[Foundation-l] Chapter-selected Board seats - brainstorming

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 2:41 PM,  <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
>  As for some of the other comments: sure, regional US chapters can raise
>  money, but for what purpose?

A million purposes. If a chapter raises money that it does not need,
the simplest solution is to make a lump donation to the WMF. Or,
server hardware could be purchased and donated, or used separately
(think toolserver, which is owned and operated by WMF DE). A local
chapter could similarly maintain servers for a variety of tasks
(toolserving, hosting mirrors, hosting related sites like wikizine,
wikinewsie.org, hosting a chapter homepage with information, etc).
Johnny and I had an idea for purchasing a small fleet of used laptops,
that we could use to teach underprivileged children how to use wikis
and how to access free information.

Similarly, we could print materials, like Wikipedia articles or
Wikibooks, or Wikiversity materials, and distribute those printed
books for free to underprivileged students.

Money can be used to host meetups, conferences, seminars and other
public outreach events.

Money could be used to purchase the rights to copyrighted educational
materials, for the express purpose of re-releasing those materials
under a free license. These free materials could then, in turn, be
used to seed books on Wikibooks, courses on Wikiversity, articles on
Wikipedia, and sources on Wikisource.

Money could be used to fund volunteers, such as supplying funding for
a volunteer developer to implement specific software
features/extensions. Volunteer authors and editors could earn grants
to write or edit important educational resources on the various
projects. Hell, we could start a scholarship trust to help give money
to dedicated wikimedians for college.

This is just the tip of the iceburg, a handful of things that come off
the top of my head. Instead of asking what's the purpose for raising
money, the better question is "can you imagine all the
possibilities?".

--Andrew Whitworth