John is unfortunately right. The (currently not publicly available as I understand) draft includes clauses that require every chapter that receives a grant to abide all US law, including but not exclusively US anti terrorism laws and trade bans (unless a court has ruled that... etc). This puts imho chapters in an awkward position - being forced to follow laws they cannot reasonably know about unless they hire expensive expertise.
It may be a logical consequence for the WMF giving out these grants (I don't know but wouldn't be surprised if i.e. Ford Foundation has similar requirements), but it clearly is a nasty side effect of the choice of the board to no longer allow chapters to fundraise. Because although it is claimed differently (and although Thomas seems to hope differently) the interpretation by the staff is clearly that no chapter except WMDE should fundraise - no matter how hard they work to improve. The exact reason for this seems to be vague to me. I really do hope the board will step forth and makes clear what their reasoning was and is - and doesn't hide behind staff (board members who already did so are being appreciated, but I'm still missing important voices). Is the reason really transparency? Is it about transferring money? Because that is important, but (sometimes easily) fixable. Or is the reasoning you don't like the projects the chapters work on? Because *then* we should have a discussion about that, and not hide behind non-reasons. Lodewijk 2011/8/29 John Vandenberg <jay...@gmail.com> > On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 2:54 PM, Michael Snow <wikipe...@frontier.com> > wrote: > > On 8/28/2011 9:00 PM, Victor Vasiliev wrote: > >> On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 7:24 AM, Nathan<nawr...@gmail.com> wrote: > >>> Which activities are these? > >> Copyright and internet law lobbying. > > This is incorrect. > > Michael, > > Have you seen the draft Chapters Grant Agreement? > > -- > John Vandenberg > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l