Fantasy wrote: Er, ah, I just volunteered to be treasurer if nobody else who was qualified/motivated didn't want the position. Nothing official at all at this point. We can't give out that info if the people who are donating don't want us to release their names. Currently there is no way for people to indicate whether or not they want their donation to be anonymous, but I'm sure we could post periodic PDFs with the dates and amounts (no names). He's the guy that pays the bills and makes all this happen (over a quarter million US bucks and counting last time I checked). What more is needed than that? So far the Foundation is just Jimbo and the reason you should trust him is because he has never given any reason not to be trusted while being in a position that could cause the end of the project on a simple whim (or to bastardize the concept by making it commercial; have you ever seen an add on Wikipedia?). He is now legally subordinate to the Foundation but as I said he is the Foundation so far. I still trust him completely though. Why? The Wikimedia Foundation /is/ the German organization too and we are far more stronger by pooling our resources instead of fragmenting them. Slow down - we still need to set the darn thing up. Yes, it legally exists but a great deal of work still has to be done by the community to make the Wikimedia Foundation actually become more than just Jimbo. And Euros, Yen, Canadian dollars and Pounds just so that people outside the US can get a grasp on what the numbers actually mean (even though the actual bank account will only have US dollars in it). As I said there is currently no way for people to indicate all this info. IMO, all we really should be worried about (especially at first) is pure numbers and dates, not who contributed how much. The "who" has to be kept confidential at least until we get a way for people to indicate that they wouldn't mind having this info made public. Even then it should be a community decision on whether or not to make the 'who' info easily available; last thing we need is for people to think that the size of their donations somehow gives them more power in our community. Merit and a good track record should still be the number one criteria we consider for that type of thing. For now at least, this info will have to be placed on a page on meta. I think I heard that we have received about US$1,000 in donations so far and that Jimbo put a couple thousand in the account when he opened it. IIRC from skimming Wikitech-l, what we have right now in funds is almost what we need to upgrade our current servers, but there has been some talk about also buying a US$6,000 server in a few months (giving us a three server set-up). That's why a mention of the Foundation and our fundraising drive is an important thing to mention in the press release. -- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)