On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
But Wikimedia Foundation isn't (and has never been) purely a techno-organization, it's a global educational media organization and world-wide movement for free knowledge, which critically depends on technology to get its work done.
And noone would be a subscriber to this list if they did not care about free knowledge. It's just that seeking donations to fund the growth of the movement, and the pursuit of its goals, ought to be carried out by way of messaging that refers to that growth and those goals, not messaging that, for example, implies that the projects will go offline or be forced to resort to advertising if the full $16 M target were not met.
We have a greater responsibility in the world than ever. The reason to raise $16M is to meet that responsibility. To meet it, for example, by making sure that we have reliable, distributed backups of all key data; that we won't disappear from the net for extended periods of time if Tampa goes down; that we don't have to rely entirely on the goodwill of a talented database engineer from Lithuania to deal with MySQL woes.
Yes, but the new datacentre and the new tech hires represent less than 40% of the new spending planned in 2010-11. This is assuming that the datacentre and bandwidth upgrades represent the whole increase in capital expenditure in 2010-11 ($2.3 M), and that as new tech staff represent 36% of planned hires they will represent an equivalent proportion of the increased expenditure on salaries ($2.1 M). [1]
They are one of the reasons, but not the only one, to raise $16 M. They are the reason to raise perhaps a third of that target.
-- [1] Obviously this will not be a correct figure, as I'm sure the tech staff do not get paid the same on average as all the other staff. Moreover the order in which the new staff are hired throughout the year will have some impact on this total. However, not all of the current/new tech hires are/will be working on anything mission critical. This suffices as a ballpark figure.