In a message dated 5/1/2008 4:18:27 PM Eastern Daylight Time, wknight8111@gmail.com writes:
Ill go through this one item at a time:
A million purposes. If a chapter raises money that it does not need, the simplest solution is to make a lump donation to the WMF. Or, server hardware could be purchased and donated, or used separately (think toolserver, which is owned and operated by WMF DE). 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. It seems like an unnecessary amount of work, two sets of books, and two sets of responsibilities: donation receipts, etc. To be effective, you would want to minimize steps between the donor and the receiver, not add a middleman.
A local chapter could similarly maintain servers for a variety of tasks (toolserving, hosting mirrors, hosting related sites like wikizine, wikinewsie.org, hosting a chapter homepage with information, etc). Who would take responsibility for maintaining these servers?
Johnny and I had an idea for purchasing a small fleet of used laptops, that we could use to teach underprivileged children how to use wikis and how to access free information.
That is a nice idea. 100 used laptops = $30,000. Then what? Were would you keep the laptops between gigs? Who would maintain them?
Similarly, we could print materials, like Wikipedia articles or Wikibooks, or Wikiversity materials, and distribute those printed books for free to underprivileged students. Also a nice idea but no context and no consideration of costs, distribution channels, etc.
Money can be used to host meetups, conferences, seminars and other public outreach events.
Money could be used to purchase the rights to copyrighted educational materials, for the express purpose of re-releasing those materials under a free license. These free materials could then, in turn, be used to seed books on Wikibooks, courses on Wikiversity, articles on Wikipedia, and sources on Wikisource.
Money could be used to fund volunteers, such as supplying funding for a volunteer developer to implement specific software features/extensions. Volunteer authors and editors could earn grants to write or edit important educational resources on the various projects.
Paid editing? Would the community go for that?
Hell, we could start a scholarship trust to help give money to dedicated wikimedians for college.
This is just the tip of the iceburg, a handful of things that come off the top of my head. Instead of asking what's the purpose for raising money, the better question is "can you imagine all the possibilities?".
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"?
Consider the implications of each answer.
BTW, I would suggest that an old US chapter list be revived for precisely this discussion.
Danny
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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
2008/5/1 Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.com:
On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 5:12 PM, daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
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.
We've had more than a few cases of organisations subsidising editors; generally to fill out an area, rather than to slant coverage. Funding better coverage of a subject seems to work okay. Then there's donating work to Commons.
- d.
On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 7:13 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
We've had more than a few cases of organisations subsidising editors; generally to fill out an area, rather than to slant coverage. Funding better coverage of a subject seems to work okay. Then there's donating work to Commons.
To give a good example, en.wikibooks has a known deficiency in books about basic mathematics: Arithmetic, Algebra, etc. Sometimes editors are hesitant to join in a book project until there is the necessary scaffolding available to "grab on to". I would certainly be willing to supply grants to editors willing to write initial drafts for these books, at least if I were in charge of distributing such grants.
Writing that kind of material for pay is a far cry different from paying a person to edit a BLP article about a controversial politician, or an article about creationism, or any other topic where slant and bias are going to be rampant.
--Andrew Whitworth
On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 5:12 PM, daniwo59@aol.com wrote:
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.
If I understand you well, you are assuming that the Foundation can fundraise everywhere efficiently. Well, I think that a local group will be much better placed to raise awareness, bring about local projects about free knowledge, and make sure that local people donate. For some it might mean just pointing towards the donate button on the Foundation website, for others it might mean having an organisation that can receive the funds on the spot. Just because it is a natural thing to be wanting to help what is close to you and it's easier to trust an organisation of which you can be a part of rather than one that's sitting 5000 km across the country. A metro-area or state chapter in the US, I am sure, can boost our donation rates big time.
On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 11:45 PM, Andrew Whitworth wknight8111@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Exactly. The idea being that this is a two way street. In my opinion, chapters, in the US or otherwise, should make sure that the Foundation's budget is met by giving it part of their proceeds, and the Foundation should make sure that money goes back into local projects carried out by chapters.
Delphine
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org