[Foundation-l] Expert board members - a suggestion

[brion at wikimedia.org]

On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:55:56 -0400, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> The WMF tremendously overestimated future hardware costs by making
horrible
> assumptions, which I pointed out on this very list.  That depended
entirely
> on the WMF.

The 2007-2008 Wikimedia budget was the company's first systematically
built budget ever, and many of the numbers were based on estimates and
extrapolations from the previous year's spending which didn't turn out to
be as accurate as originally forseen. While it may be fair to criticize it
as a sub-ideal budget, it's rather pointless to continue on about it over a
year after that fiscal year ended.

You may wish to pay more attention to the 2008-2009 (last FY) and
2009-2010 (current FY) budgets if you're interested in oversight.

As for the decision not to immediately reassign overbudgeted monies to
other unbudgeted uses -- money doesn't just disappear at the end of the
fiscal year! Spending money for the sole purpose of using up the budget
before year-end would have been gross mismanagement and would likely have
been harshly criticized. Given the relatively new company leadership and
the uncertainly of how fundraising might go, treating donors' money
conservatively makes a lot of sense.

Instead of spending it on anything we could think of right away, donors'
money was kept in store so it could be spent more wisely under future
budgets. Over the last couple years we've been building up our human
capacity, and we're now in a position where we actually can do and are
bringing in a lot of new staff and contract developers, both to the general
pool and on specific project teams.

I'm afraid we're not in a position to change what we spent two years ago;
all we can change is what we're spending today, and I don't really see
anything for you to object to. We *are* hiring more tech staff as you
recommend. We *have* assigned the dump fixing to a single responsible
individual as you recommend (and everything is now working except the
English full-history, which is still being worked on). We *are* hiring a
new CTO with a strong administrative background, as you recommend.

What's left?

-- brion