[Wikipedia-l] Fundraising

Mon Jun 7 18:37:01 UTC 2004

--- Erik Moeller <erik_moeller at gmx.de> wrote:
> Jimmy-
> > 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.
> 
> Yes. A $100K fundraising drive makes sense, but at least *some* content  
> should be up - at least the squids serving pages in offline mode. That's  
> because many of our visitors come from Google, and if fundraising is the  
> first thing they see - and no content - they will be turned away.

I completely agree with that. People need to see the goods before they pony up
the dough (sorry, needless Americanisms). 

> We should also have realtime updates of funds coming in, this can  
> dramatically increase participation. This isn't that hard to do as PayPal  
> provides an interface for it:
> https://www.paypal.com/en/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/ipn-intro

That's neat! Although in the meantime I could update the numbers a few times a
day during a fund drive. 

> Lastly, I think hardware alone is not enough. We need a fulltime  
> professional systems administrator with direct access to the machines.  
> Within a $100K budget that is certainly viable. If Brion wants a new job,  
> I'd say he should be immediately offered this opportunity.

Yes - I think we have reached a point where throwing more hardware at the
problem will not be as productive as having somebody on site (at least part
time) managing the machines. Brion seems to be the obvious choice but that
would require him to move to Florida, which is a lot for us to ask. 

Another idea I've been toying with is establishing a 'tip jar' for every active
developer in the form of links to their PayPal accounts at the bottom of the
donations page. Brion already has one but that was for his notebook computer
fund - something he bought a while ago. This would be more of an ongoing thing.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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