Board letter

General report
Letter from the Board



to be written

Overview
<!-- By Anthere



To start with, here is a brief summary of our financial state at the end of 2004:

In 2004, our global revenues were US$150,000, while expenses reached about US$123,000 dollars. The full bank history for 2004 is available on the Foundation Website. The most striking financial trend for 2004 was the amazing growth of our needs. In just one year, our server farm grew from 3 servers to 50! Naturally, this meant increasing costs throughout the year, to purchase new equipment and to support bandwidth requirements.

A budget meeting was held in early 2005, to estimate our growing needs. Following this estimate, a successful fundraising drive was held in February, yielding over US$90,000 dollars. To date, most of our income has come from individual donations, ranging from US$5.00 to US$20.00 dollars. These donations have come from editors and readers who appreciate what we are doing. The success of our fundraising suggests that our growth can still essentially be supported by individual donations.

Other revenues included grants and sponsorship. Our most recent grant was from the Lounsbery Foundation. An important issue with regard to grants and donations is that the Wikimedia Foundation has finally been classified as a public charity, and granted tax exempt status by the IRS. This will certainly offer new incentives to potential grantors. During the first months of 2005, an IRC meeting was held on grant issues, and we considered looking for a Grants Manager for the Foundation. Later in the quarter, Wikimania, the first international meeting organised by and for wikipedians (taking place in August), was granted its first sponsorship, from Gurunet.

With our existing funds, we purchased some technical equipment in January. Numerous hosting proposals this quarter allowed us to purchase less hardware than expected. The donor of the first set of French squids donated three more, soon to be hosted by Lost Oasis for free; other propositions are currently being studied (see Wikimedia partners and hosts). In particular, discussions are ongoing with Google, but no agreement has been reached. The general trend is to multiply our partners, insuring independence; while making agreements that are technically relevant.

A new expense is salary. Since early 2005, the Foundation has been employing two part-time developers, Chad Perrin and Brion Vibber. The board has also decided to hire a person full time to do secretary work, such as physical paper work, sending out packages, purchase of tech parts, phone calls. The position will be local to Florida. Discussions are ongoing about hiring other people but no decision has been taken at that point.

The Privacy policy on all Wikimedia projects was approved at the last Board meeting. It will be translated in all languages and made visible to users and visitors over the next few weeks.

Finally, the legal organisation of the Foundation has been strengthened in the past few weeks, with the creation of a page to coordinate discussions of legal issues.

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Board meetings

A complete list of notes from Board meetings may be seen at meetings.


 * Latest meetings:


 * Budget meeting
 * See also this recent list of open questions to the board.

Summary on collaboration
We worked out a number of collaborations with other organisations in the past six months, and are discussing many more.

We are in discussions with two organisations about the possibility of offering on-demand book printing from Wikipedia. One of these organisations printed a Wikireader on Frankfurt during Wikimania for a test. Our current concern is that by doing so, we are potentially stepping beyond the protections of the DMCA and running an unacceptably high level of copyright risk. So, we are currently moving at slow speed on the matter.

A fabulous strip from JD Frazer 

Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation will form a new partnership beginning of year 2006. 1-Click Answers, Wikipedia Edition'' software will be linked from the English Wikipedia Tools page. Please see the press release by Answers.com and discussion for more information. The announcement raised some very critical comments, from editors and in the press (see ]. Explanation in French : [//lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediafr-l/2005-October/001046.html]. We also previously reached an agreement in last spring to provide a live feed of our public data to Answers.com, live feed which is still currently under work for full operability (Brion Vibber is currently working with them to make this happen).

Organisation
To be written

The road ahead
WSIS

Archives

 * /April 2005
 * /January 2005
 * /September 2004