[Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion

[Brian J Mingus]

I guess nobody cares if you top post or bottom post here, but it does get
confusing when the two are mixed in the same thread.

I need not imply that the WMF depends on money. It's kind of obvious, isn't
it? The WMF relies primarily on donations from individuals, and to a lesser
extent on large grants from folks like Omidyar. So long as basic principles
like not showing third party adverts are not violated there is no reason to
suspect that the readership of the projects and thus the amount that can be
collected from donations will continue to grow. If individual donations did
decline for some reason WMF would be forced to scale back operations. There
is no reason that they would have to resort to seeking large donations from
extremely wealthy private interests. In the extreme of things we might find
that there is only enough money to pay for servers and bandwidth. That
wouldn't be so bad - it's the way things used to be. Overall I would say
there is little to nothing wrong with the current situation, so I really
don't understand your e-mail. Our "economical autonomy" derives from our
principles of openness and freedom.

- Brian

On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Noein <pronoein at gmail.com> wrote:

> Are you saying that WMF has put itself in a huge dependence relationship
> with money? That it could be forced to require third parties' help if
> the donations are insufficient? That would be throwing itself into the
> lion's den. What was worth risking so much its economical autonomy and
> mission?
> I hope you're wrong about the situation, Brian.
>
>
>
> On 31/12/2010 16:19, Brian J Mingus wrote:
> > Second, if WMF doesn't meet the fundraising goal they will have to cut
> > something from the budget. If it's so very important to you that they not
> > try advertising techniques that are mildly annoying to some users you
> should
> > start by suggesting projects that won't get funded or people that won't
> get
> > hired or servers that won't get bought, etc.
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>