The majority of the work involved in this was the decommissioning and prepping of servers for hand off. Finding someone who was interested in them was extremely easy as I had met a member of the SFCCP at a local Non Profit Conference who had expressed interest in donations. Wanting to both help out both local/remote open source communities and keeping our first donation within San Francisco as simple as possible, I went with the SFCCP.

Now that we have some good guidelines and procedures about donations, we can look to see about expanding who we work with the next time this comes around.

There are two user groups with which I’m affiliated which needed new servers, so I contacted SFCCP and they were kind enough to donate a server to each of those efforts. The WMF might save energy by searching for WMF-affiliated user groups who could use donated hardware more directly, or perhaps make an effort to let such user groups know that they can contact SFCCP (if decommissioned hardware continues to be donated there) if they need hardware.

Although SFCCP does excellent work, and supports a number of organizations which are all worthy causes, it makes sense to me that the WMF’s decommissioned hardware should be used primarily by WMF-affiliated user groups.