Hi folks,

Asaf Bartov, my dear friend from Wikimedia Israel, is now Wikimedia Foundation's Head of Global South Relationships. Further details about his job description below:

> Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2011 18:44:45 -0800
> From: bnewstead@wikimedia.org
> To: internal-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Internal-l] Announcement: Hiring of Asaf Bartov and Moushira Elamrawy contract extension
>
> I am very pleased to announce that Asaf Bartov has agreed to join the
> Wikimedia Foundation as Head of Global South Relationships (pending the
> completion of the U.S. visa application process) and Moushira Elamrawy
> has agreed to a contract extension to serve as Chapter Relations
> Manager. These positions are both part of the Global Development team
> and seek to enhance WMF's relationships with and support of chapters and
> other groups/individuals in the movement.
>
> We expect Asaf to join WMF in March 2011 and the position will be based
> in San Francisco. Asaf is a long-time Wikipedian and Wikimedian. He
> began editing Wikipedia in 2001, his home project is the Hebrew
> Wikipedia. His first contribution to Hebrew Wikipedia was to initiate
> the article on Homer (not the four-fingered guy from Springfield) in
> 2003. He has been a member of Wikimedia Israel since 2008, and served as
> board member and international liaison. Asaf has been making his living
> in software, but has always cultivated a wide range of interests in the
> humanities -- studying literature and classics, and then teaching
> ancient Greek and Latin at Tel Aviv University -- as well as voluntary
> activities in the open source and open content worlds. He is the
> founding editor of Project Ben-Yehuda, a free 100% volunteer-run
> repository of public-domain Hebrew texts. He is also active in
> transforming library technology to 21st-century open standards, having
> served as consultant at the National Library of Israel, and an invited
> expert at the W3C's Library Linked Data Incubator Group (LLD XG).
>
> Asaf's primary role will be to support the growth of the Wikimedia
> movement in the Global South with a specific focus on working with
> chapters, groups who seek to become chapters and mission-aligned
> groups/individuals. He will play an advisory role to support these
> groups to advance their work in support of the movement. He will manage
> WMF's grants program (globally) with the aim of providing funding for
> strategy-aligned initiatives with a strong focus on innovation. Asaf
> will work with groups to design effective grants and help create model
> grants that groups can readily adapt to their local needs. Finally, Asaf
> will help improve our knowledge repository of program and grant
> experiences with a priority to create systematic means for evaluating
> and learning from each program.
>
> I would also like to announce that WMF has extended the contract of
> Moushira Elamrawy, who was serving as Global Campaigns Manager during
> the 2010/11 fundraiser, to serve in a Chapter Relations capacity. She
> will continue to be based in Alexandria, Egypt. Moushira was introduced
> to Wikimedia in April 2007 during filming the footage of "Truth in
> Numbers" in Alexandria, Egypt: a few weeks later she was appointed from
> Bibliotheca Alexandrina to become the main organizer from the library's
> side for Wikimania 2008. Her responsibilities started along with the
> bidding process and extended until after the conference was over to
> include co-organizing Wikipedia editing sessions, Arabic Wikipedia Day,
> and an "Introduction to Free Open Source OS" sessions series. She
> continues to help with new initiatives and offline activities concerning
> Arabic Wikipedia, including ongoing efforts for creating an Arabic
> Wikipedia signpost, organizing events that help attract new users such
> as editing and licensee sessions. She recently initiated a cross
> collaboration among Arabic users across north Africa, in order to create
> a base of user groups across this region. Last fall, Moushira was
> engaged by WMF's community department to focus on liaising between the
> chapters and WMF during the 2010 fundraising campaign. Moushira has
> previously worked for sustainable development projects in desert areas
> of Egypt and Morocco focusing on ecological building approaches. She is
> a Greenpeace volunteer and retired vegan.
> Moushira's role will be to support WMF and chapters in living up to our
> responsibilities to each other and to the movement, particularly with
> regard to smoothing and systematizing communications mechanisms with the
> goal of increased transparency and openness. She will help establish
> processes that enable us to meet our commitments to each other and the
> movement. She will facilitate the completion of requirements under our
> fundraising and chapter agreements relating to revenue sharing,
> reporting and accountability. She will support us monitoring progress
> against these commitments, designing systems for tracking and creating
> simple ways to work together in a manner that achieves mutual
> accountability, while keeping the burden on volunteer board members and
> other chapter members to a minimum. Moushira will also serve as WMF's
> process manager over the next year for key activities such as the
> signing of chapter agreements and fundraising agreements, compliance
> with agreement requirements and more systematic capture of reports
> to/from chapters. Please note that WMF doesn’t intend this role to be an
> oversight function nor do we expect that it’s our role to remind
> chapters of their responsibilities: the role is to both help WMF fulfill
> our responsibilities and to help us all improve our processes. This is a
> big challenge and she will work collaboratively with chapters to achieve
> it.
>
> I am thrilled to add Asaf and Moushira to the WMF Global Development team.
>
> We will jointly host an IRC at the following times to address any
> questions or comments that you might have about these roles.
> 1. Friday, February 11 at 1500 UTC
> 2. Friday, February 11 at 2200 UTC
>
>
> ________________
>
> FAQ
>
> How did we source candidates for these roles?
>
> The Chapter Development Director position was publicly posted in August
> 2010, and we interviewed a number of candidates. We had some strong and
> interesting candidates, but we did not find anyone who could fulfill the
> role as we had initially designed it. Asaf Bartov applied for the
> Chapter Development Director and was interviewed by a panel of
> interviewers. Moushira Elamrawy did not apply for the position, however
> she was fulfilling some functions in the Global Campaigns role that we
> saw as needed in our Chapter Development work (items that were listed in
> the original job description).
>
> As such, we decided that the best course of action was to split the
> initial role into two that would meet our needs and not require a reset
> of the entire process. We did a review of the prior candidates to see if
> any would be a good alternative to Asaf and Moushira and concluded that
> we were comfortable with them as our selection. Please note that
> Moushira’s role is temporary: that’s because the relationship between
> the Wikimedia Foundation and the chapters is actively evolving, and so
> we think this role may change significantly over time.
>
> How does the appointment of these two roles change the relationship
> between WMF and chapters?
>
> Our hope is that these engagements will improve our relationship by
> providing dedicated resources to our chapter interactions. This will
> allow WMF to be more responsive and will provide resources to invest
> time in creating new solutions to problems that we have dealt with in
> the past, but haven't solved effectively.
>
> We also hope that Moushira and Asaf will help to enhance the
> effectiveness of chapters by serving as advisors on program work,
> helping to make connections between program work in different places and
> by creating systems that ease the administrative burden on volunteers,
> freeing you to focus more time on program activities.
>
> These engagements do not change the formal relationships between WMF and
> chapters. We both will continue to be independently responsible for
> meeting our commitments and for solving problems that arise in a timely
> and collaborative manner.
>
> Why is Asaf's position focused on the Global South vs. all chapters?
>
> We do not have sufficient resources available to expend our resources
> equally in all areas and still achieve impact and so we need to
> prioritize. The movement priorities set out during the strategy process
> set clear targets for our growth in the Global South and we are aligning
> our resources to this priority. We will continue to support grants
> across the globe and will engage with all chapters, but Asaf's first
> responsibility will be to the work focused on the Global South.
>
> What does WMF plan to do with other groups/individuals in the movement?
>
> We continue to believe in the principle of a decentralized movement and
> the importance of supporting good efforts by volunteers regardless of
> organizational affiliation. While we expect chapters to play a strong
> role in designing and running programs as well as funding
> groups/individuals within their geographies to do such work, we also
> want to keep the door open for groups or individuals who want to conduct
> program work that supports the movement priorities outside of a chapter
> structure. In recent months, this has included, for example, funding for
> the Wikipedia in Schools program in Kenya and support for GLAM work by a
> US-based volunteer, Aude.
>
> Does the appointment of Asaf change WMF's view of grant-making?
>
> We see grant-making as an important process for supporting chapters and
> other groups/individuals to achieve movement priorities. The appointment
> of Asaf provides us with an opportunity to expand grant-making and make
> it more systematic. We believe that many chapters will not be in a
> position to generate sustainable funding locally to fund the full array
> of programs that may be needed to achieve our goals. Grant-making is an
> effective way to fill that gap.
>
> We would like to see our grant-making work evolve to include much more
> community participation in helping chapters and other groups/individuals
> design good programs, in helping WMF make good decisions and in
> evaluating and capturing the learning from grants after they are
> implemented. This will be a core initiative for Asaf in his first year.
>
> I’ve got other questions that aren’t answered here.
> Barry, Asaf and Moushira will host an IRC at the following times to talk
> through the roles in more detail.
> 1. Friday, February 11 at 1500 UTC
> 2. Friday, February 11 at 2200 UTC
>
> --
> Barry Newstead
> Chief Global Development Officer
> Wikimedia Foundation
> Tel: +1-415-839-6885 x. 6634
> Skype: barry.wikimedia
> Twitter: @bazanews
>
>
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