Wikimedia budget/Long term plans

1) Endowment. We should be thinking about this already. We are no longer hanging by our teeth from a railing.

Maintain 5-10% of our incoming donations in a separate account, which we don't touch.
It should be possible for people to make gifts directly into the endowment fund.
Implement a "windfall policy" which directs that half of any single donation over [$100K] is added to the endowment.

2) Representatives. We should setup an incentive package for wp representatives around the world. The package could include a box of WP collateral, a WP (shirt?), discounts at the wikistore, a mention on the foundation site. They should be

associated with a particular account on a particular WP;
responsible for promoting WP in their area and on their wiki, postering on college campuses, finding people to join the project;
encouraged to put up flyers and get reimbursements for photocopies...
50 on each continent to start; at a cost of ~$100/yr; there should be one rep at many major colleges.

This would come to perhaps $10k/year at first, at least if the reps are requesting and using collateral; easy to expand 10-fold if it works.

3) High-end technical plan. A comprehensive plan for high-reliability, fast service. Among other things, providing such a service is one of the fastest ways for WP to grow. Say we want

to support a billion page-views a day;
with pages loading in under 1 second for non-logged-in users, and in under 3 seconds for users, 99.9% of the time;
with high-turnaround backups (up again within 2 hours) in case of catastrophic failure, such as the colo losing power while the most active support person is unavailable/trapped inside;
with maintenance costs under $50k/yr; and support staff down to one FTE.

Describe a setup which will provide this. Describe that setup in terms of startup costs and 3-yr amortized cost (maintenance and support included). This could come to $100k-$300k + $100k/yr. (see Hardware provisional budget, Three-year plan)

worth updating with recent data! these costs should come down over time.