[Foundation-l] Isn't it getting to be time...

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Anthere <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I asked Michael if we could get a financial report to evaluate the 
> situation. Financial statements for the year are roughly done, but for a 
> part about Wikimania still not fixed. I suppose Mav should soon give us 
> more feedback I expect. We have approximately 530 000 dollars in cash, 
> which is roughly what it was at the end of February.

You have a report from me that lists per quarter spending and income for all of 2004, 2005 and the
first quarter of this year. The only thing missing are Wikimania expenses for 2005 (Michael is
working on incorporating that into the regular finances, last I heard) and a current liquid asset
report (Micheal is much better situated to prepare that as well). 
 
> Donations through PayPal are roughly between 25 to 35 000 dollars per 
> week. It might be interesting to generalize the idea of putting the 
> permanent donation link at the top of pages.

s/per week/per month 

We are also getting a fairly steady stream of mail donations as well. I'm away from the financial
records right now, so I can't say just how much.

I would most certainly like to see the anonnote for every wiki have a small, permanent, donation
message. The English Wikipedia has had 'Your [continued donations] keep Wikipedia running!' since
the end of the last fundraiser. IMO, having that has helped result in the continued healthy
donation rate and has eliminated the need to have a Q1 fundraiser. Also helping us has been a
lower than expected increase in expenses.    
 
> In terms of getting funds, we try to get more organised to collect funds 
> from those using our content or setting up search systems on our db. 
> Danny also made a pretty active search of sponsors for Wikimania. I also 
> tried to strongly suggest donating to a couple of organisations through 
> the special project committee, but with no success as of today :-(

Getting funds in that way is great, but almost all of that kind of money will be program-specific
(money that can only be used for, for example, to print textbooks in Africa or, as you mention, to
help pay for a conference). So I suspect that most operating expenses (servers, bandwidth and
staffing) will continue to require donations from readers. 
 
> In terms of expenses, we definitely have Wikimania coming.

I have yet to see a budget for Wikimania, so how are we planning that? One must know how much
something will cost before trying to figure out if we have enough money for it. :)

> Two techco meetings took place two weeks ago and a couple of days ago, 
> so I suppose we can expect new order pretty soon :-)

IIRC, there was some talk after the last multi-hour outage to start building a second large fully
Wikimedia-owned and controlled server farm and have it in a geographically different place than
the current server farm (maybe near Brion in the LA area). The idea being, that if one server farm
goes down, that the other could take over with minimal disruption to at least reading of pages. If
that is the case, then we have some fairly serious server expenses coming up. 
 
> There are some pretty advanced discussions to hire staff as well. CEO, 
> legal in-house counsel as well as more assistants to help with OTRS and 
> phone answering.

Nod. But, IMO, we should seriously consider a better place for the Wikimedia main office before
hiring lots of people. St Pete is fine as a tourist destination and maybe even as a satellite
office of the foundation given that two board members and Danny live there, but the host city of
the main office of an international organization? Sorry, but no. 

Washington D.C. or NYC are places where almost every nation of world sends their ambassadors and
where a multitude of other international organizations, which we really should be working closely
with, are based. Talent pool is another consideration; many more people with the relevant
experience we need already live in those cities. 
 
> So, I'd say we would definitely benefit from a fundraising. It is not 
> *urgent* but we need to anticipate before it becomes urgent.

I told the board before that I will not run another fundraiser without the help from a duly
created fundraising committee. Nobody from the board has proposed the creation of such a committee
yet and I won't waste my time (as I did with trying to help staff the finance committee) until the
board acts. 

We also really should pass a budget for the rest of the year before we have a fundraiser. I'm
going to send the spending forecast you aleady have to the officers and committees this weekend.
Hopefully, it won't take long to turn that into a proposed budget for the board to vote one. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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