[Foundation-l] Re: Funding for the newly elected Board Members

[Delirium]

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Volunteering time to create articles is one thing, paying travel expenses for
>board members to attend meetings is very different. They are not comparable 
>and also note that the board members would *not* be paid for their time to
>attend the meetings, they would be reimbursed for any direct expenses they paid
>to travel to and stay at the meeting site for the duration for the meeting.
>They would *still* be volunteers and would *not* be making any profit - just
>like the rest of us. 
>  
>
I don't see it as very different.  Many Wikipedians have spent their 
personal money in contributing to quality articles, including buying 
out-of-copyright books from eBay in order to scan in images, to name 
just one example.  We don't have plans to reimburse people for this expense.

Besides, if we *were* going to start reimbursing people, Jimbo would be 
the obvious person to start with.  I think of the five trustees, he has 
by far incurred the most personal expenses as a result of this project.  
The next-most of the five board members would probably be the other two 
initially-appointed board members, who I believe are co-owners of Bomis, 
which has incurred significant expenses in the running of Wikipedia (and 
continues to not be reimbursed by the Foundation for the cost of its 
bandwidth).

There are plenty of things that would be nice, but none of which I think 
the Foundation's money should go to.  For example, developers may well 
be able to coordinate faster if they all flew to one location for a 
weekend to draw up plans in person, and then flew to the colocation 
facility to set up new machines in person rather than relying on ssh and 
occasional phone calls for someone to reboot the machine locally.  But 
they get by without this luxury.

-Mark