Well, both Hungary and Budapest aims to be the R&D center of the region. There are multiple government and munipal funds and programmes plus a lot of favouring policies on both administrative levels, including a full dedicated neighbourhood on the bank of the Danube, named Infopark (since 1996 [1])
Setting up a formally for-profit company who's only contractor would be the WMF (and/or other chapters) in BP can be funded well over 50% from non movement funds (or low/no interest loans) during the first few years and would be much much cheaper than any parts of Western Europe and most of the CEE. Doing so though WMHU or a separate non-profit way - probaly also doable.
However having one such department for the sake of having one is a total waste of time, money and efforts everywhere in the World, so the main question is: are there enough projects that could make establishing such a department/spearate entity reasonable?
Balázs
[1] http://www.infopark.hu/lang/en/
On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 2:39 PM, rupert THURNER rupert.thurner@gmail.com wrote:
If WMF is serious about letting development activities grow in other countries this might be taken into account in FDCs allocation policy.
For my part, I'm happy to offer feedback to the FDC on plans related to the development of engineering capacity in FDC-funded organizations. I'm sure Wikimedia Germany, too, would be happy to share its experiences growing the Wikidata development team. I'd love to find ways to bootstrap more engineering capacity across the movement, as so many of our shared challenges have a software engineering component. If any folks on-list want to touch base on these questions at Wikimania, drop me a note. :)
Erik
-- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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