Hi, //Well, salaries upto 2 lakh _per month_ with additional allowances for expenses on domestic and international travel is pretty huge for India. Reading from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WMF-A2K_Grant_Budget_and_Utilization_Sept12_-Feb13.pdf//
So what? An employee working for the same BPO / software company in India gets paid less than his counterpart in US. Even offsetting the lifestyle and cost of living allowances, it becomes like mere outsourcing for cheap labour. Should WMF consider cost cutting and out source this work to some other country :) ? 2 lakh INR comes around 3000 USD which is a decent salary for a mid level employee in US. For a national program like CIS - A2K, salaries in this range is acceptable. Problem is Indian non-profits usally paying staggeringly low salary. Not WMF approving reasonable salary scales. So, are we going to ask for the payroll details of all WMF employees and start giving our verdict on who deserves how much? //There is certainly some irony in having a 200,000 INR per month salary+perks and encouraging others to contribute voluntarily (worse still to call it staggeringly low). More importantly I think, besides mere envy, that this causes a rift between much of the community that was actually happy being (unpaid) volunteers and those that would rather spend their time jostling to be part of the funded system. Overall it seems funds as opposed to shared resources (examples here being libraries, journal access) have a tendency to affect egalitarian aims, and I suspect the effects are worse in the "Global South".// //It certainly makes the volunteers to draw a line on what they could volunteer easily and leaves the rest to them (and i have implied earlier about their abilities) and i afraid it's getting worse day by day.// Based on the same logic, is the global Wikipedia participation going down and communities getting shrinked because of the amount of spending done by WMF and national chapters? Speaking from Tamil community's perspective, most of us don't know the existance and spending done by WMF or India chapter or CIS - A2K. Even if we get to know, I am sure that this will have no effect on our community's motivation to contribute. *Community dynamics will be strained only if direct editing or off wiki outreach or programs is financially supported for a select few. We make sure that it doesn't happen and all community work is totally volunteering. Where is egalitarianism lost here? * The community should be aware of its strengths, goals and work towards it. Wherever it cannot work efficiently, it should give space for partnering agencies and let them do their work professionally. This culture of looking up to WMF, chapter and CIS-A2K for community's growth or lack of it is not healthy. We should remember that community came first and all came later. There is still a lot of scope for each community to grow on it's own and make use of grants program when it needs help. We have every right as a donor to question how WMF and it's partnering agencies spend our money. But that should not be an excuse to address the lack of motivation in our community. If people are really getting de motivated because of this, we just need to attract more people with the right attitude and motivation. Ravi
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