Le 15/04/2014 21:50, Erik Moeller a écrit :
Hi folks,
I'd be interested in hearing broader community opinions about the
extent to which WMF should sponsor non-profits purely to support work
that Wikimedia benefits from, even if it's not directed towards a
specific goal established in a grant agreement.
Indeed that's a good suggestion considering both that they are (when
they are) "organizations/communities that
the Wikimedia movement is indebted to" and the fact that they have much
less easy access to the general public for fundraising than the
Wikimedia movement has through its projects.
In the meantime, in accordance with the significant message of Ting
Chen five days ago ([Wikimedia-l] Funding of decentralized
organizational structure - Thu, 10 Apr 2014 13:23:39 +0200
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-April/071044.html
) I believe that not only the WMF but the chapters should be entitled to
support such organizations for they are often the ones that have the
opportunity to know these organizations locally. The chapters are likely
to be aware of the smooth running, needs or dysfunctioning of some of
these organizations when they operate in the same area, and be more
approachable to them.
This comes up from time to time. One of the few
historic precedents
I'm aware of is the $5,000 donation that WMF made to FreeNode in 2006
[1]. But there are of course many other organizations/communities that
the Wikimedia movement is indebted to.
On the software side, we have Ubuntu Linux (itself highly indebted to
Debian) / Apache / MariaDB / PHP / Varnish / ElasticSearch / memcached
/ Puppet / OpenStack / various libraries and many other dependencies [2],
infrastructure tools like ganglia, observium, icinga, etc. Some of
these projects have nonprofits that accept and seek sponsorship and
support, some don't.
One could easily expand well beyond the software we depend on
server-side to client-side open source applications used by our
community to create content: stuff like Inkscape, GIMP and LibreOffice
(used for diagrams). And there are other communities we depend on,
like OpenStreetMap.
So, should we steer clear of this type of sponsorship altogether
because it's a slippery slope, or should we try to come up with
evaluation criteria to consider it on a case-by-case basis (e.g. is
there a trustworthy non-profit that has a track record of
accomplishment and is in actual need of financial support)?
I could imagine a process with a fixed "giving back" annual budget
and a community nominations/review workflow. It'd be work to create
and I don't want to commit to that yet, but I would be interested to
hear opinions.
MariaDB specifically invited WMF to become a sponsor, and we're
clearly highly dependent on them. But I don't think it makes sense for
us to just write checks if there's someone who asks for support and
there's a justifiable need. However, if there's broad agreement that
this is something Wikimedia should do more of, then I think it's worth
developing more consistent sponsorship criteria.
Thanks,
Erik
[1]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Freenode_Donation
[2] Cf.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Upstream_projects
--
Mathias Damour
49 rue Carnot
F-74000 Annecy
00 33 (0)4 57 09 10 56
00 33 (0)6 27 13 65 51
mathias.damour(a)laposte.net
http://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Astirmays