Grants talk:PEG/Wikimedians in California/Wikimedia California

These numbers are _never_ gonna happen

I just read this page for the first time today. The long of the short of it is that you're asking for half a million dollars? Not trying to be mean... but... In what universe is that going to work? According to the July 09 to Dec 09 Finance statement, the foundation raised about $10 mil. Unless my math is broken, half a mil is 5% of their total funds raised. If that wasn't enough, lets look at the server piece. Asking $150k for that, when in the same fiances statement, they spent roughly $450k on "internet hosting" (which for this, we're assuming is hardware/colo costs for keeping on the air). In other words the request is for roughly 30% of their total costs for that specific portion. Another favorite is Maker Faire, $5k for that specific event. We did it last year for ...let me do the math here...nuthin' into nuthin'...carry the nuthin'... Ah, yes... nothing. This year, will be much the same. Sure, having our very own project and some computers would be nice... but not critical. We can get away without them if they aren't loaned to use from the Foundation. In the end they wouldn't be Faire specific anyways, if we bought them.

Take a look at the financial for Wikimedia Germany. They are the _most_ successful chapter there is. Page 31 - They raised (EUR)750k in donations for 2009. Page 33 - They spent (EUR)160K on "Technology" this year (2009), last year (2008) it was a pittance of (EUR)6k, which I presume means the toolservers. I would guess that this year was "upgrade" time. They are also running a serious business setup - which we would not be, at least not directly off the bat. --ShakataGaNai ^{^_^} 05:37, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

The Foundation can scale almost all of the amounts while keeping Wikinews independent, as far as I can tell. The amounts would be reasonable if long term fundraising leveled off about as fast as Twitter might be expected to. Nobody knows what will actually be available, but if we don't try to achieve what we think would be reasonable to provide software and fail-over support, Wikinews independence, then there will be no mirror with which to make use of any toolservers. Mirroring the toolserver first is probably the low-budget way to do it, and it could also hurt performance. The same could be said by having Wikinews beholden to anyone but independent journalism experts. If we could get someone with National Science Foundation principal investigator experience, that could help it happen a lot faster too. I'll ask around. 71.198.176.22 22:48, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

More modest goals

I suggest starting with more modest goals, like having ~2 students w/ mentors. There will be learning the ropes, lessons learned, etc. Once the chapter can establish more of a track record, it should be able seek sponsorships beyond WMF (the many tech companies, etc.), be able to do fundraising, etc. and be more sustainable to take on more ambitious goals. Aude 00:43, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Making a toolserver type project successful I think would work best if the chapters / groups in the US pooled our efforts and worked together. A US-toolserver and we could host copies of wiki content, whereas German toolserver doesn't allow tools that contain actual content. (FYI - OpenStreetMap US chapter has a few servers for a *toolserver* type project) Aude 00:47, 5 January 2011 (UTC)