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

[Nathan]

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 4:49 AM, Waldir Pimenta <waldir at email.com> wrote:
> Hi Thomas, and all who showed concern about Wikimedia Portugal's planned
> expenses.
>
> I am one of the persons who calculated that budget, and thus I feel I should
> provide you with some information.
>
> First of all, I'd point out that none of us has any experience in
> nation-wide nonprofit organizations. We thus had no way to know what we
> would need to make it work, and chose to play safe. Obviously, we were aware
> that the value for meetings was fairly high, and we pointed that out in our
> proposal, as you can read in the page you linked:
>
> "We are (...) willing to reduce the frequency of the meetings if the total
> value is considered too high"
>
> And we indeed were advised to do so, when the grant was conceded:
>
> "The award was reduced from the requested USD $7,909 to encourage a smaller
> budget for travel."
>
> Let me assure you, we are as much as yourself concerned in not wasting the
> grant's money with "lunches for the members". We have plenty of planned
> activities (as you can see in
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Portugal/Actividades) for which we
> didn't include a budget in our request, since it was for the start-up only.
> But we are very much willing to find ways to meet less and apply the money
> in these projects instead.
>
> We would love to receive advice on how we can make the chapter work (well)
> with people so spread across the country (almost all the involved people
> live in different cities), and since much of the money WMF has was
> volunteer-contributed, we will take into account the wishes of the
> community. If you feel we should meet less (how many times do you think are
> enough? let us know your thoughts on our mailing list:
> wikimediapt at lists.wikimedia.org), then we certainly will consider your
> advice.
>
> Thanks,
> Waldir


Thanks for commenting, Waldir. The last thing anyone wants to do is
discourage or impede the formation of a new Wikimedia chapter, and I
think any constructive criticism of the grant process should focus on
the Foundation and not recipients. As you say, new chapters are *new*
- you have the opportunity to benefit from the experience of the
Foundation staff and other chapter groups, and the grant review
process should be seen as an avenue to deliver that experience in
addition to funding.

I'm curious - Portugal isn't on this list of officially recognized
chapters[1], but the grant criteria[2] say that grants are contingent
on chapter recognition by the WMF. Has that happened and just not made
it to meta?

Thanks,

Nathan

[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Local_chapters
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/WMF_grants