Hello Erik, there are cases in which this is clearly the right thing
for us to do.
1) An annual 'supporting the ecosystem' program, that channels grants
and visibility to important partners, seems interesting. Could this
be implemented as a targeted grants program? Or just targeted
outreach encouraging groups to apply for existing programs?
I wouldn't call it 'giving back' -- that seems to minimize the way in
which this is integral to our work. (I see almost no difference, from
the perspective of our mission, between supporting OSM or Wikieducator
and supporting Wikiversity).
However we should be clear that this is where some of our resources
go, and update related messaging; or raise funds specifically for
those goals with their own campaigns.
2) We need a free toolchain that we can build upon and digitize /
gather / curate / format / publish knowledge with. There are
currently major gaps in this toolchain -- core projects and
collaborations rely on non-free tools or non-free hosted service.
Every time we use or work to interoperate with such tools and
services, we should also support replacing them with free ones. (That
support can include everything from publicity and matchmaking to
in-kind support to funds)
So we should be supporting, in some fashion: free formats; free
fonts; free tools for annotation, real-time text collaboration,
spreadsheet editing, media editing; the ecosystem needed to support
free media codecs. We should be framing and broadcasting to the FK
ans FOSS world where the biggest gaps lie and what needs to be done.
And we should be able to point to how and where we are investing in
this -- for instance when we get into debates about whether or not to
include non-free fonts in our default fontstack; or about how to
support people trying to convert and publish media in encumbered
formats.
3) Many projects that we rely on run on a very small budget, but may
need specific skills. I would separate how we think about supporting
this sort of work, from how we think about supporting larger projects
such as CC and OSM.
SJ
On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 3:50 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hi folks,
I'd be interested in hearing broader community opinions about the
extent to which WMF should sponsor non-profits purely to support work
that Wikimedia benefits from, even if it's not directed towards a
specific goal established in a grant agreement.
This comes up from time to time. One of the few historic precedents
I'm aware of is the $5,000 donation that WMF made to FreeNode in 2006
[1]. But there are of course many other organizations/communities that
the Wikimedia movement is indebted to.
On the software side, we have Ubuntu Linux (itself highly indebted to
Debian) / Apache / MariaDB / PHP / Varnish / ElasticSearch / memcached
/ Puppet / OpenStack / various libraries and many other dependencies [2],
infrastructure tools like ganglia, observium, icinga, etc. Some of
these projects have nonprofits that accept and seek sponsorship and
support, some don't.
One could easily expand well beyond the software we depend on
server-side to client-side open source applications used by our
community to create content: stuff like Inkscape, GIMP and LibreOffice
(used for diagrams). And there are other communities we depend on,
like OpenStreetMap.
So, should we steer clear of this type of sponsorship altogether
because it's a slippery slope, or should we try to come up with
evaluation criteria to consider it on a case-by-case basis (e.g. is
there a trustworthy non-profit that has a track record of
accomplishment and is in actual need of financial support)?
I could imagine a process with a fixed "giving back" annual budget
and a community nominations/review workflow. It'd be work to create
and I don't want to commit to that yet, but I would be interested to
hear opinions.
MariaDB specifically invited WMF to become a sponsor, and we're
clearly highly dependent on them. But I don't think it makes sense for
us to just write checks if there's someone who asks for support and
there's a justifiable need. However, if there's broad agreement that
this is something Wikimedia should do more of, then I think it's worth
developing more consistent sponsorship criteria.
Thanks,
Erik
[1]
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Freenode_Donation
[2] Cf.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Upstream_projects
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list
Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
--
Samuel Klein @metasj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266