[Wikimedia-l] Resignation announcement, and a parting remark to everyone

[phoebe ayers]

On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 4:57 PM, Erlend Bjørtvedt <erlend at wikimedia.no>wrote:

> Dear Nathan,
> I did not suggest what you say I suggested. My proposal was not to "send
> funds" away to weak chapters.
> The WMHK case illustrates exactly the point I wanted to make. The WMF has
> made reaching out to the world's largest language community (China), in the
> hands of the reporting and planning skills of volunteers in Hong Kong. That
> is disastreous.
>
> To clarify, my message is that the WMF should rather open an OFFICE in Hong
> Kong, to serve the 1.3 billion chinese-speaking, and other south-east
> Asians aswell from there.
>
> Your point that the WMF is best suited to support the volunteers, can
> hardly be correct if the Foundation staff clusters in San Fransisco without
> really supporting people on the ground anywhere else. It is indeed worth
> celebrating that WMHK volunteers take great efforts to organize the
> Wikimania, but it is probably not what their resources should be best
> utilised for. In may eyes, organized that massive event is an obvious task
> for the WMF.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Erlend Bjørtvedt
> WMNO


This is getting off-track of the start of the thread. But one quick note:
as a long-time volunteer in the San Francisco region, I promise you that
the WMF does not do anything special to support the volunteers here :) We
occasionally use the WMF offices for local developer community meetings and
editathons -- that is, if a staff person is also volunteering with the
group and can open it up -- but that's the main privilege that the
volunteer community here has versus the volunteer community in any other
part of the world. Pretty much all of the outreach and events that have
happened in SF and in California specifically, like talks at universities
and community meetups and our Wikipedia 10 conference and the like, have
happened because of volunteers, not because of the WMF -- just like
anywhere else.

-- phoebe