I find myself in furious agreement with Charles here. For years the Foundation has been insisting (and quite rightly so) that allied organisations consider only the stark benefit-per-dollar that they can extract for each piece of movement funding, as measured by KPIs and metrics. Handing out money to fellow travellers, no matter how well intentioned, and expecting only warm fuzzies in return seems to be to fly in the face of that.
Grants directed to the development specific functionality that Wikimedia can use and which can later be included in other project's core offerings? Sure, I don't think anyone has a problem with that. But I think that handing out unrestricted grants and "giving back" just because we're nice people and they're nice people strays too far from the Foundation's mission and contradicts the message about budgetary discipline that has been hammered into chapters over the years.
Cheers, Craig
On 16 April 2014 07:34, Charles Andrès charles.andres.wmch@gmail.comwrote:
In a period where all the fund dissemination of the movement is driven by the question "what's the impact on wikimedia project" and a community-driven process, I would suggest that any redistribution of the funds done by the WMF would follow the same rules.
Charles
Le 15 avr. 2014 à 21:57, Michael Peel email@mikepeel.net a écrit :
Hi Erik,
I'd say 'maybe'. I think this sort of work is worth supporting in
general, but the question should be whether providing the support would improve the content and/or provision of the Wikimedia projects. I'd like to see a good community-driven process that would determine whether such sponsorship would be helpful or whether it would be a waste of money.
Thanks, Mike
On 15 Apr 2014, at 20:50, 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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