I worry that running an auction and a raffle for each - or even some - editathons would be a lot of work, even if you just focus on the admin work (I'm not sure what the laws around fundraising auctions and lotteries are but that could be costly too). The FDC and the community in general are very much against increasing 'back office costs' and this would increase them by quite a bit for each editathon.
The incentivising volunteers with money issue would also be very very difficult, even if the community was ok with it. You'd be paying volunteers, which in this country would make them staff, which means they'd need a minimum wage, taxes, and even a pension.
Do we need to incentivise volunteers with cash at all? I'm not sure we do... there's no shortage of volunteers to run editathons in the UK at least! On 19 Mar 2015 00:54, "James Salsman" jsalsman@gmail.com wrote:
I really like editathons because of the ease with which they can be designed to address systemic bias, but I'm not sure having them supported by the Foundation is optimal from the perspective of time and money both.
Therefore, I propose that someone try some editathons where half the tickets are auctioned, the other half are raffled, and the Foundation pays to support them if and only if the auction fails to pay all of the expenses in advance, and then only the difference. This will allow them to become more exclusive, but not completely exclusive, and it will incentivize the organizing wikipedians by allowing them to pay themselves some contingent portion of the proceeds to be negotiated with the Foundation, and which could, for example, include an open-ended proportion of auction proceeds.
Please share your thoughts on this proposal. I am also making diagrams for nine of the twelve steps listed on http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review and its talk page, where I will soon be proposing a different alternate funding model to avoid relying on Google Summer of Code. I would also be most interested in comments on that. Thank you! _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe