A good find, Charles, and as clear an illustration of Sue Gardner's mindset
and agenda as has been expressed anywhere.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_roles/Feedback/Sue_Gardner#Funding
"*In 2010, 12 chapters acted as payments processors for the annual
fundraising campaign in their geography*." - how many of those have
survived now? When you find ten victims all shot in the foot, you start to
suspect that there's a single gunman.
"*Residents of France, Germany and the UK give 10 times as much money to
charity overall as do residents of Finland, Austria and Portugal: should
those chapters therefore be 10x wealthier?*" Only Sue Gardner has leapt to
the conclusion that Chapters will retain income *in proportion to the
donations*. Everybody else who's actually gone through the FDC process
knows that the income from donations distributed via the FDC depends very
strongly on the proposals made for expenditure - and believe me, I know a
bit about that process. Was Sue Gardner unaware of how the FDC works, or
was this simply a convenient strawman that she set up to justify her
actions? WMUK has never, to my knowledge, asked for a percentage of the
donations raised in the UK. It has only ever asked for income to meet its
programmed and agreed expenditure.
There has been no movement in Sue Gardner's anti-chapter position for the
past three years. In 2012 I challenged Gardner to outline the steps needed
for WMUK to take in order to have fund-processing restored, and she ignored
the question. At the time, I said that no matter what WMUK did to address
the concerns that were being raised, there would be no return of fund
processing, *because that was the sole item on her agenda.* Those so-called
concerns were just an excuse to remove fund-processing and I'm sorry to
have been proven right on each count.
--
Rexx
On 21 May 2014 15:30, Charles Matthews
charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.comwrote:
>
> On 21 May 2014 14:39, rexx
rexx@blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
> <snip>
>
>>
>> Taken as a whole, it is clearly part of Sue Gardner's agenda to get rid
>> of chapters - or at least reduce them to impotence. She has never been able
>> to accept that chapters can often do jobs better than a centralised WMF.
>> Despite the hollow words she has uttered over the years, when it comes to
>> practical matters, she makes decisions based on increasing her own little
>> empire at WMF to the detriment of those working for the Wikimedia movement
>> throughout the rest of the world.
>>
>>
wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org
>>
>>
> Well, hardly, as shown by the history (at least for those who have paid
> detailed attention in the past).
>
> By going into the Signpost archive for 2011, and undeleting a redirect
> that had been officiously deleted on meta, I have pulled up Sue's working
> document on this issue from 23 March 2011:
>
>
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_roles/Feedback/Sue_Gardner
>
> Which happens to be timed almost to the day to the end of the time my
> contract ended with WMUK (i.e. the moment when I was paying most attention
> to chapter matters, and was in immediate touch with WMUK's technical
> fundraising efforts, and governance). I had had only had some summary
> version of Sue's thinking, up till just now.
>
> I thought then, and still think now, that WMUK was a good example of what
> she was thinking about.
>
> There is a point about Gift Aid, for sure, but there are a number of ways
> in which the WMF could add about 2% to their annual income.
>
> WMUK has indeed issues with communicating with potential donors; but it
> has had greater issues, IMX, with communicating with members (who
> theoretically run it, though how they were supposed to do that on scanty
> information remains a mystery to me). If the Board hadn't binned the comms
> strategy I'd have a bit more sympathy.
>
> The bottom line for me is that I saw WMUK shooting itself in the foot, at
> least to the point where a biped would have no feet left. So I'd advise not
> also shooting the messenger, but trying to formulate a case for the next
> time round, with the new CEO, that actually deals with the history, and
> what has been done about it.
>
> Charles
>
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>