On Tue, 15 Sep 2009 17:55:56 -0400, Anthony <[email protected]> wrote: > The WMF tremendously overestimated future hardware costs by making horrible > assumptions, which I pointed out on this very list. That depended entirely > on the WMF.
The 2007-2008 Wikimedia budget was the company's first systematically built budget ever, and many of the numbers were based on estimates and extrapolations from the previous year's spending which didn't turn out to be as accurate as originally forseen. While it may be fair to criticize it as a sub-ideal budget, it's rather pointless to continue on about it over a year after that fiscal year ended. You may wish to pay more attention to the 2008-2009 (last FY) and 2009-2010 (current FY) budgets if you're interested in oversight. As for the decision not to immediately reassign overbudgeted monies to other unbudgeted uses -- money doesn't just disappear at the end of the fiscal year! Spending money for the sole purpose of using up the budget before year-end would have been gross mismanagement and would likely have been harshly criticized. Given the relatively new company leadership and the uncertainly of how fundraising might go, treating donors' money conservatively makes a lot of sense. Instead of spending it on anything we could think of right away, donors' money was kept in store so it could be spent more wisely under future budgets. Over the last couple years we've been building up our human capacity, and we're now in a position where we actually can do and are bringing in a lot of new staff and contract developers, both to the general pool and on specific project teams. I'm afraid we're not in a position to change what we spent two years ago; all we can change is what we're spending today, and I don't really see anything for you to object to. We *are* hiring more tech staff as you recommend. We *have* assigned the dump fixing to a single responsible individual as you recommend (and everything is now working except the English full-history, which is still being worked on). We *are* hiring a new CTO with a strong administrative background, as you recommend. What's left? -- brion _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
