[Foundation-l] [announcement] new staff member in businessdevelopment

[Casey Brown]

1. Any entity that receives as much money as we do and has as much as we do,
can be considered a business and be entitled to the same necessities as such
an entity requires.

2. The only position we are looking to fill is that of Executive Director.
Chief executive officer is a deprecated position name.  That position is
filled by the head of the Wikimedia Foundation head, the nice lady you have
been degrading in this thread.  The closest equivalent, the Chief Operating
Officer position is and has been filled by Carolyn for 5 months.

Casey Brown

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Anthony
Sent: Friday, May 18, 2007 9:07 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [announcement] new staff member in
businessdevelopment

On 5/18/07, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Actually, I have more idea that I would want to say, because I believe
> saying it publicly would not be good business :-)
> But getting good figures is a priority. Which is why I discussed in
> length the issue with Carolyn about 2 months ago, and Carolyn and the
> accountant are currently working on categorizing revenue and expenses,
> which will allow us to have a much better feedback. She is also
> currently preparing all data to get ready for the audit.
>
Regular financial statements were promised by Brad almost a year ago.
But today you make the statement: "I have some estimates of some
values for the current year. But I do not have clear precise data
month by month."  Forget about *getting* pathetic.  That *is*
pathetic.

> We do business. That is not a wish, that is a statement. Now, we do not
> do it very well, and staff is already overworked, so can not give more
> time to it.
> Two solutions. One is to proceed not doing it well since no time. We can
> decide not to answer the phone as well, and to put propositions received
> by mail in the trash. Make no DVDs. No datafeed.
> The other is to better organize the area. Which is our choice.
>
The WMF is not a business.  It's a publicly supported charity.  As
such, I think the proper solution is to limit business activities as
much as possible.  For instance, data feed services should focus on
the distribution aspects (getting a datafeed to as many people as
possible) instead of the profiteering aspects (making as much money
off the datafeed as possible).

> Now, please take a step backward.
>
> Do you remember that just ONE year ago, we had only 2 employees, one
> being Brion in California (so, tech area) and the other Danny (the "do
> it all", "save the day" man) ? We did not have any clean financial
> statements ? Officially, Jimbo was our CEO, so in charge of accounting,
> which he did not really have time to do.
>
> In one year, we created an office. There are people working in, issuing
> data we can rely on. We have enough money to run with, without having to
> bother you every couple of weeks. The website is hardly down any more
> now, which was not the case 2 years ago, whilst the traffic was much
> smaller. We pay our bills. And we pay them in time (not the case a year
> ago). Our financial statements may not be perfectly detailed, but they
> are *clean*. We have people answering the phone. We have a framework to
> receive interns (not the case a year ago). We have a file server in the
> office and a secure network. We set up a fundraising database to track
> every donation. We set up an acceptable procedure (by audit standard) to
> receive checks and cash them. And so on.
>
> And this is *getting* pathetic ?
>
> Hardly.
>
Fair enough, you've accomplished a number of things in the past year.
You've gone from Jimbo as CEO to Brad as ED to having no one as CEO or
ED - three steps each progressing beyond the previous.  But it seems
to me things are progressing far far too slowly.  I say that this is
getting pathetic not in that things are getting worse, but that more
and more time is going by without the glaring problems being resolved.

Anthony

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