I don't think the message of having a bit of discipline in your budget and making value-for-money a prime consideration is at all a bad thing for chapters to be doing. The way that the message was hammered in was at times arrogant, aggressive, or plain out insulting, but the message itself was a good one. Large cash gifts made to third parties, in my view, rarely represent good value-for-money. All I ask for is a little consistency.
I would also posit that if WMF donors wanted to donate to a worthy project like MariaDB, they'd donate to that rather than to the Foundation. I don't think targeted grants to reach some particular goal that can be shown to directly benefit the Foundation are at all a problem, and if we're going to walk down this road that's probably the better road to take, rather than acting as a charitable middleman, redistributing donor funds to other nonprofits that don't share our particular mission.
Cheers, Craig
On 16 April 2014 22:05, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 16 April 2014 13:03, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
Grants directed to the development specific functionality that Wikimedia can use and which can later be included in other project's core
offerings?
Sure, I don't think anyone has a problem with that. But I think that handing out unrestricted grants and "giving back" just because we're nice people and they're nice people strays too far from the Foundation's
mission
and contradicts the message about budgetary discipline that has been hammered into chapters over the years.
The solution would then appear to be to treat the chapters better, rather than others worse.
- d.