TL;DR: Yes, I think we should be pro-actively putting significant financial resources into the open source ecosystems we rely on.
Thanks Erik! This is a great discussion to have.
As I see it, we have a whole lot of potential fundraising revenue that we leave unraised, simply because WMF doesn't have effective ways of spending it or allocating it within the movement. The fundraising system has become extremely efficient, so we've increasingly shifted toward minimizing reader annoyance instead of increasing raising money. But the annoyance factor of fundraising is so low right now that (to me) it seems wasteful *not* to be raising and distributing more, if it can be done in ways that support our mission (broadly construed).
Wikipedia is the most prominent project of the top, public-facing layer of a deep free culture / free software ecosystem. It wouldn't be able to exist without that ecosystem, but because it's in that top layer that directly serves the public, it generates most of the goodwill and donation potential. But much of what donors love and value and want to support about Wikipedia has deeper roots than they realize. I used to be a regular donor to Wikimedia Foundation, but as I've learned more about that deeper ecosystem, I've felt it my responsibility -- because I know how things work beneath that surface layer -- to focus my giving elsewhere in the free software and free culture ecosystem. I would happily donate to WMF if I knew that the fundraising system was aggressively working to gather money to improve that whole ecosystem. (Instead, donating right now would feel like making a donation to slightly decrease the number of fundraising banners seen by readers; if I don't donate, I know there are more than enough readers who will.)
One strategy for supporting other free software/free culture organizations would be to make few-strings-attached grants for specific work that will benefit us. (For example, we give a grant that lets them pay a developer's salary for a year to work on this or that project that will result in better MediaWiki performance, or easier management of our stack.) That would be consistent with what our donors intend when they give.
-Sage (ragesoss)
On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 3:50 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
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.
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 -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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