Thank you, @Zblace. This is an interesting request and I’m curious to see how the conversation goes.
Some costs are easy to measure (services paid) and some are not (hours of staff).
Services
- Hosting - we are contracting Enterprise hosting to the company that leads the development of Discourse. This consists of a fixed monthly fee that includes everything related to server hosting, updates, and technical support. We also have a pack of hours for design improvements that we haven’t used yet because it seemed premature in the context of the community review. We pay a little extra for the code review and updates of two unofficial plugins that we are using here, the Wikimedia login plugin and the Multilingual plugin.
- We have a contract signed with Pavilion to get the Wikimedia login and the Multilingual plugin ready for production. This is a one-time contract that is about to end, after the work agreed has been completed.
- Domain - a negligible annual fee.
- Google Translate API - The monthly cost depends on the use of the API. On the other hand, we are tagging along a wider collaboration between the Foundation and Google as a major donor, and it is very possible that the real cost of automatic translations in this forum (having them vs not having them) is zero right now.
Staff hours
None of us has Forum maintenance or moderation as a primary activity or as a fixed amount of hours. This is the main advantage of contracting the technical maintenance to the Discourse developers. Moderation doesn’t take much time. Bootstrapping the forum and running the community review does take some time, but this is a one-off activity.
There are many staff members that are active in this forum, but their work here counts towards the projects they are involved in: promotion of Movement Strategy grants, facilitation of Hubs discussions, support to communities at a regional level, UCoC… With or without forum, their hours of Foundation work and their compensation would be the same.
This is IMHO the interesting part. Although I think I understand what you are aiming for, at least to me this paragraph isn’t clear. Can you describe how would this work in practice?
Once it is clear what you are requesting, it would be useful to know whether there is any precedent on Wikimedia or in any similar community. Any ideas and good practices that we all could consider here.
And then it would be very useful to hear more opinions from other members of this forum or Wikimedia volunteers in general. There are many opinions and approaches to mixing volunteering activities with money. Ideally, whatever we do would be supported by community agreement.