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

[David Gerard]

On 21/03/2008, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

>  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).


Oh well :-)

Hmm. What about beg notices all over Bugzilla? "Support MediaWiki
development: give us MONEY!" or similar. Just for a single dev pool.


- d.