[Foundation-l] Re: London meet: Wikimedia UK discussion

[David Gerard]

Kate Turner wrote:
> David Gerard wrote in gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation:

> this sounds quite positive.  i think i noted on the relvant meta page that
> i'd be interested in helping, although charities/business isn't something i
> have a great deap of experience with...


That's why VW is doing the paperwork, 'cos she does ;-)

With a suitable mission statement we should be able to fit in almost any
activity that would reasonably advance Wikimedia and/or its contents.


>>Kate: what would be good technically to buy in the UK?

> non-US purchasing decisions/planning are a bit up in the air at the moment
> as we work out what we're doing with various EU offers (Belnet,
> Kennisnet, ...).  the ideal situation would be if we could purchase
> equipment in the UK (using UK funds) and ship it to other places in the EU
> (initally likely to be Holland or France, but could be elsewhere).  would
> this be possible under UK charity law?  moving funds back to the US is
> unlikely to be required, even if it were allowed.


No idea! VW?


> i am reluctant at the moment to suggest buying any kind of service within
> the UK wrt. hosting, hardware &c.  particularly until we have a production
> off-site cluster and know what we need to do, we're unlikely to make good
> use of it, and it's not going to be worth the cost. even then it remains to
> be seen whether a large number of seperate clusters is worth the
> administrative effort.


Yeah. We thought the answer might be "nothing right this moment".


> do we have any idea what sort of money we're looking at from UK donations?


Presumably some fraction of what was donated in GB pounds last fund drive.
There were about GBP3623 (before PayPal fees) last fund drive. I have no
idea how much of that people would prefer to send direct to the UK
organisation than directly, though I'm sure deductibility would be a
tremendous encouragement.

That said, I'm sure there are lots of things we'll be able to spend money
on that aren't hardware or bandwidth.


- d.