Hello,
On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 4:58 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
One of the reasons, for many the only reason for giving a\t the annual fundraising drive is exactly to provide money to maintain our infrastructure. Take that away and you take away the reason to give.
That's a bit like the old joke that the best way to raise money is to take the site down. Yes, it works, but with some essential drawbacks :-) We're not holding the servers ransom.
If you seek assurances, there are other methods that will not be damaging in this way.
I'd like to hear what you have in mind.
Yes, there are other ways to improve reliability and long-term support. (As you often point out, projects other than Wikipedia are at more risk than WP.)
Sebastian Moleski writes:
Let's say that we want to cover half of the current year's technology budget
I would start with one aspect of fundamental infrastructure, and build out from there as a dedicated fund grows. For instance, start with our downloads and live-feed infrastructure, and that portion of our bandwidth. We might be able to cover that with half the interest from our current reserve. Moreover, making it a priority for us to be *able* to support this from a dedicated fund would encourage a focus on reducing the costs of the most-critical infrastructure.
As an example: we do not make a point of setting up torrents of our large files. This would both increase download speed for many downloaders (improve our core service) and reduce our central costs.
Sebastian writes:
In general, I think the arguments made against pursuing a general endowment are sound, at least for the moment.
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Personally, I think we should an endowment drive when we've found our donation revenue, but also our operational spending to approximately level off.
One can always keep increasing operational spending. Reserves or long-term funds should grow in tandem with those increases -- otherwise as we come to rely on this new spending, there is additional risk that efforts may collapse if funding dries up. Example: the coming year's Annual Plan includes a 50% drop in our effective reserve -- the reserve is staying the same while the annual budget doubles.
Regardless of what we do with reserves and long-term funds, keeping the projects online forever was the premise of the last fundraiser. We have an immediate obligation to make progress towards that goal. A new datacenter will help, but I'd like to see specific long-term forecasts and plans published.
SJ