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(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 16 April 2014 13:03, Craig Franklin
<cfranklin(a)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.