Hello Erik, there are cases in which this is clearly the right thing for us to do.
1) An annual 'supporting the ecosystem' program, that channels grants and visibility to important partners, seems interesting. Could this be implemented as a targeted grants program? Or just targeted outreach encouraging groups to apply for existing programs?
I wouldn't call it 'giving back' -- that seems to minimize the way in which this is integral to our work. (I see almost no difference, from the perspective of our mission, between supporting OSM or Wikieducator and supporting Wikiversity).
However we should be clear that this is where some of our resources go, and update related messaging; or raise funds specifically for those goals with their own campaigns.
2) We need a free toolchain that we can build upon and digitize / gather / curate / format / publish knowledge with. There are currently major gaps in this toolchain -- core projects and collaborations rely on non-free tools or non-free hosted service. Every time we use or work to interoperate with such tools and services, we should also support replacing them with free ones. (That support can include everything from publicity and matchmaking to in-kind support to funds)
So we should be supporting, in some fashion: free formats; free fonts; free tools for annotation, real-time text collaboration, spreadsheet editing, media editing; the ecosystem needed to support free media codecs. We should be framing and broadcasting to the FK ans FOSS world where the biggest gaps lie and what needs to be done.
And we should be able to point to how and where we are investing in this -- for instance when we get into debates about whether or not to include non-free fonts in our default fontstack; or about how to support people trying to convert and publish media in encumbered formats.
3) Many projects that we rely on run on a very small budget, but may need specific skills. I would separate how we think about supporting this sort of work, from how we think about supporting larger projects such as CC and OSM.
SJ
On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 3:50 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi folks,
I'd be interested in hearing broader community opinions about the extent to which WMF should sponsor non-profits purely to support work that Wikimedia benefits from, even if it's not directed towards a specific goal established in a grant agreement.
This comes up from time to time. One of the few historic precedents I'm aware of is the $5,000 donation that WMF made to FreeNode in 2006 [1]. But there are of course many other organizations/communities that the Wikimedia movement is indebted to.
On the software side, we have Ubuntu Linux (itself highly indebted to Debian) / Apache / MariaDB / PHP / Varnish / ElasticSearch / memcached / Puppet / OpenStack / various libraries and many other dependencies [2], infrastructure tools like ganglia, observium, icinga, etc. Some of these projects have nonprofits that accept and seek sponsorship and support, some don't.
One could easily expand well beyond the software we depend on server-side to client-side open source applications used by our community to create content: stuff like Inkscape, GIMP and LibreOffice (used for diagrams). And there are other communities we depend on, like OpenStreetMap.
So, should we steer clear of this type of sponsorship altogether because it's a slippery slope, or should we try to come up with evaluation criteria to consider it on a case-by-case basis (e.g. is there a trustworthy non-profit that has a track record of accomplishment and is in actual need of financial support)?
I could imagine a process with a fixed "giving back" annual budget and a community nominations/review workflow. It'd be work to create and I don't want to commit to that yet, but I would be interested to hear opinions.
MariaDB specifically invited WMF to become a sponsor, and we're clearly highly dependent on them. But I don't think it makes sense for us to just write checks if there's someone who asks for support and there's a justifiable need. However, if there's broad agreement that this is something Wikimedia should do more of, then I think it's worth developing more consistent sponsorship criteria.
Thanks, Erik
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Freenode_Donation [2] Cf. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Upstream_projects -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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