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

[Brian McNeil]

If a "donate to help cover the cost of developing this, and other, features"
button was added to bugzilla I feel very few would object. Provided there is
no promise to work on someone's pet project and this is made clear then
funding that is allocated to the cost of developers should not be a serious
issue to manage. It may free up resources from the Foundation's budget to
work on other issues, or - in the unlikely event it is a runaway success -
it may contribute enough to help take on another developer. In either case,
it is another potential source of revenue.


Brian McNeil

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of David Gerard
Sent: 21 March 2008 14:21
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraising "Bugging for Dollars" (request
forcomment form WMF)

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.

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