[Foundation-l] fundraiser suggestion

[Stephen Bain]

On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> But Wikimedia Foundation isn't (and has never been) purely a
> techno-organization, it's a global educational media organization and
> world-wide movement for free knowledge, which critically depends on
> technology to get its work done.

And noone would be a subscriber to this list if they did not care
about free knowledge. It's just that seeking donations to fund the
growth of the movement, and the pursuit of its goals, ought to be
carried out by way of messaging that refers to that growth and those
goals, not messaging that, for example, implies that the projects will
go offline or be forced to resort to advertising if the full $16 M
target were not met.

> We have a greater responsibility in
> the world than ever. The reason to raise $16M is to meet that
> responsibility. To meet it, for example, by making sure that we have
> reliable, distributed backups of all key data; that we won't disappear
> from the net for extended periods of time if Tampa goes down; that we
> don't have to rely entirely on the goodwill of a talented database
> engineer from Lithuania to deal with MySQL woes.

Yes, but the new datacentre and the new tech hires represent less than
40% of the new spending planned in 2010-11. This is assuming that the
datacentre and bandwidth upgrades represent the whole increase in
capital expenditure in 2010-11 ($2.3 M), and that as new tech staff
represent 36% of planned hires they will represent an equivalent
proportion of the increased expenditure on salaries ($2.1 M). [1]

They are one of the reasons, but not the only one, to raise $16 M.
They are the reason to raise perhaps a third of that target.

--
[1] Obviously this will not be a correct figure, as I'm sure the tech
staff do not get paid the same on average as all the other staff.
Moreover the order in which the new staff are hired throughout the
year will have some impact on this total. However, not all of the
current/new tech hires are/will be working on anything mission
critical. This suffices as a ballpark figure.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com