[Foundation-l] Remarks on Wikimedia's fundraiser

[Liam Wyatt]

On 8 March 2011 03:54, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:

> My own feeling is that the amount of money is so small, as is the staff,
> and special projects, in relationship to potential needs that I never
> thought of having a bad feeling, at least not about that.
>


I have the same impression. There's no shortage of things that need to be
done, things that should be done, and things that would be really nice to
have sometime - and that's just in the software/operations side of things.
At the same time I agree that we should have some principles of fundraising
that mean agree what should/shouldn't be done (e.g. stringent privacy, no
animated banners...)

I often get the feeling that on the one hand we are always pointing out
things that need to be improved ASAP (e.g. making the editing interface not
such an awfully complicated experience or making sure that the database
dumps happen) but on the other hand complaining about the increase in staff
numbers and budget. Certainly, it's not necessarily the same people at the
same time making these arguments but as a community we can't have it both
ways.

Just focusing on the technical side of things, consider the large number of
projects that are currently underway - many of which are structural to allow
easier development of future projects e.g. data centre, test framework,
analytics, documentation[1]. Whilst we might debate about the
prioritisation/speed/funding for these, I think it is clear that these
things need to happen are not going to happen by themselves.

I am certainly not a 100% fan of every project decision that the WMF has
made (for example, I would like for the WMF to focus more on building the
capacity of the Chapters in order to distribute the professional capacity of
outreach/technical/fundraising/Press more globally rather than centralising
professional capacity to San Francisco). However, criticizing the spending
prioritisation and fundraising principles is different to saying that "...we
seem to be raising more money than we need".

-Liam

[1]
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/wikimedia-engineering-february-report/

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