Hoi, When you consider the source of much of the donations, you will find that they have been coming mainly from the United States. Chapters are becoming more and more active in fundraising. The Dutch chapter for instance plans on professionalising its operations and fundraising staff has the highest priority. It performed much better, one of the reasons is that IDEAL, a payment method for the Internet in the Netherlands, was implemented. I am sure that with increased support from the WMF not only but also the Dutch will raise substantially more money this time around.
When you ask for an endowment, you indicate an opinion that the current levels of support for our projects suffice. I do not share that opinion and, I am happy to find indications in the planning that this opinion is supported in the plans for 2010/11. Milos and myself will talk in Gdansk about the need to improve technical support for our smallest projects (think Hindi, Malayalam... hundreds of million people will benefit..). Some of it is hard core language support and some are changes to operating projects in order to raise traffic and usability for readers.
The WMF has defined in its strategy that certain types of activity are left to the chapters. GLAM related activities come to mind. This means that the chapters will seek funding for exactly such projects. In the case of the Dutch chapter a project is planned about monuments and a GLAM conference is also in the planning stages.
What I am also looking for is improved support for projects like the recent Indonesian contest. They have set the standard for a competition involving universities. They doubled the number of active editors and 60% of them is female. This is the kind of ratio that compares well with the division of the genders in universities in Indonesia. This project only involved universities in Djakarta, next year could be a national competition.. When you consider that the Indonesian Wikipedias are among the fastest growing projects, I would even consider this a strategic choice.
If there is one thing that I find problematic, it is that the WMF office can be observed to operate a dual role; it is the world wide office for the Wikimedia Foundation and it behaves very much like a chapter. If there is one thing I would appreciate it would be if these two activities are separated. This would imho be best realised with the creation of an USA chapter. Thanks, GerardM
On 30 June 2010 02:33, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 4:16 PM, Veronique Kessler vkessler@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi,
The 2010-11 Annual Plan and Questions and Answers have just been posted to the Foundation website (
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Financial_reports#2010-2011_fiscal_year ).
The plan was approved by the Board last week.
The 2010-11 plan differs from previous years in that this plan is rooted in the five-year (2010-2015) Wikimedia Strategy which has been developed collaboratively over the past year. In 2010-11, we have planned continued growth over previous years reflecting continued and increased investments to serve our mission and increase our impact.
The 2009-10 year is projected to exceed revenue targets and to be underspent in expenses primarily due to underspending in the first quarter of the 2009-10 fiscal year.
Veronique
Thank you Veronique for posting this! I appreciate your continued diligence in making material available to us.
I would like to encourage everyone to be sure and actually read this plan closely; "continued growth" turns out to mean nearly doubling the staff next year, and doubling the budget -- rather surprisingly dramatic growth. There is a lot of change that is planned for here, and many of these changes relate to areas that community members do work in.
Personally, I would love to see some serious community discussion of this plan both here and at Wikimania next week.
-- phoebe
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