Wikimedia budget/Long term plans

1) Endowment. We should be thinking about this already. We are no longer hanging by our teeth from a railing.

• Maintain 5-10% of our incoming donations in a separate account, which we don't touch.
• It should be possible for people to make gifts directly into the endowment fund.

2) Representatives. We should setup an incentive package for wp representatives around the world. The package could include a box of WP collateral, a WP (shirt?), discounts at the wikistore, a mention on the foundation site. They should be

• associated with a particular account on a particular WP;
• responsible for promoting WP in their area and on their wiki, postering on college campuses, finding people to join the project;
• encouraged to put up flyers and get reimbursements for photocopies...
• 50 on each continent to start; at a cost of ~$100/yr; there should be one rep at many major colleges.

This would come to perhaps $10k/year at first, at least if the reps are requesting and using collateral; easy to expand 10-fold if it works.

3) High-end technical plan. A comprehensive plan for high-reliability, fast service. Among other things, providing such a service is one of the fastest ways for WP to grow. Say we want

• to support a billion page-views a day;
• with pages loading in under 1 second for non-logged-in users, and in under 3 seconds for users, 99.9% of the time;
• with high-turnaround backups (up again within 2 hours) in case of catastrophic failure, such as the colo losing power while the most active support person is unavailable/trapped inside;
• with maintenance costs under $50k/yr; and support staff down to one FTE.

Describe a setup which will provide this. Describe that setup in terms of startup costs and 3-yr amortized cost (maintenance and support included). This could come to $100k-$300k + $100k/yr. (see Hardware provisional budget, Three-year plan)