[Foundation-l] 2010-11 Annual Plan Now Posted to FoundationWebsite

[Samuel J Klein]

Hello,

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 4:58 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at 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