[Foundation-l] NEH grant

Fri Jul 9 07:52:46 UTC 2004

--- Sj <2.718281828 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 8 Jul 2004 14:28:46 -0700 (PDT), Christopher Mahan
> And we should renew our efforts to get support through donation, no
> matter what.  Demonstrating a strong ongoing base of community support will
> help overcome the obstacle of not yet being a proper 501c3.

I completely agree. 

> I agree wholeheartedly with this:
> 
> > I would rather mav publish a monthly budget and post that to the
> > front page, like this:

A monthly budget will require a monthly trustee meeting to approve such a
document before posting. But doing so on the front page of any Wikimedia
website seems to be like begging to me (or at least too much emphasis on
financial matters). A permanent link and/or mention on the fundraising page
along with a temporary mention on every page during fund drives seems to be
enough, IMO. 

> We should spur donations right away.  I hope we are planning to
> get new machines in the coming week(s?); we need to replace the 
> money we are spending.  $2500 a month sounds like a reasonable 
> budget estimate for the rest of the year, and I think we could easily 
> meet that need through contributions.  

I have forecasted that we will need to spend between $25,000 to $30,000 on
hardware this quarter to keep up with the projected increase in traffic over
last quarter. If our growth rate continues at 90% compounded quarterly, then we
should expect to have to spend a bit less than twice that amount in Q4. 

Things get a bit scary after that if we continue growing at the same rate (I'm
still working on mitigating factors such as Moores law and still need to check
with the developers to see if page requests, visits, or something else are a 
better measure of traffic - I've been using page requests). 

In short - $2500 per month will not be enough. 

Also, with all those servers the need for a full time on-site server admin
increases. 

Daniel Mayer,
Wikimedia CFO

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