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

[Samuel Klein]

On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 5:56 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I agree we should have specific goals for resources, both short- and
long-term.  The reason to allocate a fund for long-term infrastructure
support, is to avoid confusing that with generic reserves (with "no
immediate goals").

It is true that, if there are no other major crises happening at the
same time, people will step up anytime there is a real need to help
Wikipedia.  But part of our duty is to prepare for a major crisis as
well (one in which most of our supporters will have their own personal
troubles).


Thomas Dalton writes:
> The "kill switch" idea, as I understand it, is about killing the
> internet entirely, not one site. If the US government shuts down all
> the parts of the internet that are under its jurisdiction, the
> internet would pretty collapse worldwide

The Internet is a bit more robust than this.   At any rate, Wikipedia
should be so widely mirrored by local groups that it would still be
available on local networks if the global Internet became unavailable.
 "One country taking down the Internet" isn't so likely, but one
country being cut off is.  Today there are entire countries that have
a single provider connecting them to the rest of the world; with cheap
internal connectivity within the country but expensive connectivity to
the Internet as a whole.  A focused effort to increase our network of
local mirrors could minimize this effect.

Every national and regional library should have a local copy of Wikimedia.

SJ