On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 7:09 AM, Tim Landscheidt
<tim@tim-landscheidt.de> wrote:
John at Darkstar <
vacuum@jeb.no> wrote:
> A donation to a chapter within one jurisdiction is not something that is
> easily moved to another chapter in another jurisdiction.
Why? If a chapter can pay a hosting company for their servi-
ces with a donation, they should be able to pay WMDE for
their services as well. There is no need to "move a donation
to another jurisdiction".
Well, this ignores the political and logistical sensitivities involved in paying WMDE from outside of DE.
While nothing prevents a chapter from opting to pay WMDE for this service, I'm sure some members/contributors would be annoyed their monies are going "out of country" when there are perfectly good hosting services "in our back yard". I'm not sure on the legalities of Charities in all jurisdictions, but this could also restrict/prevent a chapter registered as a charity from sending money out of country.
In the end, I do not think that hardware ressources are an
issue with the (current) toolserver. With the backup data-
base servers on the horizon, replication should become more
than good enough. What needs to be done, and River has
pointed repeatedly in that direction, is to work on the
tools themselves: Make them "stable", make them user-friend-
ly, identify stuff that should better be integrated into Me-
diaWiki (interwiki bots, Templatetiger, Geohack, etc.), etc.
Some projects have "bounties" or pay people to improve/fix parts of tools. This might be something that chapters could do more easily. Just an idea on how to get money from chapters who want to contribute to things -- and having a web page somewhere that says "This tool sponsored in part by the ZZ Chapter" lets members see where money is going. Just a thought, anyways.
Gerald.