Dear Indian Wikimedians,

Why are we making so much noise on the same issues again and again?
We all know the culprits are at WMF who are completely non-transparent.

Even if CIS opens up all their documents and community raises voice, WMF is not going to change their stand.

There is clear discrimination between WMF paid organisation CIS and voluntary organisation WMIN (and the community).

Unless and until Asaf and the GAC gang and FDC gang at WMF gives answers to the Indian wikipedians here, all the concerns raised are going to be a big waste.

I am sure people holding the money power at WMF are going to be completely silent on this. 
Not sure about the view of the board members and advisors from India. Let the community understand their views too. Also, they should convey the concerns raised by the community on this list and various wikipages to WMF and force them to give answers.

Till that time, WMF will be having fun reading all such mail threads and laughing at all the fools in the community who do their voluntary work. 

Oh!!  I just remembered that we have so many Indic language wikipedias that are running and evolving even before the WMF had their presence in India, even after CIS do their work or even after WMIN has no money to give to volunteers.

-zZ

 


On Mon, May 12, 2014 at 5:45 PM, Hari Prasad Nadig <hpnadig@gmail.com> wrote:
Fellow Wikimedians,

As you all know, Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore has sought funding of about 1.8 Crores through the FDC process from Wikimedia Foundation to carry out work on seven local language projects in India that includes Kannada, Telugu among others. [1]
The funds primarily cover the salaries of the people belonging to the CIS-A2K team among other administrative expenses and other expenses as outlined on their proposal page.

The proposal was up for Community review and comments until April 30th and many have recorded their response about it [2]. Several community members have come forward in pointing out that the staff salaries being paid and that being proposed - are quite on the higher side (which is up to 2.4 Lakhs per month per person).

Apart from the concerns on extremely high salaries for Indian norms of the team members of CIS-A2K team, there have been some serious concerns raised about some apparent Conflict of Interest [3] and non-compliance with the local laws (mainly Karnataka Societies act and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act).

However, looks like the proposal has moved forward through the FDC process for funding despite the concerns raised and has gotten through to the next stage.

More concerns have now been raised by several community members on the Staff Assessment discussion page here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Staff_proposal_assessment

I invite you to participate in the discussion and help steer this in the right direction.

[1] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Proposal_form
[2] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Proposal_form
[3] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge/Draft_Work_plan_July_2014_-_June_2015/Budget#Budget_as_per_Expenditure_Heads

Thank you,

_______________________________________________
Wikimediaindia-l mailing list
Wikimediaindia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
To unsubscribe from the list / change mailing preferences visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaindia-l