Nick Carr has a good post today reporting on the Lift 07 conference in Geneva.
He reports on the speech made by Florence Devouard, chairperson of the Wikipedia Foundation. Carr quotes Devouard as saying:
"Wikipedia has the financial resources to run its servers for about three to four months. If we do not find additional funding, it is not impossible that Wikipedia might disappear."
However, this comment is put into context by a spokesperson from the Foundation in a comment on Nick’s blog which clarifies that Devouard did not intend to impy that the site will be closing anytime soon.
That aside, Carr points out that what began as a case study of the power of the gift economy, Wikipedia now seems to be running up bills faster than the public can gift their time and, in reality, hard cash. Citing another delegate at the conference, Bruno Giussani, Carrs adds that:
"Devouard said the encyclopedia is currently running 350 servers and needs about $5 million to sustain itself."
Apparently, its recent fundraising efforts raised about $1 million.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Wikipedia-hater and am completely sucked into the whole gift economy/social production thing, but this does raise an issue over how organisaitons deal with this type of economy.
Another blogging delegate, Phillipe Mottaz believes this is:
"another illustration of how difficult it is to find the proper business model in the digital age, and more precisely in this case in what Florence called the ‘gift economy.’" Not even gifts scale for free."
It’s a fair point, but perhaps the key is in the idea of having a proper business model. Presuming that the gift economy is a new economic model, are we relying too heavily on existing ‘models’ for business rather than looking for new ones?
As social media/social production is just that: a social enterprise, why aren’t we looking to anthropologists and sociologists to help explain how society and rapidly changing societal values are shaping new economic models.
Also, given Devouard’s speech comes a week on from Jimmy Wales’ comments about banning PR agencies from editing content on Wikipedia I would have thought he would have remained open-minded about the future of the site.