Money isn't a real issue in running the wiki. We're somewhere in the range of $75 a month to run Miraheze, which is not that big of a deal to me personally. I could pay for that on my own. (At 2.3% interest, my student loans can wait.) And instead of buying servers and doing colocation, you pretty much always want to start on someone else's infrastructure. This means one of the many VPS providers, like RamNode (Miraheze), Digital Ocean (Orain), AWS (my work), etc. We've never seriously discussed owning hardware at Miraheze, largely due to the odd concern of "our lead sysadmin isn't allowed in the data center because he's too young." There are advantages to owning, but for now the disadvantages are winning.
Miraheze has gotten two large grants, one from Wright State University, and the other from Wikimedia Indonesia. If we're going to be a public charity, we're going to have to run a fundraiser anyway for small donations, to show that we do in fact get public support. Grants are cool, but we've gotten extremely lucky -- I'm pretty sure we never applied for either one -- and it's not a reliable source of income.
The problem with what's being discussed here is that it puts me in a difficult situation. I have a duty of care to two different organizations, and it's starting to look like those duties are coming into conflict. I'll have to see if I can thread this needle, or delegate the responsibilities to someone else, or resign from one of the positions.
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Miraheze has gotten two large grants, one from Wright State University, and the other from Wikimedia Indonesia. If we're going to be a public charity, we're going to have to run a fundraiser anyway for small donations, to show that we do in fact get public support. Grants are cool, but we've gotten extremely lucky -- I'm pretty sure we never applied for either one -- and it's not a reliable source of income.
The problem with what's being discussed here is that it puts me in a difficult situation. I have a duty of care to two different organizations, and it's starting to look like those duties are coming into conflict. I'll have to see if I can thread this needle, or delegate the responsibilities to someone else, or resign from one of the positions.
-- ∇×V