On 25 December 2012 12:49, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote: Your posts are assuming a ridiculous degree of bad faith, where you start from your own confusion and extrapolate downwards. If you try not to do that, you might get results more in accordance with reality. - d.

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 10:12 AM, Zack Exley <zexley(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Zack, is it inaccurate to say that you measured banners on May 11, 2012 which outperformed all of the banners used in last year's campaign? And then a day later you renamed the page with those measurements to "We Need A Breakthrough" and wrote in some detail about how you believed you would not be able to "significantly" outperform last year's fundraising? When the 2012-2013 Annual Plan was drafted, was growth projected at not just a slower rate, but less in absolute dollar terms than was projected and occurred during the previous year? Relative to that slowed budget growth, were even more programs from the Annual Plan and Strategic Plan cut in the "narrowing focus" changes a few months ago, with no wide announcement for community consultation and less than two dozen community members providing feedback, the vast majority of whom were opposed or strongly opposed to the cuts? Since May 11, have the baseline fundraising messages you were testing performed as well or better than the tests of May 11, which outperformed all of last year's banners? And over the past year have pageviews continued to grow at their longstanding exponential rate from 16 billion per month to 21 billion per month? Over the past year, have pageviews on non-mobile browsers also strictly increased, with mobile page views under 2.7 billion per month over the past twelve months? During the past year has the ratio of the Foundation's top executive pay to the pay of junior staff and contractors increased by more than 50%? And during the past year has Foundation employee turnover risen to a record high for at least the past five years on a percentage basis? Has the Foundation ever forgone the most valuable last few days of the year, even when the fundraising goal was already met? (As I believe has happened at least twice in the past five years when non-web donations are considered.) Where do you find that meaning or any suggestion of it in the unanimous resolution of the board of 9 October 2010? https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Wikimedia_fundraising_princ… Has the Board deliberated or voted on any resolution which is compatible with the meaning you suggest? Given the answers to the questions above, how would you characterize your impact this year? Sincerely, James Salsman

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 10:18 AM, James Salsman <jsalsman(a)gmail.com> wrote: James, I'm not going to get too far into the other specifics of this really (for me) perplexing and troubling thread, but I personally wish this piece of your litany would stop. I'm only speaking for myself here, so if others have a wildly different view on compensation at the Wikimedia Foundation, then I'll let them speak up. Having worked in non-profits, from small (a transportation advocacy group in New York City with 25 employees or a non-profit news outlet in San Francisco with 3 employees) to larger ( Doctors Without Borders/MSF in NYC, 130 employees there and thousands worldwide) and now here, I can say the salary is quite competitive when compared to other non-profits. working here June 2011), the salaries have been pegged to be somewhere between similar non-profits and similar tech companies, understanding that our sweet spot is both as a tech company and also as a mission-driven change-the-world type of place. I know we hammer "mission" all the time in our recruiting material and in our fundraising material, but it really is true. I don't think anyone who works here will do well if they are not mission-focused. If I can generalize a lot, we believe that the work we are doing is valuable and that counts for a lot in our consideration of whether or not to work here. That said, I'll re-iterate that the salaries (when compared to similar non-profits) are quite good. In fact, I was surprised by the offer I got when I started: it was $20,000 USD/year higher than I was expecting it to be for a position with no management requirements (this was when I worked on the fundraiser last year, my current position has more responsibility). Similar positions at other Bay Area non-profits had additional responsibility and provided much less pay. The other serious job I was being considered for at the time of my hire here was as director for an entire communications department for a division of the City of San Francisco and it was exactly the same compensation as the position I took here (I mention this to compare to another public-minded sector that I would have been interested in). programmer/developer peers, I understand that other large outfits/corporations in the Bay Area often pay higher for equivalent experience. That being said, I also understand that one is often part of a massive team with a tiny job that is repeated over and over and over. Here, one can have one's hands in all kinds of interesting projects and the exposure is quite a bit more, given how small our teams are and how huge the web property is. We also have excellent benefits. I was recently married and my wife will be joining my health insurance on January 1 because it is more generous than hers (she works at an emergency room in the premier hospital in the area). In addition to a wide variety of options for our health plans, we can opt for Health Spending Accounts, which the Foundation pays into with every paycheck. Given that I am young and (blessedly) my healthcare bills were low last year, I have nearly $5,000 saved up since I started at WMF for use on health-related expenses. With my wife joining my plan, the amount the Foundation pays into my account will now double, so we will very likely be able to cover the entire cost of having our first child by the time we decide to start a family some time next year (and having a kid in the U.S. is expensive business to be sure). That's a tremendous burden off my shoulders when considering my near future and it makes me quite grateful to my employer. I don't live an extravagant life, but I am able to afford a good home in a good neighborhood (Glen Park, San Francisco) with a relatively comfortable commute, which usually takes me 30-35 minutes by bicycle or public transportation. At the end of my first year here, my manager and I went through a formal review process and I ended up getting a raise, so that now with 18 months of experience, I feel my compensation has grown with my experience. If I had stayed in my last position in journalism (granted it's a pretty rough market for journalists), I would be making 40% less than what I make now. That's not to say there aren't really stressful parts of this job and that it doesn't carry its burdens. I don't mean to single you out for what I'm about to say, because it could come from any number of threads on any number of lists, but this is the most current iteration of a type of thread that I find contributes a great deal of stress to my work here. There are a number of assumptions that strike me as bad faith and many of them are targeted at people I work with (some of them I consider friends), so it is very difficult for me to read this. There is so often acrimony and rancor on Wikimedia-l toward people I regularly rely on, that if my job weren't in Communications and I didn't feel like I should keep up to date on threads like this in case there are serious issues I should monitor, I would probably unsubscribe from the list (leaving Internal-l in deep in the recesses of my inbox where I don't see it every day lowered my blood pressure significantly). It's just not fun to feel like you or others you work with are being assailed, often times for reasons that don't make sense to you. In this case, since I started here (working on last year's fundraiser) I've constantly felt the pressure to minimize the impact of the fundraiser by not keeping banners up too long. Last year that pressure was coming from WMF peers and community who expressed their ire about how big/imposing the banners were (on what was then Foundation-l and the staff lists). Then that pressure came in the form of ridicule and mocking on blogs and in the press around the left-orientation of the banners from the 2011 campaign. None of that was fun to read and it was even less enjoyable because I had a hand in a lot of the work that went into those banners/appeals. So when the fundraising team this year was able to raise so much money with a relatively small burden (measured in having banners on Wikipedia X time the banners were up), I believe we were all quite ecstatic. I know that first test day on November 15th, when they brought in nearly $2 million, I went home for the weekend with quite a smile on my face. And that contentment was not for my own work, but for the Foundation as a whole and for the health of the projects. I'll let others get further into the weeds on your list of questions if they like, but having had now nearly a decade of non-profit experience, I think what the fundraising team has accomplished is really remarkable and I'm sure most of their peers at other outfits would love to replicate their success. I guess I should stop now. Cheers and Happy New Year. Matthew -- Matthew Roth Global Communications Manager Wikimedia Foundation +1.415.839.6885 ext 6635 www.wikimediafoundation.org *https://donate.wikimedia.org*

James - I just spent a little more time catching up on the W-l discussions. I see better now the point you're trying to make. I think I just have one thing to add on top of all that's been said by others: Yes, on the fundraising team we really were worried about our ability to make the revenue this year for a whole bunch of reasons. The fundamental problem here is that raising all our revenue at the very end of the year creates much to much uncertainty for us. That's why we're taking some steps to get away from that schedule. In 2013, I'm pretty sure that we won't have so much uncertainty because in various ways we're going to spread fundraising around the whole calendar. Zack On Sun, Jan 6, 2013 at 1:39 PM, Zack Exley <zexley(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: -- Zack Exley Chief Revenue Officer Wikimedia Foundation