Hello,
On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 4:58 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)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.
<
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