[Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

[Delirium]

Andrew Lih wrote:

>It's clear your objections run deep -- you seem have a standing
>problem with the entire idea of a board of trustees that is, well,
>trusted with the interests of the Wikimedia Foundation. This can be
>seen also in your strong bias and mistrust concerning the governance
>of nonprofits.  If this is so, your issues are not with the
>particulars of how we are going about things, but of an entire concept
>of the board.
>  
>
Oh, having a board is fine, so long as it only handles unimportant 
things.  We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought 
it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires 
non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more 
people.  For one reason or another, Jimbo decided it would be a good 
show of community participation and democratic fuzziness and whatnot if 
we elected two of these five members, and so we did.

As a legal matter, the board has authority over the project; as a moral 
matter, it does not.  Jimbo was previously the benevolent dictator, and 
to a large extent remains so, but he rarely took decisions unilaterally, 
instead guiding a consensus process and respecting the outcomes of that 
process even if he occasionally personally would have done things 
otherwise.  I'd expect the board to at the very least do no more than he 
previously did, and ideally to work to continue the process he starting 
of devolving decision-making to the community at large.

In short, boards are unwiki, but we are required by law to have one, so 
we do.

>However, this community has decided to go ahead with the board, so
>that designated individuals can spend more time on issues that need
>it.  This includes fundraising and building links among the different
>wikis, which have both been our weak spot.  Your characterization of
>these meetings as "perks" that happen "behind closed doors" is
>misleading and disingenuous.  No one has suggested anything of the
>sort, and Wikipedians should have every confidence that things will be
>open and inclusive.
>  
>
I don't see how they will be open and inclusive unless the Foundation is 
prepared to pay for hundreds of Wikipedians to attend them.  If they 
involve only a minutely small percentage of the users, then they are 
worse than no meeting at all, and bias decision-making towards those 
with the resources to attend.

>You've cited H.Cheney's comment, while conveniently leaving out
>others' (including my own) positive experiences in working with
>nonprofits and the benefits of face to face meetings for this type of
>collaboration. The use of "social and networking events" as a
>pejorative is odd considering Wikipedia is one of the largest social
>software systems and collaborative projects in the world.
>  
>
Wikipedia is indeed a social and collaborative system, but it takes 
place online, on a large scale.  If the Foundation can come up with 
funding so that any significant subset of its users can meet somewhere, 
or even any significant subset of one of its language encyclopedias can 
meet, I would not object to that.  However, so far there have been no 
proposals for that, only proposals for small cliques of users to meet, 
which I feel is detrimental to the project on a whole.  All important 
work should take place online, in public, with as full participation as 
possible, not take place behind closed doors and then reported after the 
fact.

As for other comments on travel reimbursements as a good thing, one of 
them even cited EU-funded projects, which are pretty notorious for being 
full of wasteful perks (http://www.iht.com/articles/521419.html among 
thousands of related articles).

-Mark