Mailing List Archive

This is reasonable. A bounty board, with the express note that all
donations are irevocable donations to the foundation, and earmarked for
development. (the foundation can of course return earmarked donations
if they can't/won't use them) The bug with the highest donation
percentage in a week, gets the work, unless it is unworkable or requires
too much time. Note that I don't believe we should be doing this on
bugs, but can do this on a feature request (subset of bug).


./scream

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Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
> How about we build a bounty board into Bugzilla?
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 3:47:57 AM
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraising "Bugging for Dollars"
>
> Hoi,
> This is only true when the money is spend on hardware. When you want to pay
> to get a particular problem fixed you cannot influence this. In the mean
> times some of the problems are debilitating to the extend that you cannot do
> a thing. When you have the option to pay someone to do what needs doing, it
> would be often a good thing. It allows you to influence priorities. The only
> thing needed from a WMF point of view that the work is done by someone
> trusted.
> Thanks,
> GerardM
>
> On Fri, Mar 21, 2008 at 10:14 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge@telus.net> wrote:
>
>
>> Screamer wrote:
>>
>>> This seems very reasonable. One can make restricted donations for a
>>> purpose only. And it can be made known, that such a donation is for the
>>> restricted purpose of equipment purchase and upkeep, bandwidth, and or
>>> network staff.
>>>
>> Looks like an excellent way to generate useless extra bookkeeping in
>> maintaining tainted accounts. If we have $1,000,000 budgeted for
>> equipment anyway, and we have $50,000 designated for equipment by
>> donors, then we just use that $50,000 as designated, and add $950,000
>> from general revenue. It all comes to the same thing except for the
>> extra bookkeeping. If a donor cuts it too fine, and starts insisting on
>> specific types of equipment as a condition for his donation, it's best
>> to just send the money back, or better still tear up the cheque and put
>> it in the trash.
>>
>> Ec
>>
>>
>>
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>>
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Geoffrey Plourde wrote:
> How about we build a bounty board into Bugzilla?

My impression is that bounties wouldn't work terribly well in our sort
of environment.

First and foremost, the amount of money involved tends to be trivial
compared to the market cost of contracting someone to do the work, so
it's not enough to seriously motivate someone for pay.

At the same time, it's enough to carry the risk of tarnishing the
"honor" of volunteer development -- we get our best work out of
self-motivated volunteers, and that's the pool most of our current tech
staff and contract devs have come out of.

Add to this the complications of bounty assignment when multiple people
are involved in a fix -- often a single bug will go through several
iterations of patches over time, and be further modified when applied --
plus the general bookkeeping difficulties of little bits of money going
through the non-profit company...

For these reasons we haven't implemented bounties during previous
discussions of them, and I really don't see it happening.


What I do expect us to continue doing is keeping a small (and slightly
expanded!) group of staff developers and a pool of available part-time
contractors for additional high-priority "big" projects.

- -- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
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Let me rephrase my suggestion of a bounty board. What users would do is offer to donate a certain sum to the WMF if a certain feature is done. Users would be able to up the pool for a certain item. Everyone is a winner.



----- Original Message ----
From: Domas Mituzas <midom.lists@gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2008 6:49:12 AM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Fundraising "Bugging for Dollars" (request for comment form WMF)

Hi!

> Hmm. What about beg notices all over Bugzilla? "Support MediaWiki
> development: give us MONEY!" or similar. Just for a single dev pool.

Well, foundation doesn't really _own_ mediawiki, nor its development
- it is GPL project, and no external contributors have their rights
assigned. It has few major committers who do great work on mediawiki
to support the live sites.
Who would operate that pool? Would that pool be used to pay for WMF
developers, or for 3rd party contributors only? Should WMF sponsor MW
development in any way, if there is separate dev pool, etc :)

And of course, we can put "support mediawiki development by donating
to wikimedia foundation" links everywhere. actually, every time
someone wants to donate for mediawiki help/development/.. we already
did redirect to foundation.
Sometimes people go with "But I want to thank you directly guys", and
get the answer "So donate to WMF" :)

Volunteer developers do it because it provides value to WMF anyway.
It is WMF role to decide if it wants to pay back in any way.

--
Domas Mituzas -- http://dammit.lt/ -- [[user:midom]]



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On 2008.03.21 07:07:03 -0500, Screamer <scream@datascreamer.com> scribbled 1.2K characters:
> Ray Saintonge wrote:
> > Screamer wrote:
> >
> >> This seems very reasonable. One can make restricted donations for a
> >> purpose only. And it can be made known, that such a donation is for the
> >> restricted purpose of equipment purchase and upkeep, bandwidth, and or
> >> network staff.
> >>
> > Looks like an excellent way to generate useless extra bookkeeping in
> > maintaining tainted accounts. If we have $1,000,000 budgeted for
> > equipment anyway, and we have $50,000 designated for equipment by
> > donors, then we just use that $50,000 as designated, and add $950,000
> > from general revenue. It all comes to the same thing except for the
> > extra bookkeeping. If a donor cuts it too fine, and starts insisting on
> > specific types of equipment as a condition for his donation, it's best
> > to just send the money back, or better still tear up the cheque and put
> > it in the trash.
> >
> > Ec
> >
>
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
>
> is for the
> > restricted purpose of equipment purchase and upkeep, bandwidth, and or
> > network staff.
>
> How is this too fine? And I don't think anyone has tainted accounts. I'm having troble following you. As I understand it, the foundation accepts restricted donations currently.
>
> ./scream

I was under that impression too, especially given the whole Greenspun donation thing - which, IIRC, was solely to be used to fund illustrations for Commons.

(Although I don't know if <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Philip_Greenspun_illustration_project> is an argument for or against allowing restricted donations, as it doesn't seem to've actually produced any art yet.)

--
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