[Foundation-l] 2010-11 Annual Plan Now Posted to Foundation Website

[phoebe ayers]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 12:48 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> When you consider the source of much of the donations, you will find that
> they have been coming mainly from the United States. Chapters are becoming
> more and more active in fundraising. The Dutch chapter for instance plans on
> professionalising its operations and fundraising staff has the highest
> priority. It performed much better, one of the reasons is that IDEAL, a
> payment method for the Internet in the Netherlands, was implemented. I am
> sure that with increased support from the WMF not only but also the Dutch
> will raise substantially more money this time around.
>
> When you ask for an endowment, you indicate an opinion that the current
> levels of support for our projects suffice. I do not share that opinion and,
> I am happy to find indications in the planning that this opinion is
> supported in the plans for 2010/11. Milos and myself will talk in Gdansk
> about the need to improve technical support for our smallest projects (think
> Hindi, Malayalam... hundreds of million people will benefit..). Some of it
> is hard core language support and some are changes to operating projects in
> order to raise traffic and usability for readers.

Hi Gerard,
A small point -- I don't know who the "you" refers to here -- me? --
but when *I* ask for an endowment, it is not because I think the
current levels of support suffice; that's a different question. It's
because I don't want the long-term support for Wikimedia to be
dependent on our ability to fundraise increasingly large amounts from
year to year. Fundraising above and beyond such an endowment is fine
and good and necessary as well. I have heard that raising an endowment
was rejected by the strategy process because it was hard; I don't know
what that means, exactly, but raising an extra $20M in a recession is
hard, too.

Someone was talking to me the other day about the differences between
Wikimedia and large universities, such as the one where I work. "You
don't mind criticizing the university governance", he said; "in part
because you can't imagine it ever going away, no matter what."

It's true, and I want Wikimedia to be that stable. In fact, I want it
to be *more* stable than most American universities are at the moment
-- certainly more than mine!

-- phoebe