[Foundation-l] fundraising

[Robert Scott Horning]

Anthere wrote:

>A list of suggestions, kindly sent offling by one of our participant and 
>reworked to suit our organisation.
>
>I'd like that these are taken into account by the Foundraising committee 
>(the job of the Fundraising committee is not only to raise money in 
>summer 2006, but also to organise sustainable Fundraising practices.
>
Has any thought gone into producing printed materials (either on CD or 
even dead tree format) for high quality materials derived from Wikimedia 
project pages?  I know this has been suggested many times in the past, 
but the quality of many of the Wikimedia pages, particular a focused 
sub-set of Wikipedia (like the Astronomy Wikiproject, for example, or 
the Chemistry Wikiproject pages) would do quite well.  There are also a 
number of Wikijunior books that are in fairly good shape, and if there 
was a group ready to do formal publication of Wikimedia materials like 
this I think the formal proofreading necessary for publication would 
come and make some of these projects of even higher quality than they 
already are.  And the multi-lingual versions of almost all of these 
higher quality Wikimedia pages are already translated as well.

Sure, I can (and have) print this stuff on my own, but it would be a 
good steady income for the Foundation if there were some sort of on-line 
store available for people to purchase these products.  And this would 
also be consistant with Wikimedia goals for the dissemination of this 
content.  It will be done sooner or later anyway, and it would be nice 
to see an initive that would involve active Wikimedians instead of some 
profiteer who doesn't care about the WMF or the Wikimedia projects.  If 
this were part of an official WMF effort rather than something ad-hoc by 
some users, it also wouldn't be too far off to even have links directly 
from Wikimedia project pages to a "printed version" of the content.  I 
don't think too many people would object to seeing that sort of link, 
especially if it wasn't obnoxious.

There are groups like Lulu press that offer things like this, and I'm 
sure there are other resources available to help with the physical 
printing.  What really needs to happen is that somebody tie all of this 
together and actually do it, rather than talk about it.  The other 
problem is that it will take a little bit of seed money to get started, 
and that is some initial financial risk as it is possible that you could 
end up with a huge stack of books or CDs that nobody wants to buy.  I 
believe this risk can be minimized, and once it has been proven that 
content of this nature can be sold, you can expand the offerings.  The 
other challenge is that Wikimedia projects have a truly world-wide 
reach, so perhaps seperate efforts at local Wikimedia chapters might be 
better to offer this?

Anyway, this is some food for thought, and I hope that there are others 
who might be interested in seeing this happen.  I think the time has 
come to put something like this together.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning