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

[Keegan Peterzell]

On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 11:35 AM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.



Hm, well, I think this gets back to David Goodman's point, one which I agree
with.

Yes, the only absolute commitment the WMF has in the grand scheme of things
is to provide the physical resource to host the projects.  However, this all
began as a  side project on Bomis servers.  If it had gone belly up before
the Foundation was established, volunteers would have forked the content and
found other hosting providers, not just tossed in the towel.  I think it is
fair to say that volunteers would still do this- locate and finance the
resources independently.  It would cause splintering, because of anticipated
control issues,and all that comes with forks and the prongs each being
pointy.

I guess my point is that ultimately I would rather see the WMF focus on
using its resources to provide free educational materials as actively as
possible and disseminating them as far as possible rather than build a war
chest.  If the shit were to hit the fan, volunteers would still step up.

-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan