[Foundation-l] Official Positions

[Erik Moeller]

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