Hi all, It's a little bit strange to me to ask people money before to know exactly what we need. I think we first need to design the network we need to face the exponential progression of Mediawiki projects. Then we can think what hardware/software we need to make it (thus, know about how much we need). Then we can ask people to donate to buy this hardware. Personnaly, instead of hear "we need $100,000" I prefer to hear "we need to buy X, Y and Z that may cost around $100,000". Just my POV.
By the way, do we have professional/competent people to design the complex network we need? How much may cost a network analysis by a professional company? May it help?
Aoineko
----- Original Message ----- From: "Delirium" delirium@hackish.org To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2004 7:03 AM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Fundraising
Jimmy Wales wrote:
In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations from the general public.
I think we'll need a decent justification of that to make sure everyone understands why we need the money and what we're going to do with it. $100,000 is a *lot* of money, and I can imagine at least some people will be skeptical that it's entirely necessary---we have to give them at least some plausible reason to believe that it's really not possible to run the site reasonably well on, say, $50,000 worth of equipment instead (which would still be a lot of equipment!). At the very least a proposed parts list with some explanation of why we need the various parts (and can't do with cheaper replacement for the very-expensive ones) would help---even non-techie people who aren't going to read it all the way through will be somewhat mollified by at least seeing that we've taken the time to put something like that up.
-Mark