On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 5:12 PM, daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
Ill go through this one item at a time:
There's basically no sense in that, these aren't well thought-out ideas, just pulled from the tip-top of my head. Think of them more as ephemiral "visions" then concrete "strategies". Some may be garbage, but likely most are not.
Are you suggesting that instead of people donating to the WMF, they donate to WMF-Nebraska, which then funnels the money to WMF-Int'l.
Think about it like the girl scouts. When Girl Scout National Headquarters (or whatever it is called) needs money, it sends the girls out door-to-door to sell cookies. The girls are not all part of an amorphous blob organization, they are organized into little local troops. If I am not mistaken, a portion of proceeds goes to the local organization, and the remainder goes to the national one.
The WMF does not currently have a door-to-door donation soliciting apparatus. Of course, door-to-door might not be the best strategy anyway, but it's a good example of the kinds of hands-on donation strategy that we could employ. The Salvation army stands people with a bell outside shopping malls. The Red Cross makes calls down it's list of known donors. Purple Heart operates donation centers where people can drop off clothes or other donatables.
Some or none of these strategies may work for us, but an on-the-ground membership presence makes them all possible.
There are two major scenarios that I can think of right now, and probably others that are a hybrid of these two, or something completely different: 1) A large fundraiser, where people donate to "Wikimedia", with the understanding that the proceeds are split as needed among local, national, and international levels. 2) Multiple fundraisers, a big annual organized one where volunteers collect for the national level, and smaller bake-sale style fundraisers to benefit the local organization, as needed.
Who would take responsibility for maintaining these servers?
Who takes responsibility for maintaining the toolserver? If Chapter A sets up a server to provide support for the WMF projects, I would assume that Chapter A would maintain it unless an explicit agreement is reached otherwise.
That is a nice idea. 100 used laptops = $30,000. Then what? Were would you keep the laptops between gigs? Who would maintain them?
We were thinking about 30 laptops, and run a drive to have them donated. They would be kept at a location designated by the chapter, and would be maintained by volunteers from the chapter.
The WMF is filled to the brim with enthusiastic volunteers with a wide variety of skills, hobbies, etc. There are people who would maintain these laptops for fun, and there are people who would do it if the chapter brass would write a nice recommendation on their next college application/resume/whatever. Asking "who is going to do job X?" in a volunteer organization as large and varied as ours is a little unnecessary.
Paid editing? Would the community go for that?
Open source software groups have been supplying funding and grants to volunteer developers for a long time. A chapter could post a bounty for a particular task that it wants to see completed: a page/article being written, a set of pictures taken, some source documents faithfully uploaded, etc. Applicants write proposals, complete the task to a prescribed standard of quality within a certain time frame, and collect the bounty.
This is an idea that has even been kicked around by the developers, using a similar bounty system to motivate people to develop certain software features. I think Brion opposed the idea because of the logistics behind it, but it's not unheard of.
I am not saying that these aren't good ideas per se, but they should be much clearer if you are going to use them to raise money. And this will reflect on how (and if) money is raised, as well as on the mission of the chapter. To become a 501 (c) 3 in the US, you have to have a clear mission statement. Is the mission, then, of the local chapter "To promote the use of free content materials and wikis, especially among underprivileged youth"? "To facilitate social interactions between contributors to Wikimedia projects"? "To acquire copyrighted materials to release into the public domain"?
These problems that you are raising are common to all chapters, not just the proposed US ones. The mission, in a nutshell, is to provide and facilitate access to free information and educational materials. There are many ways to pursue these goals, and as volunteers we are all going to pick the ways that we think is best. We probably can't do them all, but we can do some and some is better then the virtual none that we are doing right now.
--Andrew Whitworth