[Foundation-l] 2010-11 Annual Plan Now Posted to FoundationWebsite

[Samuel Klein]

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 2:49 AM, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The endowment is not about just about funding, I think it is probably also symbolic of endurance to many people.
> There is a worry about the content remaining available in the long term. If there is not an endowment to donate towards,
> I think people could use something else to symbolize a commitment to the future endurance of the content that has been gathered.

Commitment is a good way of framing this.  Our last fundraiser focused
on preserving the projects 'FOREVER'.  Those inspired by that idea
will be happy to see explicitly how we are pursuing it.

For instance, a clear commitment to maintaining the physical operation
of the projects for the next 50 years, even if all sources of funding
were to dry up.  Or a commitment to maintaining this with
infrastructure distributed across multiple jurisdictions.
Or support for a git-like solution for distributed synchronization of
a number of different hosts.  There are a number of reasons to want
this -- effective collaboration across an offline network, easier
incremental updates, easier maintenance of customized forks which
still contribute most of their updates back to the global pool, and
more robust distribution of the global project.

That's what I would imagine being supported by an 'endowment': the
work that is necessary for very long-term sustenance of the projects.
Much of this doesn't have to be supported with dedicated funds; it
could also be covered by an organized network of mirrors and backups,
redundant sources of hosting and bandwidth support, and other
failsafes.

David Gerard writes:
> http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2007/04/10/disaster-recovery-planning/
< Can we reasonably say that everything else on the list there is a
> solved problem we don't have to worry about?

I wonder how robustly the user database is backed up / whether it's in
multiple data centers.  You're right that our role as
identity-verifier for our millions of users is important.

SJ