[Foundation-l] Bounties and expenses

Wed Jun 23 16:53:13 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>  
>
>>Oh, having a board is fine, so long as it only handles unimportant 
>>things.  We decided to have a board initially not because anyone thought 
>>it was a good idea, but because the State of Florida requires 
>>non-profits to have boards of trustees consisting of five or more 
>>people.  For one reason or another, Jimbo decided it would be a good 
>>show of community participation and democratic fuzziness and whatnot if 
>>we elected two of these five members, and so we did.
>>    
>>
>
>Yeah - unimportant things such as making sure we have servers and they keep
>running. Unimportant things such as setting up chapters and other outreach
>efforts. Unimportant things like creating a CD/printed version. Unimportant
>things such as hiring an on-site server admin. Utterly unimportant things such
>as having representative members with the ability to help make this all happen.
>Sure - all very unimportant. "Democratic fuzziness" ?? What are you smoking?  
>  
>
No, the board emphatically should not handle any of those things you 
listed.  These are decisions to be made by the Wikimedia community, not 
a committee.  Top-down committee decisions are not the wiki way of doing 
things.

>>...
>>I don't see how they will be open and inclusive unless the Foundation is 
>>prepared to pay for hundreds of Wikipedians to attend them.  If they 
>>involve only a minutely small percentage of the users, then they are 
>>worse than no meeting at all, and bias decision-making towards those 
>>with the resources to attend.
>>    
>>
>
>Have you been listening? My idea is to have quarterly meetings in different
>parts of the world that will hosted by a different Wikimedia chapter each time.
>The trustees thus come to the users. Our elected representatives and Jimbo
>should be there. The meetings will also be conducted in *real time* online via
>audio/video streaming (which can be had fairly cheaply nowadays).  
>  
>
How are they going to come to the users?  Are they going to have 
thousands of meetings?  It would take about 5-10 meetings in the US 
alone to come within range of a decent majority of users, another 10-15 
in Europe, 5-10 in Asia, and so on.

>>Wikipedia is indeed a social and collaborative system, but it takes 
>>place online, on a large scale. 
>>    
>>
>
>So I guess you are against the idea of Wikimedia chapters as well. 
>  
>
No, having local chapters to make tax deductions work more smoothly is 
perfectly fine.

>>If the Foundation can come up with 
>>funding so that any significant subset of its users can meet somewhere, 
>>or even any significant subset of one of its language encyclopedias can 
>>meet, I would not object to that.  However, so far there have been no 
>>proposals for that, only proposals for small cliques of users to meet, 
>>which I feel is detrimental to the project on a whole.  All important 
>>work should take place online, in public, with as full participation as 
>>possible, not take place behind closed doors and then reported after the 
>>fact.
>>    
>>
>
>'Cliques' - can you be more offensive? The meetings *will* be very public (see
>above). Why would you assume anything else? You are making the improper
>conclusion that real world = closed door.  
>  
>
Real world by definition means only a small group of users will 
participate in the decision-making.

>>As for other comments on travel reimbursements as a good thing, one of 
>>them even cited EU-funded projects, which are pretty notorious for being 
>>full of wasteful perks (http://www.iht.com/articles/521419.html among 
>>thousands of related articles).
>>    
>>
>
>Perks my ass - having the elected trustees visit the people they represent
>while at the same time conducting quarterly meetings are all very important.
>Only so much can be done online and with computers - the human element is not
>present and thus a great deal of communication is lost. 
>  
>
How are they going to visit the people they represent?  They represent 
people spread out over the entire world.  Unless we are going to give 
them a travel budget up in the millions, and have them spend weeks per 
year travelling, that's simply impossible.

Plus, I don't really see it as "people they represent" anyway.  The 
people represent themselves, and ought to make the decisions themselves, 
preferably through some sort of consensus-based system, with a 
voting-based system as a fallback.

-Mark