Anybody see this news on the Foundation list?



Sue Gardner already shaking things up. What will this mean, legally? What about staff who won't or can't make the move? Nice that WMF will be that much closer in proximity to Wikia, Inc., huh?

Oh, wait, there is later this drivel:



Keep telling those Big Lies, Florence -- the world is beginning to believe them.

Greg

Bumping my own thread, because I think it's important news.

Also, if you continue reading that Foundation list thread, you get the distinct impression that when Sebastian Moleski said...



He actually pretty much nailed it, as evidenced by Sue's later request for list readers to e-mail her with suggestions of which neighborhoods in San Francisco might be suitable for the headquarters. Wouldn't a "professional" search have already scoped out the cities in enough detail to already have an idea of where to plunk down the headquarters?

The more I read on that Foundation list thread, the more I absolutely believe that San Francisco was selected on an "ok, sounds great!" kind of decision-making process.

Greg

It is important news, but I just do not know what to make of it. I was going to post it to see what Daniel Brandt and you (Greg) thought about it.

Brandt will know what it all means. He will show us the way.

Greg

It probably means that San Francisco is more fun than St.Petersburg, and even more fun than Canada, and now Sue Gardner has figured out how to make it happen.

I wonder what the difference is in cost-of-living is between SF and St.Petersburg? My guess is that SF is at least double. That will keep the riff-raff from stopping by the office to chat about Cary's tattoos, or about BADSITES, or whatever the hell it is that they talk about.

Legally, it won't make much difference anytime soon. To leave Florida behind legally, they'd have to reincorporate outside of Florida (Delaware is preferred by shady operators), and they'd probably have to move their servers out of the state also. They'll have to file to operate as a "foreign corporation" in California (where "foreign" means out-of-state), but that shouldn't be a problem.

One or the other. If they reincorporated they wouldn't be a foreign corporation. Most states now model their corporate laws after shady Delaware anyway. They would lose Florida's unusual "non-profit volunteer immunity" law but it not clear that applies if the volunteer is outside the state in any event.

If that was a goal, moving to San Francisco was the wrong thing to do. Simple experiment: Have you ever met someone from St. Petersburg? How about San Francisco? Right. It's far more likely some bored techies will drop by for coffee when they're in SF than when they're at the ass end of America. That's probably deliberate; it's much easier to hire when you're located somewhere people want to live. Just to throw it out there, I'd watch for some new hires in the next couple of months.

Along those lines, I wonder if Brion will be leaving. The whole "single user login" charade for the last several *years* has got to be annoying more than a few people. Am I overly harsh in thinking the CTO of a company should be held responsible such complete and utter failure?

I've got visions of Der Jimbo giving some hippy-drippy "freedom" speech to his disciples in front of the bison in Golden Gate Park, before being heckled down by Awbrey howling Ginsberg poetry at him through a loud hailer.

I hope the local San Franciscans give Jimbo a good reception:

Didn't Bezos try to take on Google with a search engine too, with some Silicon Valley skunkworks? Ain't Jimbo claiming he's going searchin' too? Get in line behind Yahoo and MSN and AskJesus...er Jeeves, Jimmy boy. Just admit you really want Wikipedia to become Wikigooglepedia so you can get a real piece of the Mark Cuban (as in selling a worthless piece of billion dollar crap to a dot com with too much money on its hands) buyout action. The posturing is amusing though!

But the real question, is how will WP's new homeboys on Castro St. feel about Guy Chaps' turdburgling?