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

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/9/13 Austin Hair <adhair at gmail.com>:
> On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 9:41 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Wow, that's... pretty offensive, actually.
>>
>> If you are offended by statements of fact, that is your problem.
>
> I think it's fairly clear that I dispute the factualness of your statement.

You take offence when people say something you deem to be mistaken? Or
are you suggesting I knew what I said was untrue and said it to be
intentionally malicious?

>> Last time I checked, being a non-profit (and a charity if possible)
>> *was* a requirement to be a Wikimedia chapter. The WMF does have
>> experience of running a charity.
>
> I don't know when it was that you checked, because this has never been
> a requirement.  In countries where there's some analog to what
> Americans and Brits would call a non-profit, that's generally the
> desired form, but different countries have different legal systems—WMF
> Inc., for instance, is not a "charity" in the American sense of the
> word—and we do now have chapters which are neither.

I've looked it up, and I stand corrected - non-profit status is on the
"guideline" page, not the "requirements" page. I knew I had seen it
there somewhere.

> That's not even the point, however.  WMF Inc. does not have experience
> running a non-profit in, say, Brunei.  I couldn't tell you the
> exchange rate in Brunei, much less what it costs to organize an event
> there.  It's preposterous to assume that we can step in and throw
> highly paid western consultants at a situation, with the poor,
> incompetent Bruneians bowing to our superior wisdom and experience.

If the WMF doesn't know what is appropriate and the local chapter
people can be trusted to know what is appropriate (in some cases the
local chapter may have the necessary experience and the WMF can defer
to their expertise, but that isn't always the case), then the WMF
needs to do the necessary research. They are responsible for what
money that people have given them is spent on, so it falls to them to
find out what spending is and isn't appropriate.