[Wikipedia-l] Fundraising

[Daniel Mayer]

Fantasy wrote:
>Hi Mav (or Jimbo),
>Re http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fundraising.html
>In your function of Treasurer for the board, 

Er, ah, I just volunteered to be treasurer if nobody else who was 
qualified/motivated didn't want the position. Nothing official at all at this 
point. 

>I think it would be really helpful to add Information 
>(on a subpage?) regarding how much is already
>there / who gave on what date. 

We can't give out that info if the people who are donating don't want us to 
release their names. Currently there is no way for people to indicate whether 
or not they want their donation to be anonymous, but I'm sure we could post 
periodic PDFs with the dates and amounts (no names). 

>A lot of comments (especially on the german
>wikipedia) are always "Who is this Jimbo", 

He's the guy that pays the bills and makes all this happen (over a quarter 
million US bucks and counting last time I checked). What more is needed than 
that? 

>"What is this Wikimedia-Fondation", "Why should 
>we trust this people", 

So far the Foundation is just Jimbo and the reason you should trust him is 
because he has never given any reason not to be trusted while being in a 
position that could cause the end of the project on a simple whim (or to 
bastardize the concept by making it commercial; have you ever seen an add on 
Wikipedia?). He is now legally subordinate to the Foundation but as I said he 
is the Foundation so far. I still trust him completely though. 

>"Can we not have our own German Server/Organisation"... 

Why? The Wikimedia Foundation /is/ the German organization too and we are far 
more stronger by pooling our resources instead of fragmenting them. 

>Maybe with a little bit of transparency we could 
>show them that this is a really "Open" Organisation.

Slow down - we still need to set the darn thing up. Yes, it legally exists but 
a great deal of work still has to be done by the community to make the 
Wikimedia Foundation actually become more than just Jimbo. 

>Maybe something like this:

>List of Donations as of xx.xx.2003 in total 123.4 USD:

And Euros, Yen, Canadian dollars and Pounds just so that people outside the US 
can get a grasp on what the numbers actually mean (even though the actual 
bank account will only have US dollars in it). 

>Date / Amount / Real-Name / (Country?)
>Date / Amount / Wiki-Username
>Date / Amount / (wants to stay) Anonymouns
>Date / (wants to keep amount secret) / Name or Anonymous
>...

As I said there is currently no way for people to indicate all this info.

IMO, all we really should be worried about (especially at first) is pure 
numbers and dates, not who contributed how much. The "who" has to be kept 
confidential at least until we get a way for people to indicate that they 
wouldn't mind having this info made public. Even then it should be a 
community decision on whether or not to make the 'who' info easily available; 
last thing we need is for people to think that the size of their donations 
somehow gives them more power in our community. Merit and a good track record 
should still be the number one criteria we consider for that type of thing. 

>If the users see that the amount send was officially 
>stated/received somewhere, maybe they would put 
>more trust (and money) into Wikimedia/pedia.

For now at least, this info will have to be placed on a page on meta. I think 
I heard that we have received about US$1,000 in donations so far and that 
Jimbo put a couple thousand in the account when he opened it. 

IIRC from skimming Wikitech-l, what we have right now in funds is almost what 
we need to upgrade our current servers, but there has been some talk about 
also buying a US$6,000 server in a few months (giving us a three server 
set-up). That's why a mention of the Foundation and our fundraising drive is 
an important thing to mention in the press release. 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)