Poor,-
Any way of keeping response time under 10 seconds consistently?
Massive fundraising campaign. For which we need responsive servers. If Jimbo's latest upgrade doesn't help, we can create a Wikipedia blackout -- black pages on all Wikipedias, for all requests, which explain what Wikipedia is about and ask visitors to keep the project going by making a donation (if possible, we could add a link at the bottom pointing to a cached copy of the article they want).
Or we ask ibiblio to host either the English or the non-English Wikipedias for us as an experiment and see how that works out. If the strategy of keeping everything in one place doesn't work out, it is very easy with the current software to decentralize things.
In any case, I strongly recommend not to start a publicity campaign without highly responsive servers. The press release is going to do you no good at all if people can't access the site. And the load after the release will be significantly higher than presently, so we need to have some wiggle room.
We now need Jimbo's leadership because he's the one in control of the servers, the foundation and the projects.
Regards,
Erik