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?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se
Wikimedia Sverige - stöd fri kunskap -
http://wikimedia.se/