[Wikimedia-l] Question for Board

[Michael Snow]

On 10/24/2012 3:38 PM, James Salsman wrote:
> The Funds Dissemination Committee was originally proposed by Sue to
> the board with explicit support for both groups and individuals,[1]
> but at some point after, all mention of individual editors was
> removed.[2]
>
> Could someone please say whether this was the decision of the board,
> someone else's decision, or a mistake? I ask because I have reason to
> believe that about 18% of English Wikipedia administrators are living
> below the poverty line, and it seems that support for such individual
> editors is reasonable. Local fire departments and the International
> Red Cross both have paid personnel and volunteer staff working
> alongside each other without any motivational crowding.
>
> [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Funds_Dissemination_Committee/Draft_FDC_Proposal_for_the_Board#Application_process_and_timeline
> [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/FDC_portal/Eligibility_criteria
I suspect you may have formed for yourself a rather different conception 
of the proposed system than what was actually contemplated. To your 
first footnote, I find it strange that you would focus on the section 
headed "Application process and timeline" for an eligibility question 
when there's a section immediately above it regarding eligibility, and 
that section is exclusively about groups (entities), not individuals. 
The page in your second footnote is pretty clearly an expansion of that 
eligibility section, so it's not surprising if they're consistent with 
each other.

If I understand things correctly, anything in the FDC materials that 
refers to individuals receiving funds should probably be interpreted as 
referring to the Wikimedia grants program, which does invite individual 
applicants and will continue on as far as I'm aware. The grants program 
as a whole would naturally be under the purview of the FDC, but that's 
at another level of the process, so individuals wouldn't be directly 
participating in the FDC process in that sense.

--Michael Snow