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(a)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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