[Foundation-l] what do we do in the event the Foundation fails? - Re: Policy governance ends

[Jeff V. Merkey]

Erik Moeller wrote:

>On 4/18/07, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>OK, (aliens came in) Foundation is out. How about we start looking in
>>our own backyard?
>>There are eight chapters to this day, going on 10 to 12 in the next
>>few months, in 8 (10 to 12) countries of the world.
>>    
>>
>
>None of our current chapters is close to being able to carry the load.
>I agree we should try to get there, but that might take us years.
>Organizations like the Internet Archive or Creative Commons are in a
>better position right now.
>  
>

I disagree.  The current hosting costs are at 60K/month.  The ISPs will 
not let WMF continue to operate for longer than a week or so without payment
if they are like most hosters.  I doubt any of these groups will want 
the traffic, and all of them will start toying with the idea of posting 
google ads
all over the place to make money.  The Libary of Congress or some other 
Government agency with deep pockets
would be better choices. 

We are current upgrading to Utopia, a metropolitian based Fiber network 
with 40 mb/s fiber links to every home in Utah.  I have ordered
80 mb/s and will upgrade the data center next month to Utopia.  We also 
have over 120 TB of servers online now at the WMG data
center.  If things ever fold up here, I can assure you that Wikimedias 
images will appear almost overnight.   And at a lot cheaper costs
than 60K month.  More like 2K a month in costs.   We run the Wolf 
Mountain File System on our servers, and hosting Wikigadugi
has really hardened it for over a year.

And I will never post Google ads on any of these sites. 

Jeff