[Wikipedia-l] Fundraising

[Guillaume Blanchard]

Hi all,
It's a little bit strange to me to ask people money before to know exactly
what we need.
I think we first need to design the network we need to face the exponential
progression of Mediawiki projects.
Then we can think what hardware/software we need to make it (thus, know
about how much we need).
Then we can ask people to donate to buy this hardware.
Personnaly, instead of hear "we need $100,000" I prefer to hear "we need to
buy X, Y and Z that may cost around $100,000".
Just my POV.

By the way, do we have professional/competent people to design the complex
network we need? How much may cost a network analysis by a professional
company? May it help?

Aoineko

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Delirium" <delirium at hackish.org>
To: <wikipedia-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 08, 2004 7:03 AM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Fundraising


> Jimmy Wales wrote:
>
> >In my opinion, we are going to need another $100,000 of equipment by
> >the end of the year, *and* we can *easily* raise that from donations
> >from the general public.
> >
> >
> I think we'll need a decent justification of that to make sure everyone
> understands why we need the money and what we're going to do with it.
> $100,000 is a *lot* of money, and I can imagine at least some people
> will be skeptical that it's entirely necessary---we have to give them at
> least some plausible reason to believe that it's really not possible to
> run the site reasonably well on, say, $50,000 worth of equipment instead
> (which would still be a lot of equipment!).  At the very least a
> proposed parts list with some explanation of why we need the various
> parts (and can't do with cheaper replacement for the very-expensive
> ones) would help---even non-techie people who aren't going to read it
> all the way through will be somewhat mollified by at least seeing that
> we've taken the time to put something like that up.
>
> -Mark