[Foundation-l] Fundraising season launch

[Anthere]

Hello,


Last update from Michael (this summer) mentionned that we had about 550 
k$ in bank.

The technical team mentionned recently there was an urgent need for new 
application servers (apache/squids), to address the record traffic the 
site has been receiving. A couple of weeks ago, traffic reports 
indicated > 18,000 requests per second, far above our routine traffic of 
12,000 requests per second earlier this summer.

Consequently, a hardware purchase resolution has been very recently 
approved, which will significantly impact our reserves.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution_Hardware_sept_2006

Michael reported that we purchased $425k of hardware last fiscal year 
and will purchase $400k more in just the first half of the current 
fiscal year. Rough estimate for this fiscal year hardware is between 
$750k-$1M.

In short, it is high time to have our second fundraising of the year :-)

A fundraising committee was set up not a long time ago for such purpose 
and will work with Brad for the success of the fundraising. The 
translation committee will naturally have to be heavily involved and 
coordination about press coverage will be under the responsability of 
the comcom.

If you want to be involved, please say so.

Florence
Wikimedia Foundation

--------

As an individual (not board member), I would like to ask if it were 
possible that the spin around the fundraising, focuses a bit on the 
other projects, perhaps the notion of virtual library, with the 
wikicommons and wikisource. We have the recent report of the german 
digitization to show up as an example as how we could push things 
forward in realm of digital libraries.

Ant