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

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I am afraid that a drive to have funding for the next fifty years will be
extremely counter productive. It is this kind of arguments that has turned
off many of the people who contribute to charities in the Netherlands. The
notion that we should have reserves for the next fifty years assumes that
our current level of service is adequate. Even that is not the case.

It has been argued in the past that when we truly need money. Money for
something that can be properly identified that we only need to ask. I
strongly believe that this is the case.

Last year I was told that the WMF could not manage more projects. The case
that was made was proper. This year we are as ambitious and there is still a
lot that we need to do if we want to reach out to every person on this
earth. This needs its funding and we will work hard to get the associated
funding. When we are frugal and build reserves, this will be appreciated.
When we build reserves that have no immediate goals, we will lose acceptance
as an organisation that actually needs the money.

So by all means feel that an endowment is a good thing but be warned that
once people have the feeling that WMF has plenty of reserves their feeling
that the WMF deserves their money will not get reconsideration.
Thanks,
       GerardM

On 3 July 2010 18:35, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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