I agree with Mike.
The question is that open software and open knowledge are not so close as
open knowledge and open data and open content, for instance.
In that case the Wikimedia projects can receive a benefit (supporting an
open software community it's a way to support better a strategical
technology).
Anyway it would be good to have a more transparent and clear overview to
understand what can be and what cannot be funded and what should be the
process of approval and what should be the maximum amount.
Regards
On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 9:57 PM, Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net> wrote:
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(a)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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