Happy Holidays - Baers X-mas adress

Hello fellow friends of wikiloops!

Today, I have the honour to wish you all some days of rest, celebration and fun as the year is about to end once more - no matter if you do celebrate christmas,
the wikiloops team would like to send out our best wishes to anyone out there!

[img]http://www.wikiloops.com/images/prohead/engineroom.jpg[/img]

I am glad to have convinced Dick it might be a good thing to let me write this adress, for I know he is sometimes having a hard time finding the right words about certain things.
I have been watching wikiloops from day one on, played my drums, seen it grow, seen Dick work a lot of hours, and man - it happened again:
wikiloops has again doubled in members and tracks within the past twelve months!

Thats twice as many people having fun compared to last year,
so to anyone out there who helped make it happen, a big pat on the shoulder!

There is however one thing that saddens me a bit, which is why I asked Dick to let me write this post:
I'm not sure if all of you are aware of one thing, so let me tell you very boldly - we have been trying quite hard to find a way to ensure the fun on wikiloops can go on for many more years to come, and there are quite a few people out there who understood our call for help and supported wikiloops.

When Dick returned from the accountant the other day and I had a short glimpse at the numbers (which will be published & commented here in january), it did strike me that even tho there is a black number below bottom line, there is hardly any money available to reward Dick for doing eight months of full- and overtime development work.
If you'd translate Dicks efforts into donated dollars, the guy just invested something above 20k $ for our fun here.
I just felt like someone should mention that somewhere.

When Dick and me spoke about what to do with what has been gained in 2014,
we agreed that most of it needs to be put aside to be able to pay for the next server upgrade, which is always just around the corner looking at the speed wikiloops has been growing by.

Still, I felt Dick should treat himself to something nice by spending some of that hard earned money. Let me tell you what Dick decided to do:

"Let's donate 25 dollars each to the wikipedia, to the modzilla foundation, jPlayer.org and piwik.org - these guys are our fellows in trying to make the web a better place, so lets give back something for all the help they offer." - so thats what we just did.

In todays world, it seems harder than ever to know where mankind will be in ten years from now.
Everyone of us has the means to make a change somewhere.

Merry Christmas everyone & cheers!

Baer