On 12/31/11 3:21 PM, phoebe ayers wrote:
And, not rhetorically at all, the question of how much to raise is one of the important questions to face us strategically. We are incredibly lucky that we have the ability, through our tremendous readership, to raise a substantial amount of money. We could raise less, certainly, and we could probably raise more (and there are lots of evil tactics to raise more that we won't consider). But every annual planning cycle (it starts up essentially now and goes through the spring) the WMF staff and board has to consider exactly that question -- what should we fund, and is any given new idea worth it, given that it represents donor dollars and fundraiser time? When are we pushing the outer limits of what we can raise? I encourage everyone to think and talk about these questions -- it's not a solved problem, but a complicated and important one.
I do think this is the key issue, and one where I think there many of the stakeholders aren't really on the same page, even in terms of basic starting information. Informally canvassing some of my non-Wikipedian friends and colleagues, the vast majority were under the impression that the purpose of the fundraiser was to raise money to "keep the lights on", more or less: to pay for servers and bandwidth holding the *.wikipedia.org websites, along with some associated stuff like the Wikimedia Commons media repository, and a few programmers and sysadmins to maintain the servers and MediaWiki.
I'd say (nearly?) everyone was pretty surprised when I sort of hemmed and hawed and explained that yes, that's the use of some of the money, but the budget is much larger than just that, and the main purpose of the fundraiser is to raise money for more ambitious projects, like new initiatives, grants to researchers, funding for travel and events, grants to Wikimedia chapters, etc. Some were pretty annoyed, feeling it was a bit of a bait-and-switch: the advertising gave them the impression that their donation was being used to keep wikipedia.org on the air and maintain the servers/software, and they didn't even realize the Wikimedia Foundation did or planned to do any of the other things with their money.
Of course, I'm not the best advocate in such situations, because I'm a bit wary of the direction things are going myself, so tend to give a sort of sheepish shrug in reply, and an explanation that a substantial portion of the money (though perhaps no longer the majority) *does* go to some of the core servers-and-software operations. I do worry things are becoming a bit like a Big Nonprofit, though, even verging onto some NGO ambitions, while not being 100% clear to the outside world that that's the direction we're going--- the outside world still thinks we're struggling to raise money to pay for bandwidth and colo space. I would guess the same is true of many Wikipedians as well; I only recently realized how much the Foundation has grown in the past 3 years, without, as far as I can tell, it ever being an explicit decision to expand scope... just sort of happened. Not entirely comfortable with it, but eh, I guess that's how things go, and it *does* at least still keep the lights on at *.wikipedia.org, which is what I care about.
-Mark