[Wikimedia-l] Wikimedia (Foundation) endowment

[Anders Wennersten]

I was marginally involved on this issue two years ago. And by then the 
focus/priority was to ramp up the Fundraising activities.

As this now has been successfully done, I believe this discussion is now 
much better in timing, and worthwhile to work through

I like the idea that the basic running costs for servers etc should have 
guaranteed income by Endowments, but that the programmatic activities 
should still be dependent on the yearly fundraising

Anders

Theo10011 skrev 2013-03-14 19:23:
> On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 2:47 PM, MZMcBride <z at mzmcbride.com> wrote:
>
>> As I understand it, the yearly annual Wikimedia Foundation budget is about
>> $35 million. It costs about $2.5 million to keep the sites operational for
>> a year. So even if an endowment weren't large enough to cover well over
>> 130 full-time staff members, it could still keep us up and running for a
>> while. Assuming $2.5 million, that's about $125 million, using your
>> multiply by 50 formula. That's still a shitload of money, but it's much
>> less than $2 billion. :-)
>>
>> I think we need to decide, as a community, whether this is something we
>> want. If it is, we should set up an endowment fund sooner rather than
>> later, so that people willing to donate to such an endowment have a place
>> to put their money, I think.
>>
> This used to be my pet project for a while. My first edit to strategy wiki
> was about an endowment fund[1], I don't think there was anything on the
> subject before that one. Stu and Eugene's edit on the subject came later,
> so I'll still take some credit for this one. ;)
>
> I brought this up in person to a few board members, and to the foundation
> staff on another mailing list an year or two ago. I believe they are all
> aware of the idea and its implication. Eugene suggested at some point that
> we should come back to this discussion later. The answers were always
> ambiguous from what I recall.
>
> There seems to be absence of a long term sustainable financial vision for
> the foundation, or if there is, it doesn't seem to be public. The majority
> of it seems to revolve around retaining x months of operational reserves
> and putting all the chips on the annual fundraiser. I always thought that's
> not a very mature financial strategy for an organization.
>
> I started discussing this on strategy wiki, etc. and the first thought was
> separating the core and non-core activities, and then separating the
> funding models. The core activities are relatively stable, the non-core
> differentiate a lot more year on year - moving the non-core to a variable
> model where the revenue would define spending, and core activities to its
> self-contained sustainable model would be an ideal strategy. The
> bare-minimum operational cost of hosting, and being online, could be
> covered with such a fund easily, leaving the annual fundraiser target to be
> a variable each year without any target, which in turn can define the
> spending. The correct calculation,as thomas started alluding to would be -
> operating expenses + projected growth (year on year) + annual inflation
> rate + reserve/contingency. I had a lot more worked out somewhere according
> to tax laws and specific interest rates. Either way, the first implication
> would be that this would nullify to some extent, the majority of the
> urgency the fundraiser raises, the success of the fundraiser would be
> irrelevant to the long term existence of the projects.
>
> Regards
> Theo
>
> [1]http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Wikipedia_Fund
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