Wikimedia Foundation elections/Board elections/2009/Candidates/Questions/2

<< Questions 1-20

Foundation Endowment

What are your thoughts about the establishment of an endowment for the Foundation? More specifically: (i) How should establishment of an endowment be traded off against shorter-term objectives? (ii) What size endowment should be targetted? (iii) What operations should be supported by distributions from the endowment, and why? Jeremy Tobacman 21:59, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Adam Koenigsberg (CastAStone)

Long term planning is the most important form of planning, and with that in mind, I am 1000% in favor of an endowment. Over the long haul, an endowment will significantly impact Wikimedia's ability to do business, particularly in down years. Significant money should be independently raised for an endowment, and if necessary, it is preferable to slightly stunt current growth in favor of the future security offered by an endowment.

Beauford Anton Stenberg (B9 hummingbird hovering)

I outlined this eventuation in my Platform and elsewhere in these questions. I wish to open strategic dialogue for a financially sustainable Wikimedia, so your question is close to my heart. Bequests, endowments and capital preserved trusts should be foregrounded in our prospective strategic envisioning. Jeremy, all the ins and outs and variables would require further exploration and I consider it fruitless endeavour to outline them herein. I am not a specialist in the legal requirements, a benevolent endowment, fund or foundation just feels right in my heart to ensure the continuity and furtherance of Wikimedia in the fickle turning of Fortune. I do not know the USA legislation and instruments that determine the efficacy and implementation of such entities or trusts and it may even be determined at state level. Endowments may be established within the auspice or attendant to the Foundation or they may even be established by benefactors to feed dedicated funds into Foundation, Projects or programmes into perpetuity. That is what I mean as a financially sustainable model, one that does not run counter to NFP.

Brady Brim-DeForest (Bradybd)

no response yet.

Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester)

I have been in favor of an endowment for several years now. I disagree with some of my colleagues that we don't need to start working on one right a way. In fact, I believe now is the perfect time to start growing an endowment; in a down economy our fundraising efforts must necessarily be increased anyway, and by starting now and getting the setup phase and initial contacts out of the way, we are not behind the power curve when the economy recovers and organizations (as well as private individuals) resume full scale philanthropic funding. In answer to your specific questions, (i) The endowment is a long-term, ongoing goal, and should not come at the expense of short-term objectives; but that is not to say that we should fill up on short-term objectives at the expense of any endowment whatsoever. (ii) The size of the endowment required will obviously grow and adjust as the organization grows and changes focus and programming. The obvious answer is "enough that we can meet all desired programming and operational activities in a year, without significantly impacting endowment principal". (iii) Just because the endowment should be large enough to support all activities in a down year of fundraising, does not mean that we want to use it for that purpose. Distributions from the endowment should be used to partner with like-minded organizations to expand our global reach, for instance, targeted programs with OLPC for distribution of Wikimedia enabled laptops, or working with cultural organizations to acquire new content under licenses that are from the very start free (rather than with restrictive copyright and waiting until they are either released or copyright expires). These are programs that will be too expensive to pursue through fundraising, as well as time-consuming for the staff. An endowment distribution allows us to offload both of these burdens, allows our partnerships to develop, brings great publicity to us, positively impacts our fundraising in future years, and helps us to fulfill our mission.

Domas Mituzas (Midom)

I do not see endowment as requirement for next few years - building an endowment would require way more aggressive fundraising - and more resources would have to be spent on actual fund management, and now it may be more efficient to direct those resources to other parts of organization. Growing our platform, volunteers, relations, connections - it all is investment too, that can yield good returns too. We will eventually grow our own alumni, which may be great contributing force to endowment, but at the moment we rely on small contributions, which scale with the mindshare. Once we reach mindshare saturation - then different kind of financial planning might be needed.

Also, we're still quite agile organization, which may scale down certain projects in case of financial problems. We are in somewhat uncharted lands, and endowment would commit us to certain way of financial planning way too early.

Of course, we may consider endowment as restricted funding option - if any grant makers are ready to switch from institutional funding to endowment building.

Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)

no response yet.

Gregory Kohs (Thekohser)

Excellent question, Jeremy. I am very cautious about the need for a Wikimedia Foundation endowment fund at this time. For the past couple of years, the Foundation has been socking away money in a "rainy day" bank account, in excess of annual expenditures. So, thus far, security against future fundraising shortfalls would seem to be a weak argument for an endowment. Endowment funds are tricky things. Outlays from the fund are restricted; typically, only the interest gained from the principal may be spent. Furthermore, only a portion of the earnings from the endowment are spent annually, to help assure that the original capital will continue to grow over time. Donors who direct gifts to an endowment fund are almost always more "hands on" in making sure their gift is shepherded ethically and responsibly.

An unfortunate but true side-effect of having a large endowment (no giggling, children) is that the WMF may be criticized for having one, or too large of one. Annual giving could erode if too many potential donors begin to view the endowment as alleviating the need for more funds. Smaller non-profits (like Wikimedia) are often criticized for not spending the lion's share of funds on current needs. Grant-making organizations might even pass over an organization that already has significant endowment capital.

Apologies for sounding like a broken record, but the Wikimedia Foundation needs to stop practices like underspending the Technology budget by 65%, and dealing Stanton Fund gift money directly to the privately-held company (Wikia, Inc.) of the Foundation's founding trustee, before it even dares consider launching an endowment fund campaign!

José Gustavo Góngora (Góngora)

no response yet.

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro)

The first steps should be definitely taken right now to prepare for an ordered transition towards a stabler financing structure. What I do not think we should do is begin such an endowment immediately. What can be done is to create a shrink wrapped action plan to kickstart such an endowment in the case of an unexpectedly large donation, immediately upon reception.

An another intermediary step that can be taken right now, is to regularize the handling of the current financial cushioning strategy. It clearly was impossible in the previous term or the one before that, and it won't be implementable in the current accounting term either, because of the explosive growth of the size of our operations in terms of staff and office space. But once the move to an alternative location in SF is out of the way in terms of one time financial outlay; I think it only prudent that there is a clear strategy on how the cushion is handled. This would be prudent in itself, and since hopefully it would be a strategy that can be publicly expressed, as a completely serendipitous bonus, it should alleviate all the unnecessary foaming of the mouth from our more excitable critics :-) If that is ever possible :-/

To be clear, my feeling is that an endowment is useful if and only if the amount of money coming in as donations is an order of magnitude larger than currently. Specifically it would be useful if there was a sudden donation of an order of magnitude beyond our current revenues. It is conceivable that we might be able to grow in easy stages into a size where our revenues are even several orders of magnitude larger than currently before an endowment would be near inescapable. I have to say that in terms of future planning, when and if our revenues continue growing, it would be wise to begin the endowment sooner than it is absolutely indispensible, to give it time to grow.

It will be a glorious day when we are in a situation where all the money to run the servers can be scraped off the interest on the endowment. May I live to see that day!

Kat Walsh (mindspillage)

no response yet.

Kevin Riley O'Keeffe (KevinOKeeffe)

no response yet.

Lourie Pieterse (LouriePieterse)

no response yet.

Ralph Potdevin (Aruspice)

no response yet.

Relly Komaruzaman (Relly Komaruzaman)

no response yet.

Samuel Klein (Sj)

Wikimedia is 8 years old. We have built one of the informational wonders of the world, and our mission closes with the essential phrase, "in perpetuity" – yet we have hardly begun to plan for the future.

Yes, we need an endowment fund, and should set one up now, even before we have planned a fundraiser for it (see i.). An endowment is essential to safeguard the future of any long-lived institution. Our annual budget is now many times our basic operating expenses, with over $8M a year in recurring expenses in the current 2009-2010 financial plan (for comparison, $8M is roughly the annual upkeep of the Clinton Presidential Library). Moreover, the plan calls for Foundation spending next year to grow faster than revenue - this is short-term planning. We must prepare for the long term at the same time.

(i) - Some donors, particularly larger individual donors, may give to an endowment what they would not to a general fund. The endowment should be supported through careful outreach to major donors, and through policies allocating a portion of major unrestricted gifts to the endowment. The greatest investment required to set up an endowment is the definition of what it would support, something that we must do regardless as part of strategic planning.

(ii) - This is a topic for discussion with the Foundation's finance team. The endowment should be large enough to sustainably support the basic operation of the Projects (see iii. below), able to grow with inflation while supporting any needed central server farms and technical support with its interest, and of a size that we can raise. An initial target of $10M would match current expenses. Expenses have grown geometrically in years past, but there has been no focus on separating the costs of a core set of services from other expenses.

(iii) - First we need to work together to definine a core set of services that define our mission. I would include:

• Reliable read/write access to the projects through the Wikimedia domains, and the hardware and bandwidth this requires;
• Reliable access to dumps and statistics
• Reliable backups of private and public data

These services should be supported as robustly as possible : making it easier for third parties to help support them in-kind with their own time, money, and hardware; having someone keeping the infrastructure involved up and running - either with a dedicated team or with some other effective supporting network; maintaining and improving ways to find and access dumps, from a fileserver and mirrors to actively-seeded torrents of large files; and regularly generating statistics from available sources while protecting private data [which makes this a difficult task to let others share].

Distributions from the endowment should support all of this, as well as efforts to reduce the future cost of maintaining them.

Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist)

no response yet.

Thomas Braun (Redlinux)

no response yet.

Ting Chen (Wing)

It depends on which kind of endowment. I am against any incentive programs that is initiated by the Foundation to encourage edits. I know that Hoodong does that, actually Hoodong Baike is almost entirely driven by incentives. But this is not the way of Wikimedians. We have a mission, and that is FREE knowledge, not incentive driven knowledge. What I would support is programs that can benefit us on fields where we need help. One such field is for example research. I would support endowment on research projects about Wikimedia projects, its outreach, its development, its community, our image in the public. We need to know a lot about ourselves, but good studies are rare.

"Office actions" and BLP issues

As a member of the Board of Trustees you would apparently have the power to take "office actions" with respect to content. Current policy states that "office actions" are edits intended "to prevent legal trouble or personal harm and should not be undone by any user." Jimbo Wales has stated that WP:OFFICE may be used in "cases involving a threat of legal action, but in other cases it may be simply as a courtesy". Would you support restricting this power to WMF's General Counsel? If not, do you see any conflict between satisfying an article subject who is complaining of "harm" and maintaining a neutral POV? How high a priority to you is "personal harm" avoidance?Bdell555 03:02, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Adam Koenigsberg (CastAStone)

I don't particularly have a problem with taking a timeout from an article to cover all of our bases. This is how I read the OFFICE dictum. It is temporary, I think that that is the key to it. I don't love it, however, I do not foresee it causing a long term conflict with the object of the encyclopaedia projects, which is of course to build the sum of all human knowledge, in every language. As to POV issues, if WP:OFFICE leads to the removal of notable, well sourced material, I think that the community will be right to take issue with that. I do not expect that to happen.

Beauford Anton Stenberg (B9 hummingbird hovering)

I uphold that an encyclopedia's register should be dispassionate, yet engaged. We as a Community should strive for balance and where possible a full, informed and systemic framing of an article with rich context and historicity. I favour a deep consultation model throughout the Community which subsumes Foundation, Projects, Charters, programmes, editors, administrators and audience, amongst others particularly benefactors. I do not favour censorship unless in situations of compassion and duress or where minors may be impacted. Even then the censorship is not one of filtering holdings but one of retrieval. I also favour decentralized governance, a reticulum of interpenetrating amorphous sapiential circles, to engage the term of Margaret Mead. Consensus fails without having deep consultation and broad catchment and representation from our manifold constituencies. This is a fundamental flaw in Wikimedia currently. To further my Platform standing and to strengthen consensus, I intend to table a universal communication channel with social media capability integrated directly with the online interface. Or at minimum a widget or plug in that provides for deep consultation and the establishment of communities that can amass according to interest and necessity. Information will be interrogable and reportable. I don't use IRC, though I appreciate its function in the history of the Internet and particularly hacker culture. Wikivoices has foregrounded to me that only certain collected individuals talk and have a voice in Wikimedia. There is a certain humanity to hearing one another and seeing one another if possible. We don't all write well, we aren't all clearly and powerfully literate. Particularly given the impending strategic envisioning, it is timely to progress beyond IRC. The nature of privilege in the Community is sensitive. We should endeavour to be open and accessible wherever possible. Wales has established and invested this failsafe, this safety valve within the Board and before I establish a platform or opine as to its benefit or otherwise, I would require a statement or consultation from legal counsel and exposure to prior case studies and to dialogue with the Community. There is a wisdom in committees not evident in any one of the individuals of that collective, singularly.

Brady Brim-DeForest (Bradybd)

no response yet.

Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester)

Having had to implement an office action on an article at the request of the foundation staff, I disagree that it should be limited to the General Counsel. It is part of the necessary oversight that the WMF (both staff and board) must have over the projects to protect the foundation's mission. The second half of the question is not related to board activities, but I will answer it anyway. Our policies require us to maintain a neutral POV. We should strive to do no harm. It is extremely rare that these two things are incompatible with each other, and almost never in a well cited, verifiable, researched article.

Domas Mituzas (Midom)

Our General Counsel suggests that we should do as few as possible 'office actions' - and I support him. It is not much of an issue lately, and I think that foundation should always try to have best possible dialogue between community and staff - and have bidirectional support on all the issues, that previously required unilateral actions. This is definitely scaled down activity from few years ago, and I think that everyone involved now is happier :)

Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)

no response yet.

Gregory Kohs (Thekohser)

Wikimedia "office actions" are exceedingly rare, and even more so when executed by Trustees lacking the surname "Wales". Thus, without any offense to the person asking the question, I am struggling to see the merit of providing anything more than the following response: if you trust the Board member to take care of more than $6 million of your money, then you ought to trust that the Board member will exercise an appropriate balance between caution and action when faced with questionable or illegal Wikimedia content that happens to be drawing complaints.

José Gustavo Góngora (Góngora)

no response yet.

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro)

With the greatest of respect to our General Counsel (Hi, Mike!) the one healthy trend in the operations of our movement, has been the concerted effort to identify bottlenecks and to attempt to see how they can be removed from being a potential source of problems. Having a single person with so much power was not ever good before, as the power of OFFICE; and putting it into single hands again would be a serious step back. I won't tell precisely why putting them into single hands would be a bad idea, just to not give the bad guys any ideas, but be advised that my mind is fertile in charting ways bottlenecks can fail, and I can see several in the instance of putting the whole ball of wax in the hands of our venerable General Counsel.

As a completely unrelated to the question above, but intimately entangled with the rationale I offer why consolidating the OFFICE power back into single hands would not be a good idea, I note as a sidebar that the reason that having a single Executive Director is not in violation of this doctrine is precisely because the staff is thoroughly insulated from having any influence on editing activity, apart from situations where legal matters are not in play. And that insulation should be further enhanced rather than creating a breach across it directly connected to the General Counsel.

On the separate issue of "harm"...

While I haven't had to participate in OFFICE actions, and I suspect there are very few office actions that are operated on any but some of the largest language projects, but have had to witness a few cases where there have been "complaints" of harm, libel and the like (the most bizarre perhaps being the case of a lady Video Jockey who made a complaint to the police so they could see if it was illegal to edit her article in a way that made her feel "uncomfortable"; specifically quoting catty words she had uttered in a major newspaper against another female political candidate in a race she was running in etc.) My attitude is that we should be skeptical about one-sided claims of harm. Investigating the issues behind such ought to be done with a huge amount of diligence, as interfering with the normal procedures of a project is something that shouldn't ever be lightly done, and never never never with fear or favor.

Kat Walsh (mindspillage)

no response yet.

Kevin Riley O'Keeffe (KevinOKeeffe)

no response yet.

Lourie Pieterse (LouriePieterse)

no response yet.

Ralph Potdevin (Aruspice)

no response yet.

Relly Komaruzaman (Relly Komaruzaman)

no response yet.

Samuel Klein (Sj)

The Board itself should not be taking part in any Office Actions.

Wikimedia's Counsel may request such an action, but would not need to do so through the Board. Thankfully this is rarely done - it is generally an ineffective way to get things done, and an unnecessary imposition on community processes.

Yes, there is a central conflict between satisfying an article subject who is complaining of harm and maintaining a neutral POV; and it is one that community editors and OTRS respondents must cope with every day - independent of whether or not the Foundation feels an additional legal reason to respond to such a complaint.

Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist)

I do not believe that office actions of the sort that you describe should be limited to the WMF's counsel, but I do believe that they should be limited to persons holding some sort of executive role in the WMF, which Trustees do not. Trustees should not have any privileged position in on-project edits.

Thomas Braun (Redlinux)

no response yet.

Ting Chen (Wing)

From all "office actions" in the last year that I am aware of or I was involved in I can say that they are carried out very sensitively and very carefully. They are all justified. I handled such a case in the last year because we received a letter from a lawyer of a hongkongnese company. The staff member asked me if the accusation is correct. I checked the article on zh-wp, found that the section that was mentioned in the letter was without citation and not reliable. I informed the user who put the passage in on his or her talk page, informed the community through village pump and the administrators through the Skype chatroom and removed the section. Part of the section was put in later again with sources and citations by other users. I don't see in such cases the staff abused their power in any way. Naturally, your concern is legitimate. I can only assure you that our staff is in awareness of their responsibility and the trustees take their control duty very seriously.