Proposal:Sponsored research and development

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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

Every proposal should be tied to one of the strategic priorities below.

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation


Summary

Yet another possible sub-proposal of Make Wikimedia scale. It aims at making sure that Wikimedia makes informed choices in developing its organisational strategy and structure and produces the necessary framework to facilitate sustainable growth on an academic level.

Proposal

Create a topical matrix from sponsored categories allowing sponsorship for specific topics. These topics are researched across projects and languages to organize and catalogue what resources are available, who is working on them and what is missing.

Principle

All the projects and languages working in a holistic way:


Example 1

Sponsored category: Computer science

Potential sponsor: Google Summer of Code, Perl Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, etc

Matrix elements:

People

Categories

Example 2

add another example

Motivations

From Proposal:Make Wikimedia scale:

Financial sustainability:

Several components of that network will have to be considered to improve. First of all, the chapters and the WMF will need to make sure together both are sufficiently funded from a variety of sources to be financially sustainable. This means that opportunities both in the area of fundraising and (commercial) partnerships will have to be made possible for chapters and WMF, of course for both under the necessary conditions as to be agreed together. A chapter will not be able to build up a costly organizational structure without the ensurance or at least likelyhood of sustainable funding.

From Proposal:Work on developing a sustainable international structure:

Proposal: Make sure that Wikimedia as a whole (all organisations, Foundation and Chapters) makes informed choices about where it wants to go, but more importantly, how it wants to get there, as an international organisation. Create a charter which would bind all Wikimedia orgnaisations at least morally, but also financially and structurally, with the aim to provide a framework that would help Wikimedia organisations be sustainable in the long run.

Key Questions

  • Could Wikimedia earn additional funding through sponsored R&D?
  • Does the Wikimedia user-base have the needed skills for conducting responsible R&D?
  • Does the Wikimedia user-base have the proper ethos for conducting responsible R&D?

Potential Costs

  • Financially, this would cost very little to implement, and provide the potential for great returns.
  • ...

References

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Community Discussion

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