This reminds me of a slightly heretical idea I had a while ago while thinking about crowdfunding and WMF fundraising...
Currently the WMF raises money via site banners, and spends these on programmes and disburses them via grants, which go to all kinds of projects - education, outreach, development, Wikimedians in Residence, etc etc. Despite the relative openness of the WMF as an organisation, this is still a very centralised, top down method of handling (the disbursement of) these funds. If we're truly going down the "everything open, everything community driven" route, the more consistent approach would be something like the following: The community submit funding proposals for projects they want to do, of any kind. Each has a campaign page with a description of the project (much like a kickstarter page, with project milestones, background, team etc), a monetary target they're trying to raise, and a banner design. These projects compete for advertising time on the site banner via a community curated queue; When they're at the top of this queue, they're displayed on the banners, which lead to their project pages; if they hit their fundraising target, they're taken down; if they have a low conversion rate (% of views that lead to donations), they're demoted down the queue and, if persistently low, rejected entirely. The criteria for prioritisation of projects in the queue and the vetting of project quality is done organically by the community, who would create and evolve guidelines and policies. The actual handling of the queue could be done algorithmically via an openly editable algorithm, or even done manually like with e.g. WP:ITN - you'd just need a widget that tells you how much a given project has raised so far and what the conversion rate is. If the community is concerned about people being shown too many banners, we dial down the number of people being shown banners, or raise the bar in terms of acceptable conversion rates. If a project raises money and is ultimately considered a failure, then hopefully the community will learn from this and provide more support / be more careful with that kind of project in the future. However, one hopes that this will also allow for bolder project ideas to get off the ground, and also allow for a much larger amount of small funding to go to many small projects, as there is no centralised grants body that has to process them all. In order to pay for its own programmes, then, the WMF itself would have to submit projects into this queue. Nobody would have to go to any centralised body for money - all funds would be raised and disbursed via this one channel. Operationally I suppose the WMF would provide the infrastructure to actually receive and send out the money. You could even start getting clever with e.g. showing different campaigns to readers from different geographical regions, or particular campaigns to readers looking at articles from particular wikipedia categories, and I imagine that kind of thing would start to evolve on its own. It really struck me that the discussions around the centralnotice fundraising banners fell into a classic pattern; one centralised team doing their best, but being overwhelmed by feedback from a large community. This model puts all this attention to good use. *Edward Saperia* Conference Director for Wikimania 2014 <http://www.wikimanialondon.org> email <edsape...@gmail.com> • facebook <http://www.facebook.com/edsaperia> • twitter <http://www.twitter.com/edsaperia> • 07796955572 133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG On 24 February 2015 at 18:54, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipe...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Feb 24, 2015 at 10:43 AM, Austin Hair <adh...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > With more and more Wikimedians engaging in crowdfunding, I suppose we > > can talk about whether the mailing list for Wikimedia movement > > organization is the place to advertise in this way. For my part, I > > don't think a simple (i.e., without any additional context) "please > > check out this Indiegogo" is any different from "hey, check out my > > blog," so when the last one came through the queue I rejected it > > without much thought. It certainly wasn't done with any prejudice. > > > > For my part, I always like to see crowdfunding pitches from > Wikimedians. There haven't been *that* many of them (maybe 8 or 10?), > and so far they've all (that I've seen) come from prolific > contributors. > > These crowdfunding pitches generally take a lot more effort to put > together than a blog post does, and they are also easy and satisfying > to act on. If I can take 3 minutes and a few dollars to simultaneously > say thanks to a great contributor and help them make even better > contributions, I'm grateful for that opportunity. > > -Sage > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
