Le 15/04/2014 21:50, Erik Moeller a écrit :
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.
Indeed that's a good suggestion considering both that they are (when they are) "organizations/communities that the Wikimedia movement is indebted to" and the fact that they have much less easy access to the general public for fundraising than the Wikimedia movement has through its projects. In the meantime, in accordance with the significant message of Ting Chen five days ago ([Wikimedia-l] Funding of decentralized organizational structure - Thu, 10 Apr 2014 13:23:39 +0200 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-April/071044.html ) I believe that not only the WMF but the chapters should be entitled to support such organizations for they are often the ones that have the opportunity to know these organizations locally. The chapters are likely to be aware of the smooth running, needs or dysfunctioning of some of these organizations when they operate in the same area, and be more approachable to them.
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