[Foundation-l] Putting the Foundation back in WMF

[Thomas Dalton]

On 17/11/2007, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> Endowments and contingency funds are nice, but right now that's all
> academic.
>
> After 26 days this drive is at $725k.  Even running the drive for the
> planned 2 months, nearly 80% longer than the longest previous drive, it will
> be a huge surprise to come anywhere close to the $4.6M the foundation wrote
> down for their "budget".
> Rather than talking about how to put money away for the future, the
> immediate discussion needs to be  A) how to raise money more effectively,
> and/or B) how to make do with less.

A good point. The easiest way I can see to spend less in the short
term is to delay the move to SF. I haven't done the sums, so I don't
know if that would be enough, but it would help. There are a lot of
benefits to the move, but right now it would appear we simply can't
afford it unless things greatly change. The other big expenditure is
the appointment of an ED, but I'm not sure delaying that would be a
good idea - we're never going to have a stable foundation until we
sort out the governance.