Hi Pine,
Thanks for your questions.
On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 1:27 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks for the announcement.
I see that membership has a minimum price of $2,000 per year. Why is there
a fee to join the organization?
Because money is the main focus of this organization - specifically,
getting funds from organizational users of the software and putting it to
use in development, evangelism, etc. Of course, a lot of development and
evangelism can be done for free, but that's not the main focus of the EMC.
There are other organizations that handle volunteer efforts at improving
parts of "enterprise MediaWiki", most notably the MediaWiki Stakeholders'
Group:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_Stakeholders%27_Group
Is the organization a 501(c)(3)?
No, but the hope is for it to become an official nonprofit, either by
becoming a 501(c)(3) or via another route. In the last few years the IRS
has apparently been less willing to give 501(c)(3) status to open-source
software organizations like this one, with some high-profile rejections
like the OpenStack Foundation. I haven't tried applying to the IRS yet,
though, so we'll see.
Who are the owners or directors of the organization?
At the moment, I'm the sole owner and director.
-Yaron
Thank you,
Pine
On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 7:49 AM, Yaron Koren <yaron(a)wikiworks.com> wrote:
Hi,
I'm very excited to announce the launch of the Enterprise MediaWiki
Consortium (EMC), an organization devoted to supporting and maintaining
"enterprise MediaWiki" software.
As you may know, a lot of open-source software has some sort of
organization or foundation that is intended to pool money from users of
the
software toward developers. MediaWiki is in an
unusual situation: it is
funded by the Wikimedia Foundation (and, to a lesser extent, Wikimedia
Deutschland and others), but those organizations' primary allegiance is
to
software that runs on Wikimedia sites. That
leaves a lot of
MediaWiki-related software (extensions, skins, etc.) that is mostly
intended for use on non-Wikimedia sites, i.e. "enterprise" uses: some of
this software has significant usage, but very little of it has
institutional support.
That is where the Enterprise MediaWiki Consortium fits in. It is intended
to fund the development of extensions and other software that otherwise
has
no funding source. The set of software being
funded is entirely up to the
membership of the EMC, and of course the amount of support that can be
provided depends on the amount of money that members contribute - an
amount
that will hopefully grow over time.
If you belong to an organization, company or website that makes use of
MediaWiki - and specifically, of MediaWiki-related software not used on
Wikimedia sites - please consider joining the Enterprise MediaWiki
Consortium - to provide much-needed support for the software you use, and
to have a greater say in shaping its future.
You can read more about the EMC here:
http://enterprisemediawikiconsortium.org/
-Yaron
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