[Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> 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.

Yeah - unimportant things such as making sure we have servers and they keep
running. Unimportant things such as setting up chapters and other outreach
efforts. Unimportant things like creating a CD/printed version. Unimportant
things such as hiring an on-site server admin. Utterly unimportant things such
as having representative members with the ability to help make this all happen.
Sure - all very unimportant. "Democratic fuzziness" ?? What are you smoking?  

> ...
> 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.

Have you been listening? My idea is to have quarterly meetings in different
parts of the world that will hosted by a different Wikimedia chapter each time.
The trustees thus come to the users. Our elected representatives and Jimbo
should be there. The meetings will also be conducted in *real time* online via
audio/video streaming (which can be had fairly cheaply nowadays). 
 
> Wikipedia is indeed a social and collaborative system, but it takes 
> place online, on a large scale. 

So I guess you are against the idea of Wikimedia chapters as well. 

> 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.

'Cliques' - can you be more offensive? The meetings *will* be very public (see
above). Why would you assume anything else? You are making the improper
conclusion that real world = closed door. 
 
> 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).

Perks my ass - having the elected trustees visit the people they represent
while at the same time conducting quarterly meetings are all very important.
Only so much can be done online and with computers - the human element is not
present and thus a great deal of communication is lost. 

-- mav


		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail