Hello, On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 4:58 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> wrote: > One of the reasons, for many the only reason for giving a\t the annual > fundraising drive is exactly to provide money to maintain our > infrastructure. Take that away and you take away the reason to give.
That's a bit like the old joke that the best way to raise money is to take the site down. Yes, it works, but with some essential drawbacks :-) We're not holding the servers ransom. > If you seek assurances, there are > other methods that will not be damaging in this way. I'd like to hear what you have in mind. Yes, there are other ways to improve reliability and long-term support. (As you often point out, projects other than Wikipedia are at more risk than WP.) Sebastian Moleski writes: > Let's say that we want to cover half of the current year's technology budget I would start with one aspect of fundamental infrastructure, and build out from there as a dedicated fund grows. For instance, start with our downloads and live-feed infrastructure, and that portion of our bandwidth. We might be able to cover that with half the interest from our current reserve. Moreover, making it a priority for us to be *able* to support this from a dedicated fund would encourage a focus on reducing the costs of the most-critical infrastructure. As an example: we do not make a point of setting up torrents of our large files. This would both increase download speed for many downloaders (improve our core service) and reduce our central costs. Sebastian writes: > In general, I think the arguments made against pursuing a general endowment > are sound, at least for the moment. < > Personally, I think we should an endowment drive when we've found our > donation revenue, but also our operational spending to approximately level > off. One can always keep increasing operational spending. Reserves or long-term funds should grow in tandem with those increases -- otherwise as we come to rely on this new spending, there is additional risk that efforts may collapse if funding dries up. Example: the coming year's Annual Plan includes a 50% drop in our effective reserve -- the reserve is staying the same while the annual budget doubles. Regardless of what we do with reserves and long-term funds, keeping the projects online forever was the premise of the last fundraiser. We have an immediate obligation to make progress towards that goal. A new datacenter will help, but I'd like to see specific long-term forecasts and plans published. SJ _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
