[Foundation-l] Q1 2005 Fund Drive over

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Another thanks to mav for the very informative updates!

Thanks for the compliment. :)

Much thanks also goes to the numerous people who created translations and who
helped me with updates. 
 
> I do have one question---what's the relationship between the Wikimedia 
> Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland?  Is that money to be considered 
> part of our overall fundraising, i.e. money that can eventually be used 
> for servers, etc., or is it specifically for activities within Germany?

That is a very good question that I'm not clear on either. One reason why I sat
on the Wikimedia Deutschland numbers for a few days was due to this question.
Every indication I did get from the few members of the Wikimedia Deutschland
board I talked too about this, was that we are all one Wikimedia and the
numbers should be included. Thus I finally made that update. 

Legal issues about how that money can be spent (or transfered and then spent)
still are not clear to me. Speaking solely as a user and not as CFO, I think it
would make the most sense (and probably be easiest to do) if Wikimedia
Deutschland spent this money directly inside Germany to buy hardware needed to
set-up a server farm in Germany. This could even become the primary and logical
purpose of having national chapters in the first place (other than the social
aspect).

At the very least a squid-caching set-up in Germany would be nice, but the
amount of money Wikimedia Deutschland has would make it possible to have a
database slave as well (IIRC, Jamesday said this type of set-up is possible
even for wikis). Then the next time our Florida cluster goes down we can 
theoretically be up in at least read-only mode in a very short amount of time
(please, somebody correct me if this is possible with a separate squid-only
set-up). 

-- mav


		
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