River Tarnell wrote:
i've read your mail twice, but i don't really understand what sort of answers you're looking for. you seem to be more interested in the people side of the problem, e.g. how we can get more people to contribute; is that correct?
My problem is a lack of speed. When I say "geotagging", I want geotagging to happen, but so far it is delayed by this and that. When I want to add interwiki links (using Multichill's suggester), the failed s3 replication delays a large portion of that work. I'm trying to find out what sides there are to this problem. I suspect there is a people side and a money side, and if we can solve these, the technical side will just be fun to solve. Maybe there is a legal side too.
if you have specific technical questions/problems, i can answer those, or explain why things are as they are.
I have tons of these, but I'll save them for another thread.
as far as resources go: yes, we're short of money. we have just about enough to keep the toolserver running most of the time, but with more money it could be a lot more reliable (and faster).
How does this money flow? Does the toolserver have a budget of its own? A balance sheet that shows what you've used the money for? Is the server wholly owned by Wikimedia Deutschland? They're hardly short of money, are they?
Unfortunately I don't sit on a lot of money, but I have contacts that can be used for finding funding.
we are also very short of admin time, in part because the WMF won't allow us to add any more admins until they've moved their private databases to a new cluster, which is taking a long time. (Werdna recently gained access to those databases by working for the WMF, which is why we were able to give him root access.)
Ah, always this WMF bottleneck. While we're waiting, could we send someone more along Werdna's path? Are the current admins doing some tasks that can be delegated to unprivileged users?
Are there some projects that only use database dumps, and no replicated data, that could run on a separate (low security) server with a more liberal admin policy?
i've started asking other chapters for funding; our ZWS license was purchased by wikimedia.fr, for example. but this is a slow process, and most chapters want to know exact (or at least roughly accurate) figures before they can decide whether they can help. this means we need to know what we want, and that means someone (which will probably end up being me) needs to sit down and work it out.
Yes, probably. Is there a budget, a balance sheet, a bank account? On the Toolserver Wiki, the donation page asks for donations to be sent to Wikimedia Deutschland or WMF. If both organizations have a problem to send money out of their countries, that seems suboptimal.
the main problem with having chapters buy stuff is most countries restrict how a non-profit organisation can transfer funds/assets, in most cases forbidding them to simply buy hardware and give it to the WMF or wikimedia.de. this means we could end up with 20 servers, each owned by a different chapter, which makes support/RMA/etc. a nightmare.
Fortunately, the Swedish chapter doesn't have any such restrictions. (There's no tax exemption in Sweden anyway.) So far, we have been more active in other areas than fundraising, but we still asked if we could send $2K of our surplus to WMF. That request was turned down, so we're now looking for some other goal. We'll probably support travel costs for the chapter meeting.
As a chapter, we have a need to present our achievments at some exhibitions and conferences in September-November. So if we can spend money now that makes a difference during spring/summer, that would be optimal. As a Swedish chapter, we need to present how our achievments have helped free knowledge in Sweden. A better infrastructure for WikiMiniMaps, for example, would do just that. We have to support Sweden, but we're not forbidden to help others.
Our next chapter board meeting is on Monday evening, March 2. Do you have any suggestion I should bring forward?