[Foundation-l] Fundraising "Bugging for Dollars" (request for comment form WMF)

[Domas Mituzas]

Hello,

> Can a member of WMF comment on the feasibility of this proposal?   
> Thanks.


It still remains my personal opinion though, but I hope it will sound  
sane. If needed, I'd provide this personal opinion to anyone  
interested :)

Currently WMF has extremely capable developers under the payroll,  
though, only few of them.
So far development time has been most expensive resource to allocate,  
and there're always important projects to be worked on.
So, there're strategic goals, and there're operational goals.

Now, how big should be donation, to support one feature or another?
In software industry, the pay-for-feature development is charged at  
least 200$ per man-hour, so our internal development costs are  
slightly lower %)
Add operational expenses costs afterwards - they increase too.

So this 'I pay 10$ gimmie features' idea doesn't really work, and is  
actually impossible to administrate. Ending up with 1000 different  
budgets for 1000 different features doesn't really work.
To make this viable, it has to make serious 'profit' (the cost of  
allocating developer who has been working on #1 project to do #100  
priority project is quite high, so there has to be quite high  
motivation for it).

Anything higher, like "we want to give you 10000$ for X" is something  
what can definitely go to WMF business development department, and  
they can evaluate that.

WMF is not software organization, nor software project, and though it  
maybe needs more brainpower/muscle, it still needs to be allocated to  
high-importance projects, to maintain collaboration infrastructure  
for community.
There were thoughts in the past to have separate fundraising account  
for mediawiki development, but even then, foundation shouldn't be  
interested in assigning people to projects that are not important in  
general mission.

And general mission is supported from general budget.
The higher general budget gets, more development resources can be  
obtained to work on various projects, and if your pet ideas fall into  
the agenda, they might get developed and rolled out.

-- 
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]