A good find, Charles, and as clear an illustration of Sue Gardner's mindset and agenda as has been expressed anywhere.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Movement_roles/Feedback/Sue_Gardner#Funding

"In 2010, 12 chapters acted as payments processors for the annual fundraising campaign in their geography." - how many of those have survived now? When you find ten victims all shot in the foot, you start to suspect that there's a single gunman.

"Residents of France, Germany and the UK give 10 times as much money to charity overall as do residents of Finland, Austria and Portugal: should those chapters therefore be 10x wealthier?" Only Sue Gardner has leapt to the conclusion that Chapters will retain income in proportion to the donations. Everybody else who's actually gone through the FDC process knows that the income from donations distributed via the FDC depends very strongly on the proposals made for expenditure - and believe me, I know a bit about that process. Was Sue Gardner unaware of how the FDC works, or was this simply a convenient strawman that she set up to justify her actions? WMUK has never, to my knowledge, asked for a percentage of the donations raised in the UK. It has only ever asked for income to meet its programmed and agreed expenditure.

There has been no movement in Sue Gardner's anti-chapter position for the past three years. In 2012 I challenged Gardner to outline the steps needed for WMUK to take in order to have fund-processing restored, and she ignored the question. At the time, I said that no matter what WMUK did to address the concerns that were being raised, there would be no return of fund processing, because that was the sole item on her agenda. Those so-called concerns were just an excuse to remove fund-processing and I'm sorry to have been proven right on each count.

-- 
Rexx



On 21 May 2014 15:30, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com> wrote:

On 21 May 2014 14:39, rexx <rexx@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
<snip> 

Taken as a whole, it is clearly part of Sue Gardner's agenda to get rid of chapters - or at least reduce them to impotence. She has never been able to accept that chapters can often do jobs better than a centralised WMF. Despite the hollow words she has uttered over the years, when it comes to practical matters, she makes decisions based on increasing her own little empire at WMF to the detriment of those working for the Wikimedia movement throughout the rest of the world.

 
Well, hardly, as shown by the history (at least for those who have paid detailed attention in the past). 

By going into the Signpost archive for 2011, and undeleting a redirect that had been officiously deleted on meta, I have pulled up Sue's working document on this issue from 23 March 2011:


Which happens to be timed almost to the day to the end of the time my contract ended with WMUK (i.e. the moment when I was paying most attention to chapter matters, and was in immediate touch with WMUK's technical fundraising efforts, and governance). I had had only had some summary version of Sue's thinking, up till just now.

I thought then, and still think now, that WMUK was a good example of what she was thinking about.

There is a point about Gift Aid, for sure, but there are a number of ways in which the WMF could add about 2% to their annual income. 

WMUK has indeed issues with communicating with potential donors; but it has had greater issues, IMX, with communicating with members (who theoretically run it, though how they were supposed to do that on scanty information remains a mystery to me). If the Board hadn't binned the comms strategy I'd have a bit more sympathy.

The bottom line for me is that I saw WMUK shooting itself in the foot, at least to the point where a biped would have no feet left. So I'd advise not also shooting the messenger, but trying to formulate a case for the next time round, with the new CEO, that actually deals with the history, and what has been done about it.

Charles

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