Hi,
As you all have probably seen, our budget is seriously increasing every trimester.
It is my personal view that we cannot anymore entirely rely on donations by visitors, but must seriously seek other sources of income.
Last year, we were offered two grants and one prize, and a third grant of 40 000 dollars was just offered.
These grants make the difference between succeeding to run the site,
or not.
We need to pay more attention to grants. Most require quite a bit of work, but the result is really worth it.
For this reason, a meeting will be held on this sunday, 4 PM UTC. If you wish to participate, please come over to #wikimedia, we'll find a quiet room to host us.
While the meeting is open, I or Angela or Danny reserve the right to kindly ask a visitor to leave the room if necessary. We wish to involve people as much as possible, but only seriously interested and trusted people :-)
Topics will be * feedback on current grant requests (Danny) * discussion over new possible grants * Decision to seek for a couple ones. * Teams setting up.
In particular, last year, we thought of asking a NEH grant, but the deadlines were too short. We might try again this year. The work to do is not only setting up figures, but there is also a lot of work simply describing our project, gathering statistics or press clipings, helping on the layout, fixing typos, improving style etc...
I invite you to read http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants
and join us sunday
Anthere
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Anthere wrote:
In particular, last year, we thought of asking a NEH grant, but the deadlines were too short. We might try again this year. The work to do is not only setting up figures, but there is also a lot of work simply describing our project, gathering statistics or press clipings, helping on the layout, fixing typos, improving style etc...
I thought last time this came up, Jimbo indicated he was fairly strongly against the idea of Wikipedia seeking grants from governments or government agencies?
-Mark
I am not aware he opposed at all the attempt made for this grant last summer : http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/NEH_grant_application
Sooooo, he might have changed his mind :-)
If not, we can discuss this.
Delirium a écrit:
Anthere wrote:
In particular, last year, we thought of asking a NEH grant, but the deadlines were too short. We might try again this year. The work to do is not only setting up figures, but there is also a lot of work simply describing our project, gathering statistics or press clipings, helping on the layout, fixing typos, improving style etc...
I thought last time this came up, Jimbo indicated he was fairly strongly against the idea of Wikipedia seeking grants from governments or government agencies?
-Mark
I will be there, but can you please remind again when you see me on IRC on sunday ;)
Waerth/Walter van Kalken
--- Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
As you all have probably seen, our budget is seriously increasing every trimester.
This is very true (although our budgets are quarterly). I heard yesterday that many people thought the $130,000 budget was for the rest of the year. In fact, that is just for the first quarter of this year (ends March 31st).
We are throwing a lot more money at servers this time than we normally would. This is largely due to the existence of the $40,000 grant and our want to *finally* get ahead of traffic increases and have a server farm that is top rate and very scalable.
It is my personal view that we cannot anymore entirely rely on donations by visitors, but must seriously seek other sources of income.
Last year our total income was $150,498.75 (in 2003 we took in less than $20,000). Based on projected increases of traffic, how much we have spent per 1000 page requests just to keep up, and adjusting for Moore's Law, I project we will need to spend about $165,000 to $195,000 on servers during the last quarter of this year just to keep up (not for the whole year, just for the last three months).
That is *if* we continue to grow as fast as we have been (80% compounded each quarter), *if* we don't find some way to be vastly more efficient, and *if* we continue to rely pretty much only on servers we buy.
Lots of ifs, but it is still an important thing to consider as we move forward. The plan for Google hosting will greatly reduce the amount of money we need to spend as will other hosting offers. I imagine that grants will at least be needed to build extra capacity (playing the role of the current $40,000 grant this time).
-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)
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On Wednesday 09 February 2005 23:58, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Hi,
[...]
The plan for Google hosting will greatly reduce the amount of money we need to spend as will other hosting offers.
I'm reading about google hosting for the second time now, but couldn't find anything on meta, wikidev or this mailing list. It sounds interesting, what is meant with it exactly?
best regards, Marco
I'm reading about google hosting for the second time now, but couldn't find anything on meta, wikidev or this mailing list. It sounds interesting, what is meant with it exactly?
Basically, Google have made a proposal to host some of our content.There's an introduction at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_hosting, but I'm not sure I can say much more than that at this stage.
Angela.
--- Marco Krohn marco.krohn@web.de wrote:
I'm reading about google hosting for the second time now, but couldn't find anything on meta, wikidev or this mailing list. It sounds interesting, what is meant with it exactly?
I don't remember the specifics (ask Jimbo for those), but Google has at least tentatively agreed to give us access to a certain number of dual zeon servers at one or more of their data centers and with unlimited bandwidth. I've been told that there are no strings attached (meaning they don't expect us to do anything for then, such as having GoogleAds).
-- mav
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Marco Krohn a écrit:
On Wednesday 09 February 2005 23:58, Daniel Mayer wrote:
Hi,
[...]
The plan for Google hosting will greatly reduce the amount of money we need to spend as will other hosting offers.
I'm reading about google hosting for the second time now, but couldn't find anything on meta, wikidev or this mailing list. It sounds interesting, what is meant with it exactly?
best regards, Marco
It is currently proceeding, but details are not entirely worked out. We had a first proposal for which we gave feedback last week.
Today, in Standford, Jimbo met with Sergei Brin and Larry Page, who were extremely enthousiastic about the whole project.
The board has a meeting planned early march to try to finalize this a little bit more.
Ant
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