have strings attached. Absolutely. Ec

Anthere wrote: First, say, "Thank you." Second, tell him that Wikipedia is not for sale. One of our speakers mentioned several volunteer projects that ended up absorbed by a for-profit company. IMDB by Amazon, etc. My greatest anxiety about the project is that the many hours of dedication and effort put in by thousands of volunteers would in the end serve only to enrich a little corner of corporate America. Of the present Board members I see you as the one most likely to have the courage to stand up against such temptation. In my view the primary responsibility of the Board should be to insure not only that it won't happen, but that it can't happen. The idea of an advisory board is good. The members of that board will need to keep in mind that they only act in an advisory role without any direct decision making powers. Their advice will not be binding, but if that advice is too frequently at odds with our principles then maybe we have the wrong people appointed to that board. The Board needs to get its operational house in order. Much of what we are doing, and many of our most profound goals bring us into a broad uncharted sea with many legal and other uncertainties. We won't be able to cope with that if we don't have clearly established decision making processes. If our representatives make deals they need to feel confident that their decisions are fully consistent with the principles and policies that the Board has adopted. They should never be put in a position where when they report to the Board they must face the doubts and hesitancy of a Board that is afraid to think big, or is unable to evaluate the importance of an issue. Ec

Hoi, There is a big difference between how "it should" and "how it is". For all kinds of reasons, there is a big NEED and EXPECTATION that a WMF board member spends a lot of time on the organisational matters of the board. Not only is there the need to communicate in order to come to the strategy of the foundation, it is also expected that board members are part of committees and play an active part in these. I have heard horror stories where board members were denied access to information of "committees" and it is therefore understandable that these invisible organisational units are considered to operate in stealth mode. At this moment the organisation is very much in flux. Not only has Angela decided to quit, Brad is finding his way in the murky dealings of the WMF organisation, the committees pronounce very much that they are only starting to get going. To top it off, many of the current people who are up for election for the board are manifestly unsuited to the task because of their narrow minded platform. When it is said that a board member only needs to spend "only" a few hours a week on this function, the reality is very much ignored. By expressing that this "should be the case" and by not indicating what needs to be done to make this happen, I am afraid that false expectations are raised. At this time, being a board member seems to be the kind of activity that eats up all the time that you can throw at it. It has relatively little to do with any one project and as Anthere says, it is hard work for little recognition. I wish all future board members well, but I hope that none are chosen because of their ideas on how the English Wikipedia can be improved. They do not understand what is needed. Thanks, GerardM On 8/12/06, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote:

On 8/13/06, Anthony <wikilegal(a)inbox.org> wrote: Someone was hired for this but she quit already. I don't know the exact details of why she left. I believe Brad was tasked with finding a replacement. Angela.

Amgine wrote: I do not know for this one, but I understood that Susy would not work on OTRS anyway. If the new one is only planned to answer the phone, that does not help at all with the OTRS issue and does not answer the request for help made in the resolution mentionned above. Ant

Ray Saintonge wrote: Does someone handling e-mail and press inquiries actually have to be in St. Pete? Most of our labor is distributed; for technical staff, we have one guy on site part-time to physically manhandle the machines and everybody else is thousands of miles away. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Brad Patrick wrote: Even someone answering the officenumber doesn't have to be in the office. Together with my father and a friend we have started a voip telephony company last year. This year we decided to also do retailtraffic and we are currently testing with numbers that for instance are Dutch local numbers but can be teminated (through voip) anywhere in the world. This can be done with numbers in many countries now. So people can call you on a local number but you can be anywhere in the world as long as your comp is on. As far as I know the same is possible with US numbers. Waerth

On 8/13/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: Remote workers could result in you haveing assets within the juristiction of legal systems less friendly than the US. -- geni

Gregory Maxwell wrote: IMHPOV we should have people in the office and not scattered around the globe. I was just pointing out that there are alternatives possible as I surmised from the reaction of Brad that he wasn't aware of this possibility. Waerth

Walter van Kalken wrote: It already happens with customer service and help lines. There are still some mundane tasks that cannot be done well at a distance. Bookkeeping would be a prime example of this. That person needs direct access to the paperwork to verify that what is recorded matches the invoices, or that the right amount is paid for bills. A person could phone someone to check data, but that involves two people's time when it would be easier just to walk across the room to the filing cabinet. It's also difficult to give supervision and direction from a distance. If the person suddenly quits (as happened in St. Petes) time could be wasted just trying to sort out what happened or getting all the paperwork back so that you can send it to a different person in yet another city. Ec

On Sat, Aug 12, 2006 at 09:06:35PM -0400, Brad Patrick wrote: Does this mean we'll finally be able to run wikimedia out of a trust fund? I'd be more interested in being around for 100 years than having a billion dollars to play with, however tempting the latter might seem at first blush. Running as lean as possible and not _depending_ on too much income is another way to be sure we'll still be around in 2106. We can't count on always having goodwill. read you soon, Kim Bruning -- [Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment] gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key FEF9DD72 5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A 01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72

Anthony wrote: Agreed. But I fear we are not yet ready for that. To provide a specific outline as to what Ya. Good question. This might be relevant information for future members :-) I have seriously reduced my time for WMF since holidays (for the kids) started. Simply because they are at home :-) I have on average from 2 to 4 speaking engagements or collaboration meeting per month (I refuse some). A speaking engagement may take one full day (rarely), usually 2 days, sometimes more. Of course, most speaking engagements require preparation time (in particular if you do not wish to simply forever repeat the same things :-)). I could very naturally cut down on these, but the fact is there are some collaborations I wish we develop (in particular related to Africa, wikijunior etc), so I focus most of my presentations on these topics. Except when I am specifically asked, I generally try to let most conferences in France to french editors. I removed my phone number in most places, so phone calls are finally dropping. Frankly, journalists calls generally are better answered. People screaming they are gonna sue us as well (I can smooth the issue on the phone). I think it is relevant I answer the phone for french-speaking requests. Nicolas Weeger, the french chapter chair also get a lot of them. It makes no sense to redirect these phone calls to Florida where no one speaks french. Future board member from english speaking countries will not have to do that, but if they are non english, they will likely have interviews, complains etc. Frequence for interviews is variable. Low times are 0 per week. High times may be a couple per day. I have hardly done any OTRS thing in the past 3 weeks (Wikimania). I am the only board member left looking a bit at it. A couple of people are thank god helping. A new person was hired to help with the phone in Florida (apparently, she was not planned to help on OTRS). She resigned last week (during Wikimania). So, there is no employee on OTRS. Someone to take care of this will be very valuable help. I intend to remind Brad about this need. I assume we could possibly hire part time someone from our community to give a hand with this. By burst of time, I give some time to the special project committee (the only committee I chose to belong to). I followed up several projects over there and I was the one who made Nokia be the Wikimania sponsor. I am the chair of that committee for now. In the past weeks, I have to review the InstantCommons proposal and handle some of it with Oscar (the grant request). We also approved hosting the WiktionaryZ. There are the collaboration proposals, or business proposals to review. The big decisions all are the objects of resolutions I proposed to the board (and had to push them to vote on). I also am the one writing the committee report to the board (Angela may not have access to the wiki, all relevant topics were reported to the board and all decisions were presented to the board). This takes time. And then, there is everything else. From hiring Brad to approving last technical purchase. Getting informed about the last potential serious legal concern, to complaining of lack of information from another committee. Asking financial or audit information to Michael and trying to settle down the composition of the Fundraising committee. Considering whether I should pay myself the domain names renewal when Soufron credit card is failing :-) Trying to convince Brad that the polish chapter needs a logo agreement. And thinking of the potential flaws of our organisation, which could lead to damage for our mission. Whatever. This takes a lot of time. Mostly, it is a huge mass of information or request flowing all the time. Whether you want it or not, you get it. What would be fabulous would be to avoid getting all that information, but only summaries. Or reports about what we need to know. This is not how things are really working right now. We are flooded with information all the time. Each time I leave home for a couple of days, I am snowed under emails. Should we have all this ? Probably not. A lot should be Brad or other staff people job. A lot could be done by others. Board members should also get more specialised. But hell; we are not a professional organisation. We are learning :-) In the case of Ant she has stated on the mailing Not to take care of OTRS. There is not employee yet as of today (and yes, the resolution was taken in may. No comment). ... To voluntarily stop doing some of the stuff they do. If everything goes on fine, they had no reason to do it before If things really fail, then it might be sufficient to prove there is a problem to fix