--- Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Last evening, we were discussing of how much money was currently in bank. I made a quick estimate, because Mav in on holidays, so I could not ask him last numbers, but basically I know that mid may we had roughly 5.400 dollars. Add to this the 9000 dollars refund for a server. Plus 10.000 euros received a few days ago by Jimbo for the trophy.
That makes about 24 000 dollars (it is a *very* rough estimate).
The figure I have on http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising is US$9,054.63 as of June 18. That figure does *not* include the ~US$9000 server refund and it does *not* include the ArsElectronica award money. So your estimate, if anything, is low by a few thousand dollars. I will update the numbers as soon as I get exact figures from Jimbo.
JeLuF made a provisional hardware budget for the rest of the year. You may find it here : http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_provisional_budget Current amount indicated is 12000 dollars
This is helpful, but the dollar figure looks to be way too optimistic given our non-linear growth rate.
.... I would say that we should plan a fund raising time in fall. It will be necessary. But saying we do not have enough money right now is just plain incorrect.
We should have one sooner. In fact we should have one *each* quarter of the year.
Absolutely. It is very important that people know how their money is spent. I deeply agree. And we know that donations were done to purchase *hardware*, because most donations were sent while wiki was broken, and we made a general call precisely to have new hardware, so no money donated to pay for server should be used for any other means. This is an essential point, and I really wish that no one have any doubts about that.
It would be trivial for me to track the ArsElectronica money separately so that it could be used for non-server expenses. In future fund drives we would say up front the exact maximum percentage non-server expenses (overhead) would take up of the general fund budget. Thus fund drives would be best launched right after a quarterly board meeting. The coming fund drive and revising the budget would be very important topics for that meeting.
We provide right now transparent money use history. Mav has been maintaining this for a while now. See
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_bank_account_history_for_2004
Which reminds me that I need more bank statements from Jimbo.
I think that in the future, we may ask members to indicate if they wish that their money is used for a specific purpose. Till now, the two specific purposes were
- hardware
- purchase of a computer for Brion
We just need to be upfront as to how exactly the money is spent. Ergo, we need a living budget that is adhered to (my main election platform, BTW).
I see many more. Especially for firms funding. A firm or an organisation may wish that the donation money is used in a specific way, such as support of a minority language, or sending computers with wikipedia on it to an given african country, or making a whole set of wikireaders around a specific topic. There are many options and to my opinion, donators should have the possibility to indicate what they want the money to be used for.
For individual donors, we could have three separate PayPal/MoneyBookers accounts to choose from: 1) general fund (pays for server-related expenses and basic foundation expenses which would not exceed 10%) 2) developer fund (pays bounties to developers to fix certain things in MediaWiki) 3) legal defense fund (pays the expenses of pro-bono legal council)
Aside from donations, we also recently received an award (10 000 euros), and the money from this award may be used the way we choose to use it. Which mean, we can use it for hardware, or for *anything else*, including to support costs which will help to build the community.
Or to reimburse the travel costs of board members who attend meetings.
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com