[Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion

[Stephen Bain]

On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 9:40 PM, Domas Mituzas <midom.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It's kind of obvious, isn't it?
>
> It is not obvious how much money is "urgent", more urgent than the need to read the article.
> It is not obvious how much money is sooooo urgent that it needs to distract me from reading the article by blinking.
> It is not obvious how much money is urgent so we could entirely block people from reading the article until they donate.

I think we can equate 'urgent' to 'keeping the sites operational'.
With that in mind we can look at the 2010-11 plan [1] to see how much
money is budgeted for doing that:

$1.8 M (up from $1 M) is budgeted for hosting costs, ie keeping the
servers operational and buying enough internets to feed them with.

$3.3 M (up from $0.96 M) is budgeted for capital expenses, most of
which (though an unspecified proportion) is to fit out a new
datacentre and get more bandwidth for the existing ones. We can count
this as urgent too (making sure the sites remain operational with
growth over the 12 months).

We don't know what proportion of the $9 M budgeted for salaries is for
the tech staff. With projected hirings over 2010-11 (16 new tech staff
for a total of 38), they will make up about 40% of staff (roughly the
same as at present). Not all of these will strictly be necessary for
keeping the sites operational though. Not all the new positions are
specified, but the ones that are range from strongly connected to
keeping the site operational (five new tech operations positions, a
datacentre engineer), to moderately connected (a couple of new
positions relating to MediaWiki development), to not connected at all
(people to work on a database to "track relationships with all
stakeholders including readers, editors, donors, other volunteers,
etc").

Moreover, as much as we all love the current tech staff [2], not all
of their positions are related to keeping the site operational; some
are about expanding functionality.

But let's be generous and say that all the tech staff can be put in
the 'urgent' pile, and that tech salaries will be $3.7 M (41.7% of the
budgeted amount for salaries, assuming here that tech salaries are no
higher or lower than other salaries). Let's also assume that the whole
of capital expenditure will be on tech essential for keeping the sites
operational into the future.

This puts a ceiling on 'urgent' costs at $8.8 M, or 43% of the budget
of $20.4 M. [3]

--
[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf
[2] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff#Technology
[3] The fundraiser hit $8.8 M on Dec 16. But, subtracting the budgeted
$4 M of non-fundraiser revenue, the fundraiser needed to meet $4.8 M
to cover 'urgent' expenses, a mark it hit on Nov 25.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com