[Foundation-l] Are we useful yet?

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 8:41 PM, Dennis During <dcduring at gmail.com> wrote:
> How would we KNOW that our efforts were pleasing to anyone other than
> ourselves?  We have very little information about how valuable our
> users fee about any of the projects in any language.  In the name of
> some definition of privacy we have created a world where our efforts
> face virtually no broad reality check.

If I judge according to your name, you are a native English speaker
(sorry if I made a mistake :) ). As someone who is not a native
English speaker and as someone who has a fair amount of contacts in
non-English world, I may guarantee that not only we have a great
support, but we are, actually, a community [and WMF is an
organization] with very high reputation (and, not only inside of
non-English world). So, according to that, our efforts are valued by
others.

> I suppose we could rely on a marketplace test: Are we succeeding at
> raising the funds required to keep the operation running and at
> getting volunteer help to reduce the need for funding?
>
> Presumably the foundations and corporate funders know how to evaluate
> us, whether it is on some statistical basis, on some good-intentions
> test, on a feel-good basis, or based on how it contributes to their
> own objectives.

AFAIK, donations during the fundraising period at the end of the year
are increased from year to year. Actually, I think that last year
we've got much more, because the previous one we've got one very big
donation doubled by some other donor. (If I don't remember well,
someone may correct me.) However, we should watch the fundraising
period for this year, too.