Jimbo,
I accept the appointment as Chief Research Officer, and thank you for
your trust, and for this recognition. Given Anthere's posting here on
positions that were appointed by you before the Board was created:
http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-April/002998.html
.. I would briefly like to ask the rest of the Board to comment on
whether they consider these new official positions to be fully valid,
i.e. "official" official positions that will be listed on the Foundation
website etc. It is my understanding that this appointment reflects an
internal agreement of the Board, but it would be nice to have a
confirmation of that belief.
As for what exactly Chief Research Officer means, I am working on a more
comprehensive proposal for an open (!) Wikimedia Research Team that I
will put on Meta later today, and which includes a definition of this
role. (The Board is familiar with this proposal.) I will state here in
advance that I consider it to be a role that exists *alongside*
development and is in no way intended to interfere with the existing
software development processes.
As Tim correctly notes, it's important that we're not introducing a new
element of authority here, but primarily first points of contact for
certain issues. Beyond that, I think the holders of these official
positions should take a basic *organizational* role in the fields they
are working in, e.g., propose meetings and agendas, though that is
certainly also an open process. I also see it as my role to write
regular reports, and to build bridges between the Board, other
researchers, and the community.
Regarding Sj's earlier arguments, I believe it *is* important that we
have titles like these. Giving people a title is free, and it's a nice
way to show appreciation, especially when we only have 2 elected members
of the community on the Board. It would not be fair to have these two
titles, "Vice President of Wikimedia" (Anthere) and "Executive Secretary
of Wikimedia" (Angela), while delegating all other users to be mere
members of vague "Special Interest Groups" -- this only creates jealousy
and friction, not to mention that it overloads these two members of the
community. More on this in my Research Team proposal.
All that being said, with the exception of Brion and Chad, Wikimedia is
still just a hobby for all of us, including even the trustees. I
therefore hope it goes without saying that any time commitments I can
give to this may change based on real life requirements. However, I
consider this role more important than anything else I've done within
Wikimedia, and will shift most of my activities towards it.
I personally consider Wikimedia and the principles for which it stands
to be of historical significance. There's more than just the much-cited
peer review issues (which I definitely want to work on), and Wikimedia
is not just Wikipedia. One of my key goals, in fact, is to help these
other ideas to really take off:
* to create and distribute free and reliable learning resources on any
topic (Wikibooks)
* to build a neutral and open news source with citizen reporters around
the planet (Wikinews)
* to digitize and translate source texts into as many languages as
possible (Wikisource)
* to define every word in every language (including sign languages) and
to make these free dictionaries easy to search, download, use and
interface with (Wiktionary)
* to build the world's largest repository of useful and free media
content, to harness the creative energy of millions to create original
videos, photos and artwork for our projects, and to make the whole thing
easy to search and use (Wikimedia Commons)
* to open up the gigantic field of structured databases to the wiki
model, from databases of scientific articles to catalogs of movies and
books, from chemical structures to biological taxonomies (Wikidata)
* to establish a free, world-wide institution of learning,
certification, research and publication that allows anyone to
participate (what I call Wikisophia).
Take all this, and everything else we're doing and will be doing, and
imagine we succeed in only half of the goals we set for ourselves, and
you get an idea how important the whole thing is. It's a massive
challenge, but it would be a grave error in judgment not to undertake it.
As Jimmy said in a recent radio interview, "There's no going back." The
collaborative model is here to stay. We have the chance to lay the
groundwork for the knowldege society of tomorrow. In many ways, we have
already done it, but Wikipedia today is merely scratching the surface of
what is possible.
I'm too much of a futurist to imagine Wikimedia's technology in 10 or 20
years as recognizable from our perspective today, but the content we are
creating, the global community we are building, and the basic
organizational framework: these things will continue to exist. I cannot
imagine being part of a single more interesting project in the world today.
All best,
Erik