Craig Franklin wrote: >The Foundation acted to strip chapters of their fundraising authority at >the first opportunity, based on what clearly seems to be a pre-determined >ideological decision that doesn't take actual evidence into account and >centralises movement decision making authority even further in the WMF? > >Colour me surprised.
Hi. As I understand the history here (and please correct me where I'm wrong), Wikimedia UK was one of the early chapters (along with Wikimedia Deutschland and a few others) that set up fundraising agreements in the mid-2000s. This resulted in a few Wikimedia chapters receiving a disproportionate and frankly exorbitant amount of money as donation income steadily increased over the years and the agreements (which were percentage-based) stayed in place. Eventually the agreements were renegotiated, but not before a few chapters had hundreds of thousands of dollars and no concrete plans for what to do with this money. Wikimedia UK in particular had bad enough management issues that in late 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia UK worked together to generate a report about the various management and governance deficiencies within the organization, which was posted a little over a year ago. The history here is complex and it's certainly possible that the Wikimedia Foundation is acting in its own interest rather than in the interest of the Wikimedia movement. However, I have difficulty understanding why the decision to not renew Wikimedia's UK fundraising agreement would be surprising, given the historical context. I'm not sure this decision would be surprising to an outside observer. To that end, on the subject of outside observers and open letters: when writing such a letter, it's important to give context and err on the side of formality. I've never seen a professional letter begin with "Dear Sue" (no last name or contact information provided) and end with "Yours sincerely, Jon" (no last name or contact information provided). This isn't a huge deal, but it's perhaps indicative. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
