Hi Lila,

There are some governance red flags that need your attention before signing up to a N * $100,000,000 endowment plan than will last for a thousand years...

1. The board is not fully elected. It is unlikely in the current environment for a board for an endowment trust to have a majority of elected trustees. This means that choices of when and how the endowment is invested in years to come might be on projects or organizations that would never be approved of by the volunteer community of Wikimedians, and volunteer trustees could be outvoted on every key decision.

2. The WMF struggles to become convincingly transparent or accountable. As a simple to fix example, long term Wikimedians are denied access to reports that the WMF (i.e. you) holds about them; circumstances that would be unlawful in Europe.

3. There is huge potential for a financial scandal. The WMF does not have policies or procedures in place to ensure that investment on this scale can be handled well, year after year. These types of fiscal controls are entirely different from handing and reporting on a $100m cash flow.

4. With an endowment scheme in place, the WMF would be naturally *less* accountable to Wikimedians for its actions each year. There would be less incentive to answer questions, less incentive to established a community consensus for the annual strategy and less incentive to put volunteers at the center of decision making. Similarly there would be less incentive for the WMF to attempt to repair declining numbers of contributors to its on-line projects, or ensure that issues such as gender disparity or on-line harassment are targeted for investment. At the current time I cannot imagine how any system would ensure this was not an inevitable consequence in a volunteer based organization. I have no prior examples of volunteer-centric organizations where this has worked well.

As the CEO, it would be helpful for you to spell out in a public recommendation to your board the good governance practices and core competences that would have to be established and tested before proceeding to put money into a massive long term endowment scheme.

Thanks, Fae

On 30 November 2015 at 17:27, Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org wrote:

Lisa,

Thank you for sharing these exciting news and all the work the team has completed so far. I know I have spoken with many of our community members in the past about this important milestone in protecting our community's work long-term. I am looking forward to hearing more from everyone as we make this real.

Lila