Wales's term was set to expire on December 31, along with two other trustees. The board of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia's parent organization, is supposed to have 10 board members, half appointed and half elected. It currently has two elected members — Kat Walsh, a Virginia law student, and Ting Chen, a gay Chinese programmer working for IBM in Germany — and two temporary appointees. According to the foundation's bylaws, it requires a quorum — at least five trustees — to take any action other than appointing new members. On December 28, with days left to go, the board announced the reappointment of the three expiring board members on an obscure mailing list — a move that the board's chair, Michael Snow, only saw fit to make public on the foundation website's nearly a week later (after the publication of an earlier version of this post, and followup reporting by CNET News). Five of the ten board seats remain empty or filled by seatwarmers.

How did Wales come to this embarrassing pass? The former porn merchant and options trader, who has traded sex and money for his help in getting Wikipedia entries edited, has met his Machiavellian match, in the form of Sue Gardner, a Gothy, spider-tattooed Canadian pop-culture expert who now runs the site he helped start as Wikimedia's executive director.

Incompetence and infighting are endemic to nonprofits, of course. But Wikipedia's bureaucracy is distinctly, fearsomely awful. The site, which dictates the online reputation of countless living people and companies, itself operates by rules that are completely incomprehensible, determined by a self-appointed group of volunteer editors who can seldom stop arguing over obscurities to explain their ways to outsiders.

No one should be surprised, then, that Wikipedia's overseers are so hobbled that they can't even fill vacancies on the board — a situation Gardner has exploited expertly.

The Wikimedia Foundation is celebrating the fact that it has just badgered Wikipedia users with a sitewide telethon — featuring Wales — into filling its $6.1 million budget. Donors have just handed a blank check to Gardner.

She has a cushy job: The former Canadian journalist has $6 million to spend, with no functional supervision. And Gardner managed to get herself on the board's nominating committee, so she gets to pick her own bosses — a conflict of interest so ridiculous it beggars the imagination.

Wikipedia is now running ads thanking Wales for his help with Wikipedia's fundraising. Wales has held onto his special "community founder" board seat all his own, now that the board has gotten around to reappointing him — but the move required Gardner's consent.

(Photo of Wales via Wikipedia Commons; photo of Gardner via Seattle Times)

If so, Wales makes for an unlikely Jerry Lewis. The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation is trying to raise $6 million to fund its operations — chief among them Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone with more time than sense can edit. Wikipedia does not run ads, instead relying on contributions from Wikipedia's users.

But Wales has had more luck drumming up donations from wealthy venture capitalists scheming to make money off of Wikipedia volunteers' articles than from ordinary users. Of the $3.9 million that has come in, $2.6 million came from already announced donations; half that amount has come from the fundraising drive.

We have to wonder: Is the problem Wikipedia's pitchman? Wales profits handsomely from his Wikipedia connection, parlaying his status as the site's cofounder into a lucrative speaking career. And he's also used his sway over Wikipedia's volunteer editors to get himself laid, most notably by Rachel Marsden, the Canadian political commentator who some say is the Great White North's answer to Ann Coulter. The junkets, paid for by sponsors, suit his taste for jet-setting, but conflict with the man-of-the-people image he needs to beg for money.

Unfortunately, he's the best Wikipedia has got. The Wikimedia Foundation's executive director, Sue Gardner, a Canadian pop-culture journalist with a thin resume, is actively scheming to supplant him as Wikipedia's public face, but she's embarrassed herself by defending Wales's sleazy sex hijinks and hasn't otherwise made much of a public impact.

So here's a notion: Why not have Marsden, Wales's former paramour, give it a try? She's a proven television presence with a knack for driving controversy. (Sure, she was escorted out of Fox's offices, but she says that was all a misunderstanding!) And she's proven herself to be very interested in what Wikipedia has to say about her — to the point that she was willing to bed Wales to get her entry edited. That's the kind of passion Wikipedia's fundraising needs!

Everywun, a new website, lets users display badges on their blogs and social-network profiles indicating their support for a cause. Their friends will click on them. If they get enough clicks, some charity will magically get money from someone else.

That someone else is, conveniently, an advertiser. Ad-supported charity! Why not? The only problem with that notion is that advertisers are disappearing fast, and spending on experimental social-network websites is the kind of thing that gets hit hardest in a recession.

Everywun itself is a venture capital-supported charity at present. If the three-person company has signed up any actual sponsors, they're not visible on the site. It is planning to give away $100,000 of its investors' cash to nonprofits, if it gets 100,000 badges posted online. So far, it has 454.

The post on the blog didn't use the opportunity to solicit support for their fellow runner Chelsee Caskey, an 18-year old from Lincoln High School in Portland, who was the first person to be hit by a car in the 27-year old event's history. Caskey is still in the hospital in serious condition, while the driver of the car was booked for reckless driving and being under the influence of drugs. Donations to help defray her medical costs can be made at any Washington Mutual branch — like the one at Castro and El Camino in Mountain View.

A more curious omission: The team's name does not appear on a list of fundraisers for the American Cancer Society, the chosen beneficiary for team donations. If Google did any good by letting employees run the race, it's not mentioned in the blog post or anywhere else. Way to go, Googlers — you might have nearly won the race, but you managed to lose the point.

The foundation's two main programs are the 11th Hour Project, an organization which publishes links to information it deems "scientific" about global warming, and Greenhound LLC, a bus operator on Nantucket Island. Schmidt is the founder of the 11th Hour Project, and a longtime summer resident of Nantucket, where she is also an investor in downtown real estate.

Both superficially good causes. But if Eric wanted to give Wendy, who has a master's in journalism from Berkeley, a job writing environmental press releases, why didn't he just hire her at Google, as he did with ex-girlfriend Marcy Simon? And if the Schmidts want to boost the value of their Nantucket real estate with bus service, why don't they just pay for it themselves, rather than with the help of a tax-exempt charitable foundation?

Eric Schmidt complains about the lack of investigative journalism today. This seems like a good place to start. Compared to Bill and Melinda Gates, whose charity reaches around the globe, the Schmidts don't just come across as small-hearted. They look downright unimaginative.

I am very proud of this project as it was a challenging one. I had to "dress up" (in addition to furniture, art accessories, a new lighting plan and flooring as well as stage it) almost 4,000 sqf in one month in order to fulfill my client's as well as Fox's network criteria as the penthouse used to film part of the Secret Millionaire show airing in fall. Fox was thrilled with the way it turned out(as they described it- it looked like a "movie set")

Never mind the contributions of such scientists as Alan Turing to computing and cryptography, two rather key elements in the development of the Internet. Still, if that's a stipulation of the foundation for funding, it only makes clear how Bill Gates and company are using the nonprofit to invest in Microsoft's strategies by other means — and putting ex-Microsoft executives out to pasture there, rather than hiring experienced philanthropists. (Photo by Marcin Wichary)

*Wikimedia Foundation Receives $500K Donation*

''Vinod and Neeru Khosla, innovators in educational outreach, provide financial support to the Wikimedia Foundation.''

San Francisco, CA - March 24, 2008 - The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, is delighted to announce it has received a $500,000 donation from philanthropists Vinod and Neeru Khosla.

"We are thrilled and very grateful," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "Vinod and Neeru share the Wikimedia Foundation's vision: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Today, they have moved us closer to making that vision a reality."

"Vinod and I are proud to help Wikipedia, a valuable global educational resource," said Neeru Khosla, co-founder and chair of CK12, a non-profit organization supporting the worldwide creation of "flexbooks," collaborative, open-source textbooks. "Wikipedia proves that mass collaboration works, and that small investments can reap extraordinary returns. We are happy to be a part of it."

The gift comes at a critical time in the history of Wikimedia, which has just relocated to San Francisco to be closer to Bay Area technical talent, like-minded non-profit organizations, and educational and research institutions.

"Moving to San Francisco was an essential step in the maturing of the organization," said Gardner. "Now that we are here, and have built a great team of smart people, we're well-positioned to make significant progress."

Wikipedia, the world's largest encyclopedia and one of the 10 most popular websites world-wide, is written, edited and maintained entirely by a global community of thousands of volunteers. It was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales. The Wikimedia Foundation, founded in 2003, has a staff of 15, and provides organizational support for Wikipedia and eight other collaboratively-created information projects.

In coming years, the Wikimedia Foundation plans to launch outreach projects designed to encourage contributions to Wikipedia from targeted groups such as academics, speakers of small languages, people in developing nations and older people. It also plans to increase the distribution of material from Wikipedia and its other projects in non-web-based formats such as DVDs and books, to provide information for people who are not online.

Far more important than the amount of money you put in is the way you nurture the work that you do. The way you conceive it. The way you think about it strategically. The people that you get to work with to, ah, to tackle a problem.

Pixel Qi will produce the cheap, low-energy, sunlight-readable display used in Negroponte's charity computer for use in laptops, portable devices, and mobile phones. The startup will also use its design expertise to create other low-power computer components. Jespen is the chief inventor of the screens, the most unique component used in Negroponte's OLPC. With the industry increasing focus on low-cost, energy-efficient components, Jespen may have the making of a successful business. However, the entrepreneur and engineer hasn't completely woken from the philanthropic dreams of OLPC. Pixel Qi will continue to provide Negroponte's nonprofit with screens at cost while pursuing its own goal of producing an even cheaper, for-profit laptop. At the same time, it may well make OLPC irrelevant. Greed is good — even when it comes to helping third-world children.

Ostensibly it's because Lilly wants attention focused on Mozilla's army of unpaid volunteers, who help write code for Firefox. But I can think of another reason why Lilly wants to deflect attention away from Mozilla's operations.

The foundation which owns Mozilla recently won approval for "public charity" status. That seems odd, when Mitchell Baker, Lilly's predecessor as CEO, is pulling down a $500,000 salary, and Firefox is making tens of millions of dollars for Mozilla. The test for a public charity, under the tax code, is that it must have substantial support from the outside.

In reality, the Mozilla Foundation is almost entirely supported by the profits of its wholly owned corproration. But the IRS allows nonprofits to look back over several years. One-third of its support must come from donations to qualify as a public charity. Here's the relevant line of Mozilla's voluminous tax filings:

Note that bottom line: Mozilla squeaked over the one-thirds line by a mere 0.12 percent. Suspiciously close. The consequences, if it hadn't just met the required number, would have been severe: Mozilla would have been forced to pay out a substantial portion of its endowment every year. To this day, it retains substantial monies in a reserve fund for just such an event.

There are other tests Mozilla could apply to retain public-charity status — what's called "facts and circumstances," Frank Hecker, the foundation's executive director, told me in November.

Let's talk facts and circumstances, then: The facts are that Mozilla is gushing money, thanks to its search deals. The circumstances are that Mozilla would prefer to retain as much money internally as possible, rather than have to spend it.

This may well be for the good. Firefox is an excellent browser, and open source a worthy cause. But wishing that this all would be "invisible," as Lilly hopes, and hiding behind the legalities of the tax code, as Hecker, in my opinion, sought to do, is unseemly. And unworthy of Mozilla's high purposes.

Mozilla may qualify, just barely, as a "public charity." But it's hardly a charity case. By his statements, I'd say Lilly is unqualified to be the CEO of Mozilla. The community of developers, and larger community of users, deserve a leader who embraces transparency, not invisibility. And someone who will give real answers about Mozilla's finances.

• Gates Foundation money creates demand for specially trained clinicians, creating a "brain drain" from basic care
• The focus on AIDS, measles and malaria leaves basic needs such as nutrition and transportation unmet
• Gates-funded vaccines instruct patients not to discuss ailments the vaccines cannot cure

You had it right with the burger-joint panhandler, Bill: Giving money away is a thankless affair.

(Photo by AP/Seth Wenig)