Talk:Selling to Wikimedia Foundation

RobH's modified version

So I took RobLa's work and modified it slightly for use in my email canned responses:

Thank you for your interest in the Wikimedia Foundation.

We are frequently approached by vendors hoping for some of our time to discuss why we should purchase a product/service/software/solution from that company.

If you are interested in selling to Wikimedia, please start by reading the "Get involved" page maintained by our operations team. Understand, however, that the Wikimedia Foundation is very strongly biased toward free software, so before trying to making an aggressive sales pitch, please read the Wikimedia Foundation Guiding Principles published by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees.

At Wikimedia Foundation, we pride ourselves with our level of accessibility to skilled technical collaborators. Many vendors make it clear that they fail to understand our values and way of working, and attempt manipulative and/or pushy techniques to reach us. Your best strategy in reaching us is going to be by demonstrating the depth of your understanding of our values and preferred way of working. As such, any closed source solutions are largely frowned upon, and would only be used if there was no viable open source alternative. So far, the only place we have found we cannot use open source software effectively is within a servers BIOS and within our network routing/switching platform. All of our other operational services and projects are open source.

Additionally, all of our infrastructure is documented and available via the above links and sub-links from those pages. Any suggestion for a software to replace an existing software solution for one of our services should be fully researched and detail how it specifically applies to our infrastructure. Unfortunately, we cannot entertain every offer to converse about every potential solution, as we get dozens of these offers weekly.

When we launch a search for a vendor solution, we often announce it on our . Please follow it for these announcements and kindly remove my email address from your promotional/mailing/sales/contact lists.

Thank you for your interest in the Foundation,

Excellent, thanks RobH! I've incorporated most of your improvements into the page. -- RobLa (talk) 00:58, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Shorter template to mail out that points to this page

I love User:RobH's improvements to my text! Here's a shorter version that I'm going to suggest as a pointer to this website: Selling to Wikimedia Foundation/Pointer

I think keeping it short and sweet makes it more likely that they'll read the most important bits, and understand their homework (reading the full page). Thoughts? -- RobLa (talk) 00:56, 9 December 2015 (UTC)