[Foundation-l] Board-announcement: Board Restructuring

Wed Apr 30 15:28:24 UTC 2008

On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 7:41 PM, Durova <nadezhda.durova at gmail.com> wrote:

>  It was also unwise at this juncture for some individuals to remind concerned
>  volunteers of how severely limited their formal power is within Foundation
>  bylaws, because in a friendly relationship nobody actually exercises the
>  limits of their formal powers.  Bylaws notwithstanding, the volunteers wield
>  great power here - more so than in almost any nonprofit:
>
>  *WMF is a provider of content, but its content is entirely copyleft.

Depending on how you interpret "provider"... The editors provide the
content. The WMF owns the servers that host it. The WMF makes the
content available to the general public.

>  *WMF runs on powerful software, which is also copyleft.

The Wikimedia Foundation does not run on any software. Its projects do :)

>  *WMF is almost entirely dependent upon volunteer labor for its content.

Right.

>  *WMF is not particularly well funded: it has no endowment, no contingency
>  fund, and would shut its doors in less than half a year if donations
>  disappeared.

Probably... which brings me to your next comment:

>  So long as the volunteers who fund WMF and provide its content remain
>  content, there is no realistic danger that they will bring the full import
>  of these facts to bear.

With all due respect, and I might be wrong in my interpretation of
your sentence, but...
the volunteers who provide content and the people who fund (donate)
the projects are, I believe, two different sets of people. While there
are donors who are editors and vice versa, we need to be aware that
the donors are way more numerous than the editors (thankfully). Not to
mention the number of our readers, which in turn is more important
than that of our donors (unfortunately ;-) ). In short, thinking the
power resides in the hands of the actual editors and only them is, in
my opinion, a shortcut we should not indulge in. 20 million and (even
lots of) volunteers ready to go "somewhere else" does not make a new
Wikipedia. The real power resides in the synergy of it all. The
volunteers, the readers, the donors.

Delphine
-- 
~notafish
http://blog.notanendive.org

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