[Commons-l] Dream a little...

Sun Oct 15 19:08:02 UTC 2006

On 10/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>
> I would like to gather from the community some examples of works you
> would like to see made free, works that we are not doing a good job of
> generating free replacements for, works that could in theory be
> purchased and freed.
>
> Dream big.  Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase
> copyrights to be made available under a free license.  What would you
> like to see purchased and released under a free license?
[snip]

How sustainable do you see this sort of funding being?

I ask because I think it makes a difference in how we handle this sort
of planning.

Because of the huge spread of topics and interests in our projects,
there is sure to be as many good ideas as there are users.

If this is to be a one time event, the best way to handle it is
perhaps for a Wikimedia executive (i.e. you) to put out a call..
select a couple of the best ideas, and then see which of them can be
done for the funding we have.

If there is a possibility of continuing this model further, I think a
better approach would be to setup a tracker of ideas (perhaps as
simple as a wikipage, although the sales forecasting component of a
CRM might be more powerful) which we can use to determine which ideas
are most widely supported, and from that list we can go and
presumptively obtain budgetary numbers for the ideas.  With the costs
in hand we could then seek appropriate funding to make the dreams a
reality.

I think that if we're going to consider the big impact ideas... it's
not a much a question of finding the ideas, because a couple of them
should be pretty obvious to all of us ("Hey, lets buy a small but well
established US textbook company, open up their books, enhance them
through collaborative development, and take english speaking schools
by storm while we use the income to translate the work and replicate
it world wide")... The real challenge for those is figuring out "How
much?" and all the other logistics.