[Foundation-l] Re: Funding for the newly elected Board Members

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Last evening, we were discussing of how much money was currently in bank.
> I made a quick estimate, because Mav in on holidays, so I could not ask 
> him last numbers, but basically I know that mid may we had roughly 5.400 
> dollars. Add to this the 9000 dollars refund for a server. Plus 10.000 
> euros received a few days ago by Jimbo for the trophy.
> 
> That makes about 24 000 dollars (it is a *very* rough estimate).

The figure I have on http://wikimediafoundation.org/fundraising is US$9,054.63
as of June 18. That figure does *not* include the ~US$9000 server refund and it
does *not* include the ArsElectronica award money.  So your estimate, if
anything, is low by a few thousand dollars. I will update the numbers as soon
as I get exact figures from Jimbo. 
 
> JeLuF made a provisional hardware budget for the rest of the year.
> You may find it here : 
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_provisional_budget
> Current amount indicated is 12000 dollars

This is helpful, but the dollar figure looks to be way too optimistic given our
non-linear growth rate. 
 
> ....
> I would say that we should plan a fund raising time in fall. It will be 
> necessary. But saying we do not have enough money right now is just 
> plain incorrect.

We should have one sooner. In fact we should have one *each* quarter of the
year. 

> Absolutely. It is very important that people know how their money is 
> spent. I deeply agree. And we know that donations were done to purchase 
> *hardware*, because most donations were sent while wiki was broken, and 
> we made a general call precisely to have new hardware, so no money 
> donated to pay for server should be used for any other means. This is an 
> essential point, and I really wish that no one have any doubts about that.

It would be trivial for me to track the ArsElectronica money separately so that
it could be used for non-server expenses. In future fund drives we would say up
front the exact maximum percentage non-server expenses (overhead) would take up
of the general fund budget. Thus fund drives would be best launched right after
a quarterly board meeting. The coming fund drive and revising the budget would
be very important topics for that meeting.
 
> We provide right now transparent money use history. Mav has been 
> maintaining this for a while now. See
> 
> http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_bank_account_history_for_2004

Which reminds me that I need more bank statements from Jimbo. 
 
> I think that in the future, we may ask members to indicate if they wish 
> that their money is used for a specific purpose. Till now, the two 
> specific purposes were
> * hardware
> * purchase of a computer for Brion

We just need to be upfront as to how exactly the money is spent. Ergo, we need
a living budget that is adhered to (my main election platform, BTW). 
 
> I see many more. Especially for firms funding. A firm or an organisation 
> may wish that the donation money is used in a specific way, such as 
> support of a minority language, or sending computers with wikipedia on 
> it to an given african country, or making a whole set of wikireaders 
> around a specific topic. There are many options and to my opinion, 
> donators should have the possibility to indicate what they want the 
> money to be used for.

For individual donors, we could have three separate PayPal/MoneyBookers
accounts to choose from: 
1) general fund (pays for server-related expenses and basic foundation expenses
which would not exceed 10%) 
2) developer fund (pays bounties to developers to fix certain things in
MediaWiki)
3) legal defense fund (pays the expenses of pro-bono legal council) 

> Aside from donations, we also recently received an award (10 000 euros), 
> and the money from this award may be used the way we choose to use it. 
> Which mean, we can use it for hardware, or for *anything else*, 
> including to support costs which will help to build the community.

Or to reimburse the travel costs of board members who attend meetings. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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