If you or another reader on this board would want do some programming on an interesting standalone job, there has been a discussion on another WikiMedia board: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2004-July/date.html, about the fundraising page, see http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising

I give a excerpt of the discusson below. If anyone with relevant experience is interested, I suggest to contact Daniel Meyer, e.g. at maveric149 at yahoo.com (who is primarily responsible for WikiMedia finances)

Erik Zachte

Why not having a dynamic picture looking like:

              WikiPediaThon

    0$        30k$                  100K$

[OOOOoooooo......................]

Where: O is provision o achieved . still needed

Daniel Mayer:

"Because there is currently no easy way to update such a bar and no way at all to have those updates in real time. We also need to figure out where the goal line should be set (hint to board: we need an approved budget).

But that would be an awesome thing to have, yes.

We might want to consider putting a bounty on creating a bot that could do that. The person creating it would have to be *very* trusted and their bot code vetted for security purposes (since it would be using account names and passwords to gather data). But I think it could be done."

----

Erik Zachte (paraphrased):

I would like to consider whether a volunteer might not be interested to do this useful and interesting job. Bountry should be last resort.

---- Daniel again:

"I simply want results and I want them fast. Creating a process by which donors get near instant feedback that their donation was counted and helped push us toward a goal will generate many times the money any bounty would cost.

I'm also not at all keen on trying to attempt to do this in anything but an automated way (esp since it would be *me* that would be attempting to be a bot)."

---

Erik:

in reaction on "The person creating it would have to be *very* trusted and their bot code vetted for security purposes."

I wonder, many developers write applications which will need to run in a secured environment, so much so that they don't get access to the live version themselves. They test it on a fake account. Standard practice. Yes, an audit would be wise.