Oliver Keyes wrote:
... Extrapolation is not a particularly useful method to use for the budget, because it assumes endless exponential growth.
I agree. Formal budgeting usually shouldn't extend further than three to five years in the nonprofit sector (long-term budgeting is unavoidable in government and some industry.) However, here are a couple illustrations of some reasons I believe a ten year extrapolation of Foundation fundraising is completely reasonable: http://imgur.com/a/mV72T
... I can't see what we'd actually /do/ with 3 billion dollars
I used to be in favor of a establishing an endowment with a sufficient perpetuity, and then halting fundraising forever, but I have changed my mind. I think the Foundation should continue to raise money indefinitely to pay people for this task: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service
That is equivalent to a general computer-aided instruction system, with the side effects of both improving the encyclopedia and making counter-vandalism bots more accurate. As an anonymous crowdsourced review system based on consensus voting instead of editorial judgement, it leaves the Foundation immunized with their safe harbor provisions regarding content control intact.
Best regards, James Salsman
I have one or two ideas about what to do with 3 billion US Dollar. It would be a huge step towards some of my stretch goals for the movement.
On Fri Jan 02 2015 at 12:08:43 PM James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Oliver Keyes wrote:
... Extrapolation is not a particularly useful method to use for the budget, because it assumes endless exponential growth.
I agree. Formal budgeting usually shouldn't extend further than three to five years in the nonprofit sector (long-term budgeting is unavoidable in government and some industry.) However, here are a couple illustrations of some reasons I believe a ten year extrapolation of Foundation fundraising is completely reasonable: http://imgur.com/a/mV72T
... I can't see what we'd actually /do/ with 3 billion dollars
I used to be in favor of a establishing an endowment with a sufficient perpetuity, and then halting fundraising forever, but I have changed my mind. I think the Foundation should continue to raise money indefinitely to pay people for this task: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service
That is equivalent to a general computer-aided instruction system, with the side effects of both improving the encyclopedia and making counter-vandalism bots more accurate. As an anonymous crowdsourced review system based on consensus voting instead of editorial judgement, it leaves the Foundation immunized with their safe harbor provisions regarding content control intact.
Best regards, James Salsman
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Denny Vrandečić, 02/01/2015 21:17:
I have one or two ideas about what to do with 3 billion US Dollar. It would be a huge step towards some of my stretch goals for the movement.
:) 3 billions are not that much money, for instance they're only enough to pay 6 months of operating costs of a poor and small university system like Italy's. ;-) But yet, if not managed by us they could be very useful for some neglected Wikimedia projects.
I wonder if Jean-Claude Juncker is short of ideas to go from 315 to 400 G€ investments... should someone investigate? Up to 50-100 G€ I don't have big issues imagining educational programs, beyond that I'd have to think a bit.
Nemo
Dear all,
Happy new year. I'm very sorry and with all due respect, I'm guessing this is getting a bit off-topic. Let me kindly remind that this is the Wiki-research mailing list. Thanks and have a wonderful year ahead! .Taha
On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 10:28 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Denny Vrandečić, 02/01/2015 21:17:
I have one or two ideas about what to do with 3 billion US Dollar. It would be a huge step towards some of my stretch goals for the movement.
:) 3 billions are not that much money, for instance they're only enough to pay 6 months of operating costs of a poor and small university system like Italy's. ;-) But yet, if not managed by us they could be very useful for some neglected Wikimedia projects.
I wonder if Jean-Claude Juncker is short of ideas to go from 315 to 400 G€ investments... should someone investigate? Up to 50-100 G€ I don't have big issues imagining educational programs, beyond that I'd have to think a bit.
Nemo
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On 2 January 2015 at 15:08, James Salsman jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
Oliver Keyes wrote:
... Extrapolation is not a particularly useful method to use for the budget, because it assumes endless exponential growth.
I agree. Formal budgeting usually shouldn't extend further than three to five years in the nonprofit sector (long-term budgeting is unavoidable in government and some industry.) However, here are a couple illustrations of some reasons I believe a ten year extrapolation of Foundation fundraising is completely reasonable: http://imgur.com/a/mV72T
Words tend to be more useful than contextless images.
... I can't see what we'd actually /do/ with 3 billion dollars
I used to be in favor of a establishing an endowment with a sufficient perpetuity, and then halting fundraising forever, but I have changed my mind. I think the Foundation should continue to raise money indefinitely to pay people for this task: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service
That is equivalent to a general computer-aided instruction system, with the side effects of both improving the encyclopedia and making counter-vandalism bots more accurate. As an anonymous crowdsourced review system based on consensus voting instead of editorial judgement, it leaves the Foundation immunized with their safe harbor provisions regarding content control intact.
It's also not worth 3 billion dollars (no offence, Aaron!) as evidenced by the fact that it can be established with <20k.
This is not a discussion for research-l, this is a discussion for (at best) Wikimedia-l - and I have to say that I don't feel it's at all useful even /there/, but it is at least in context. Spending time discussing pie-in-the-sky "what would we do if we had 3 billion dollars" ideas is all well and nice, but I prefer to think that time is better spent doing research with the resources we have now, and editing with the resources we have now, and making pitches for additional resources as and when they become available. So on that note: I'm going to go off and do that.
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