Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 02:15, 7 September 2006

Disputed Content/NPOV Concerns

I'm Robert Levin, executive director of Peer-Directed Projects Center. We run freenode and I spoke on it to several Misplaced Pages contributors about some aspects of this article which disturb me, and don't seem to reflect a neutral point of view.

(1) The article says that our website *describes* us as an IRS 501(c)(3) tax exempt corporation. We are listed on , which is a joint project with the Urban Institute. To be listed on that site, you must *be* recognized by the IRS as a section 501(c)(3) corporation. We faxed them our letter of recognition and they found us in the database. We are a nonprofit corporation in Texas and to be recognized by the IRS in this way, again, you must *be* a not-for-profit entity registered in one of the states.

(2) The article says that "their website leads people to believe" that we'll be working on other charitable projects. The only difference between "their website leads people to believe" and "their website says", as far as I can tell, is that the latter seems to be NPOV, and the former doesn't. For what it's worth, the closest we have come to other charitable projects so far is that the current year's fundraiser includes a passthrough to UNICEF for tsunami relief. As the sole employee, and only working full time at PDPC since October, I can tell you that we're not very far along yet on other projects. Freenode has consumed most of my attention. But the wording doesn't seem to reflect NPOV.

(3) "Despite the official nature of the PDPC, they run with only one full-time paid staffer, the President and Executive Director Rob Levin."

I'm currently a member of the board, as president, but I am not paid a salary as a board member. That's not appropriate for a not-for-profit org. The position of "executive director" is a day-to-day management position, essentially that of "CEO". I accepted that position on a volunteer basis in July of 2002 pursuant to a board resolution (I abstained). The resolution expressed the intent to hire me on a salaried basis when funding was available. I began work as a salaried employee in October of 2004. I'm paid $16K/year. You should decide which of these details belongs in the article, but in my opinion a more neutral wording for the above would be:

"PDPC is still extremely small. Its only paid staffer is its executive director, Robert Levin."

(4) "Other unpaid volunteer staff for the 2005 period include Christopher Mills (Treasurer), Seth Schoen (Secretary) and Phil Stracchino (Consulting Systems Administrator), and the freenode IRC Network volunteer staff."

Not-for-profit org board members are generally not paid to act in that capacity. Our board members are no exception. However, they're usually listed separately from other volunteers, since they serve in a legal capacity. Perhaps:

"The current board members of PDPC are:

Robert Levin President

Christopher Mills Treasurer

Seth Schoen Secretary

Phil Stracchino"

Phil does not work for us in the capacity of "consulting systems administrator"; that's his day job. He is on the board but has not been elected to perform a board role such as "Treasurer" or "Secretary".

(5) "In order to find funds, the PDPC has recently conducted waves of fundraising campaigns based around the freenode IRC Network. Supporters who donated supported the freenode IRC Network in funding it's growth."

We held a fundraiser in 2002. It was pretty small, though I believe it went on for a few months. We held a fundraiser in 2003 to fund the 2004-2005 fiscal year. It was moderately successful. We've held a fundraiser this year to fund the 2005-2006 fiscal year. It's been a bit more successful. The last fundraiser took about 5 months to reach its goals; this one is still ongoing but is taking longer.

So we currently hold one fundraiser a year to fund our operating budget The fundraisers are not very heavily publicized and their impact is minimal. This year about 350 persons and groups have donated, so far, out of the 25,000-or-so users of freenode.

"Waves of fundraising campaigns" does not seem to reflect NPOV.

(6) "In 2004 the PDPC began to establish formal support levels for users of the network, as well as cloaks to promote donation. Their fiscal year starts on July 1."

I've renamed this to "donor levels" on our web page because it seems clearer. We do not provide different support for users based on their donating, or not donating, to PDPC. We do provide cloaks to acknowledge donations, and to make people more aware of the idea of donating. One reason that we emphasize that wearing the cloaks does *us* a favor is to make sure people don't see the cloaks as being some special privilege. We don't sell cloaks; users who do not donate to PDPC or participate in a cloaked group (such as the Misplaced Pages project) can get generic ".user" cloaks, and there is no charge. PDPC donor cloaks differ from .user cloaks only in that they acknowledge that the cloaked user has made a donation. "Promote" doesn't seem to be an entirely neutral word.

Yes, the fiscal year starts July 1.

(7) "The Register provides insight into PDPC: Buy a piece of net"

The link to the article on The Register does not mention that the article is not written in NPOV. It starts:

"If you've got $5,000 to spare, you could buy a piece of Net nostalgia in the form of the OpenProjects .net, .com and .org domains.

Owner, founder of the OpenProjects Network (OPN) and professional online beggar Rob Levin, has decided to put them up for sale on eBay (all the sites in question point to the auction entry)."

"Professional online beggar" does not reflect NPOV and, in fact, "critical" doesn't even begin to describe the article. It links to the Freenode FAQ once and to a satire site about me. I'm not questioning the validity of adding an external link for a critical article to a Misplaced Pages article. I *am* questioning the validity of adding *this* link, because of the minimal amount of actual attributed, solid content in the article, and because the focus of the article is mostly on me as an individual, with the exception of a few unattributed and undocumented charges about PDPC.

That's all I have. If someone could take a look at this disputed content, I'd appreciate it! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.173.235.14 (talk • contribs) 24 June 2005 (UTC)

IRS Information

For proof of edit, please refer to the IRS Search Engine and enter "Peer Directed Projects Center" and note the respective entry. (Unsigned entry by someone)

To back up anonymous, the IRS database mentioned above says the PDPC stopped being a non-profit in June 2006. To get the data, set the search type to "Starts with", search for "Peer Directed Projects Center" in "Houston" "TX" and hit search. It will return exactly one non-profit, "Peer Directed Projects Center (Until June 2006)". I am now editing the wiki article to reflect this (and will aggressively roll back any changes that state otherwise until the PDPC re-registers as a non-profit and Rob can prove so to the public). Diablo-D3 10:38, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Their ruling period simply expired in June 2006, and they have 90 days in which to file paperwork in order to keep their nonprofit status. Please research properly before you add untruths to articles. - Mark 02:15, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Article needing cleanup

This article is very POV. Almost a brochure for PDPC donators. I am going to attempt to clean out some of the not-notable information (donators receive user cloaks? these are free on most ircnets. Nor does it even attempt to explain what usercloaks are. Definitely not encyclopedic) and add relevant criticisms. --Weevlos 22:23, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Only one person?

The opening sentence declares, "The PDPC is an organisation led and solely operated by Rob Levin..." yet the infobox lists 4 'key people'. That doesn't make much sense. Neither does deleting an entire Talk page en masse; ostensibly it is part of the article's history. — VoxLuna   10:45, 3 August 2006 (UTC)

Concurred (and now revived). The (formerly-)deleted content, ostensibly by Rob himself, explains the leadership issue. I've rewritten the first sentence to resolve the contradiction. DMacks 06:57, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Removed criticism section

I removed the criticism section because of what was said there can't (and wasn't substantiated) and the flow of the section was polemic rather than encyclopedic (and once that was removed there really wasn't anything left except basically repeating a Register article. The Register can publish whatever it likes but there's no real reason for us to repeat it because they did.

The only other items there were security problems at Freenode, "documented" by slashdot posts and blog entries--terrible sources for anything.

As far as I can tell, PDPC just doesn't have enough notoriety to have generated "criticisms" or "controversy" in any meaningful way.

Demi /_C 03:50, 1 September 2006 (UTC)