In a message dated 5/1/2008 4:18:27 PM Eastern Daylight Time, wknight8111@gmail.com writes:
Ill go through this one item at a time:
A million purposes. If a chapter raises money that it does not need, the simplest solution is to make a lump donation to the WMF. Or, server hardware could be purchased and donated, or used separately (think toolserver, which is owned and operated by WMF DE). Are you suggesting that instead of people donating to the WMF, they donate to WMF-Nebraska, which then funnels the money to WMF-Int'l. It seems like an unnecessary amount of work, two sets of books, and two sets of responsibilities: donation receipts, etc. To be effective, you would want to minimize steps between the donor and the receiver, not add a middleman.
A local chapter could similarly maintain servers for a variety of tasks (toolserving, hosting mirrors, hosting related sites like wikizine, wikinewsie.org, hosting a chapter homepage with information, etc). Who would take responsibility for maintaining these servers?
Johnny and I had an idea for purchasing a small fleet of used laptops, that we could use to teach underprivileged children how to use wikis and how to access free information.
That is a nice idea. 100 used laptops = $30,000. Then what? Were would you keep the laptops between gigs? Who would maintain them?
Similarly, we could print materials, like Wikipedia articles or Wikibooks, or Wikiversity materials, and distribute those printed books for free to underprivileged students. Also a nice idea but no context and no consideration of costs, distribution channels, etc.
Money can be used to host meetups, conferences, seminars and other public outreach events.
Money could be used to purchase the rights to copyrighted educational materials, for the express purpose of re-releasing those materials under a free license. These free materials could then, in turn, be used to seed books on Wikibooks, courses on Wikiversity, articles on Wikipedia, and sources on Wikisource.
Money could be used to fund volunteers, such as supplying funding for a volunteer developer to implement specific software features/extensions. Volunteer authors and editors could earn grants to write or edit important educational resources on the various projects.
Paid editing? Would the community go for that?
Hell, we could start a scholarship trust to help give money to dedicated wikimedians for college.
This is just the tip of the iceburg, a handful of things that come off the top of my head. Instead of asking what's the purpose for raising money, the better question is "can you imagine all the possibilities?".
I am not saying that these aren't good ideas per se, but they should be much clearer if you are going to use them to raise money. And this will reflect on how (and if) money is raised, as well as on the mission of the chapter. To become a 501 (c) 3 in the US, you have to have a clear mission statement. Is the mission, then, of the local chapter "To promote the use of free content materials and wikis, especially among underprivileged youth"? "To facilitate social interactions between contributors to Wikimedia projects"? "To acquire copyrighted materials to release into the public domain"?
Consider the implications of each answer.
BTW, I would suggest that an old US chapter list be revived for precisely this discussion.
Danny
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