[Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees June 2009-

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/9/12 Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org>:
> Fair enough, Brion :-) -- I'm just going to amplify and elaborate a
> little on Jennifer's original mail. I think some of this is on the
> meta page, but I'll say it here anyway.
>
> The purpose of the chapters grant process is to make money available
> to people to get good work done. The basic assumption underpinning it
> is that those people know best what they need to make progress towards
> our shared goals. They know their culture best, they know their
> situation best, and they know best what will help them get stuff done.

While that is true, it is also important to remember that most people
setting up a chapter have next to no experience of running a
non-profit. They don't know what is and isn't appropriate to spend
donations on, they don't necessarily know what needs to done and just
because they know their culture in general doesn't mean they know how
the charity sector works in their country. The Foundation could
provide a lot of advice on those issues. While I don't doubt that the
Portuguese Wikimedians are acting in good faith, trust requires two
things - good faith and competence. They are almost certainly not
competent since they haven't had an opportunity to develop that
competence yet, so they should not be trusted to be making the right
decisions.