[Foundation-l] Wikipedia Executive Director?

[Andrew Garrett]

On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 10:19 AM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is an important point to raise regarding cultural and legal
> differences in regards to advertising, however the banner in question
> is not appearing in Australia.
>
> The Australian chapter is managing the banners and appeal text that
> appear within Australia, and there is no way 'Wikipedia Executive
> Director' would have been approved by the WMAu committee.
>

For the record, I don't think that this arrangement is working well.

There are a lot of people working on the fundraiser, both Wikimedia staff
and hundreds of volunteers from the community. The Foundation has allocated
substantial staff and resources to running a campaign that is agile and
data-driven. In the United States, this has had a strong result -- US
editors stopped seeing the Jimmy banners (which people are getting tired of
despite their effectiveness) a week ago. Elsewhere in the world, bringing in
the new editor/Sue appeal banners has been held up by this sort of
bureaucracy.

If we believe (as I do) that the central fundraising team is the best team
for the job, then we should give them the ability to roll out their best
work quickly, without going through the bureaucratic quagmire of requiring
chapter approval for each special region. The rest of the world is missing
out on the best that they can do.

-- 
Andrew Garrett
http://werdn.us/