Wikimedia-l May 2008

wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

135 participants
189 discussions

[Foundation-l] Cary Bass as "Wikimedia US Affiliates Coordinator"
by Pharos 05 May '08

05 May '08

I propose that we promote Cary Bass to "Wikimedia US Affiliates Coordinator", as an adjunct position to "Volunteer Coordinator" of the WMF. The WMF already handles the legal responsibilities of a US chapter (it administers the trademarks etc.). With a "Wikimedia US Affiliates Coordinator" we can also have an organizational capacity among the different affiliates (the on-the-ground groups) around the country. I would be happy to report to Cary from New York, and hopefully Andrew could report to him from Pennsylvania, and Dan from DC etc. Cary could also have the responsibility of collating votes from the different affiliates in US Wikimedians' say toward the chapter seats on the Board. (I haven't contacted Cary about this yet, but I am hopeful he would be warm to the idea.) Thanks, Pharos

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Re: [Foundation-l] Chapter-selected Board seats - brainstorming
by daniwo59＠aol.com 05 May '08

05 May '08

In a message dated 5/1/2008 1:14:55 PM Eastern Daylight Time, swatjester(a)gmail.com writes: I see. Well on that note, can I announce the start of a working group for the development of a DC/Baltimore metropolitan area chapter. Both Wikimedians from the DC area as well as those with chapters experience are invited to help out. What is the objective of this chapter? Is it to solicit tax-free donations in the US? The WMF is already doing that with a professional, dedicated staff. Is it to negotiate with local institutions over the release of content? Again, the WMF is in the same country and is better equipped to do this. Is it to provide a membership organization that will assume responsibility for content? I doubt it. Is it to organize meetups and other social events? If so, then why go to the trouble of incorporating just to have a realtime beer with your online friends? Is it just to have a say in determining the chapter seats? Seems like a lot of trouble for that. While I do not oppose a US chapter or even a series of local chapters, it would seem prudent to determine first what the purpose of the chapter is. Danny **************Need a new ride? Check out the largest site for U.S. used car listings at AOL Autos. (http://autos.aol.com/used?NCID=aolcmp00300000002851)

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[Foundation-l] Wikimania 2008: Registration opened
by Casey Brown 04 May '08

04 May '08

With less than three months to go until the fourth annual Wikimania conference, registration has finally opened and will remain so until the 15th of June. This year Wikimania starts with the a promise to "Change the Shape of Wisdom" as it is hosted by Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the reincarnation of the ancient Library of Alexandria, one of pillars of this Earth when Philosophy and Wisdom are bought into question. In Alexandria, from the 17th to the 19th of July, ideas will be shared and discussed between people from all over the globe, once again igniting the golden cosmopolitan age of the city. As always, the conference will take place over 4 different tracks, with a variety of speakers: Keynote, invited, and other. The conference tracks this year are: * Wikimedia Communities - Interesting projects and particularities within the communities; policy creation within individual projects; conflict resolution and community dynamics; reputation and identity; multilingualism, languages and cultures; social studies. * Free Knowledge - Open access to information; ways to gather and distribute free knowledge, usage of the Wikimedia projects in education, journalism, research; ways to improve content quality and usability; copyright laws and other legal areas that interfere with Wikimedia projects. Free Content in Middle-East/Africa countries. * Technical infrastructure - Issues related to MediaWiki development and extensions; Wikimedia hardware layout; new ideas for development (including usable case studies from other wikis or similar projects). * Scientific track - Papers submitted to the scientific track were peer reviewed by scientific standards and accepted or rejected based on these reviews. The papers will be published in proceedings afterwards. Based on the number and the quality of the submission, a journal special issue may be pursued This year the conference is taking an interesting direction that hopes to enlighten third world and Middle Eastern countries about the new digital realm that is continuously expanding and evolving; as such, along with many well reputed figures, an emphasis has been put on bringing in Arab speakers. Speakers include Ahmed N. Tantawy, the Technical Director of IBM in the Middle East; Eliane Metni, the founding director of the International Education Association; Tim Spalding, the founder and lead developer of LibraryThing; Eric M. Johnson, the team leader for the Knowledge Management Action Team at the U.S. Department of State; and Usama Fayyad, Yahoo!'s executive vice president of Research & Strategic Data Solutions. Take part on one of the most important IT events of the year. Check the registration prices online. <http://wikimania2008.wikimedia.org/wiki/Registration> While these prices do not include accommodation, the local team has taken the effort to make all sorts of housing opportunities available, starting from dorms up to luxury hotel rooms. Check these when your registering. You will also be pleased to know that transportation is available to and from Cairo International Airport in the 2 days before and after the conference. And what is a gathering without fun? Tours and parties are being planned out for the participants of the event. After all Alexandria is cultural city that brims with hospitality and the main idea of the event is to provide a gathering place. Hope to see you there! The Wikimania Local Team ---- Please forward this message along to whomever you think will be interested! (Sorry if you've already this e-mail more than once!) -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 --- Note: This e-mail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to this address will probably get lost. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 --- Note: This e-mail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent to this address will probably get lost.

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[Foundation-l] New wiki creation
by Erik Moeller 04 May '08

04 May '08

We're still waiting for the FDL 1.3. Since there's been no resolution within the timeframe we hoped for, we're going to re-allow the creation of new Wikimedia wikis. To make sure that we can safely transition to CC-BY-SA, we're going to dual-license them under CC-BY-SA 3.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode We may remove this dual-licensing clause later, depending on what the community decides with regard to licensing of existing and new wikis based on the options that the FDL 1.3 will provide. This dual-licensing of new wikis is purely intended to make sure that we have the _option_ to transition these wikis to CC-BY-SA 3.0 (or later) if we choose to. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

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[Foundation-l] Board elections: Weekly report for April 26 to May 3
by Jesse Plamondon-Willard 04 May '08

04 May '08

Following is a summary of the 2008 board elections organization for the week of April 26 to May 3. For detailed information on the elections, see <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/en>. ==Timeline== * We began accepting translations this week. * Candidates will be accepted starting next week on May 8. ==Election rules== On April 26 we unveiled the 2008 board elections pages and structure, timed to coincide with the committee and Board of Trustees announcements. We later added a warning not to edit the official English rules page (this was done in previous years as well). Based on community discussion, we changed the eligibility requirements for candidates and voters, so that they must have 50 edits between 01 January and 01 June (instead of 01 April and 01 June). We also relaxed the requirements for candidates, so that they must have 600 edits before 01 January 2008 (instead of 01 June 2007). We discussed whether we needed to change the voter-requirements exceptions to cover remote staff (who don't work in the office), but decided this was unnecessary this year. The persons affected were eligible without exceptions, and a change would require a number of translation updates. Two discussions are currently on hold while we examine technical feasibility: * sending an official notification email to all eligible voters; * the voting system. ==Translation== We began accepting translations 5 days earlier than planned on April 27, due to eager translators. The next day we added the navigation menu and removed the notification email (incomplete draft) as translatable pages. We currently have 28 translations. If you'd like to help, please see <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Translation>. Translations by percentage completed (total size of complete pages / total size of all pages): * 100: de, en, fr, nb, pl, pt, ru, sv, zh-hans, zh-hant; * 80+: fa, ja, nl; * 20+: he; * 10+: ca, it; * 1+: eo, es, eu, fi, hr, ko, ml, uk; * 0: ar, cs, hu, id. ==Technical details== There have a flurry of tweaks and fixes following the original publication. These have simplified translations, reduced maintenance overhead, fixed an overlap display glitch on candidate pages, and added support for right-to-left languages. We expanded the translation page, so users can see at a glance: * the status of each translated page (missing/not complete/update needed/done); * the overall completion percentage of each language (based on page size); * the relative size in percentage of each page (so translators can start with the shorter pages). -- Yours cordially, Jesse Plamondon-Willard (Pathoschild)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Chapter-selected Board seats - brainstorming
by daniwo59＠aol.com 03 May '08

03 May '08

In a message dated 5/1/2008 2:05:07 PM Eastern Daylight Time, wiki.ral315(a)gmail.com writes: And certainly, logistically, there's a serious problem. A flight from New York to Los Angeles, for example, would cost anywhere from $300-500 round-trip. And driving would be out of the question for most; that's a 2,700 mile, 40-hour drive. Just some quick stats Distance from San Francisco to Boston = 4339 km Distance from London to Warsaw = 1447 km How many chapters are squeezed into the shorter distance? **************Need a new ride? Check out the largest site for U.S. used car listings at AOL Autos. (http://autos.aol.com/used?NCID=aolcmp00300000002851)

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[Foundation-l] Modification of the official board election page
by Kwan Ting Chan 03 May '08

03 May '08

The Election Committee would like to ask the community of administrator on Meta to refrain from editing the English version of the Board election page [[m:Board elections/2008/en]]. The page was protected by the committee as it contain the official rules for the election, and is the source for translations. Its current wording and formatting is what's agreed by the committee. Of course, if you spot anything which you think may be an error, any ambiguity, or any points which you feel should be modified, feel free to suggest it to the election committee either on the talk page, on this list, or straight to the election committee. However, please take into account any changes to the page requires all the translations to be updated and hence it is unlikely the page will be modify simply for small grammatical changes. For the election committee, Kwan Ting Chan - [[m:User:KTC]] -- Experience is a good school but the fees are high. - Heinrich Heine

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[Foundation-l] The fallacy of power
by Erik Moeller 02 May '08

02 May '08

The Board restructuring appears to have triggered discontent among some community members. This seems to be in part motivated by the fact that previous community propositions for the Board to encourage the exploration of a Volunteer Council by means of a Board resolution were declined, while at the same time, the structure of the Board was changed to designate the responsibility for two seats to the chapters. Another part of the dissatisfaction appears to be rooted in the perceived lack of public communication about these changes. I was not part of the Board meeting in San Francisco, and I'm not speaking from an organizational position, nor am I writing this on the basis of inside information about the meeting. Based on my own experience as a former member of the Board and a longtime member of this community, I would like to offer an alternative interpretation for what I think is happening here. My own understanding of this decision is exactly the opposite of what some people seem to interpret it as: The Board has, through its decision not to create a Volunteer Council but to encourage community exploration of self-governance, made an explicit statement that it is up to volunteers working on the projects to explore and propose processes to decide what new projects & languages to create, what decision making processes to use to resolve disputes, what major software changes to enable, and so forth. The Board and the organization will be minimally prescriptive in these processes. This is in the organization's interest, as the top-down method of implementing decisions affecting the projects doesn't scale well. I interpret it as encouragement to "be bold" and develop scalable volunteer-driven processes on all levels. The Board, through its commitment to bringing in new Board members with expertise in relevant legal, accounting, fundraising and governance issues, has made it clear that it understands its governance obligation and its fiduciary responsibility towards a tax-exempt non-profit organization. Through its commitment to bringing in chapters into the governance process, it has made an important attempt to share lessons and recognize the chapters' role in the international Wikimedia movement. Through its clear, continuing commitment to community membership on the Board, it has stated its long term view that, in order to guard and nurture our values, we need individuals on the Board who live and breathe these values. So, what I get from this is: * The Board has given the community a clear "go" signal to explore models of self-governance and decision making processes, be they councils, direct voting, committees, or other processes which work. This allows for the rapid, parallel evolution of mechanisms of self-governance and a "survival of the fittest" decision-making processes. That's a very real alternative to a top-down decision to explore one particular model (Volunteer Council) and, arguably, preferable. * The Board has attempted to develop a reasonable balance in its own composition to address the challenge of running a multi-million dollar non-profit organization while preserving the key values that allow it to exist. But, the Board is _meant_ to not get involved in daily operations, it is _meant_ to not try to make project-level decisions that cannot scale, it is _meant_ to structure itself so that it can competently hire an Executive Director when needed, so that it can evaluate her performance, so that it can raise funds for the organization, so that it can make sure that we are in compliance with the legal requirements for organizations like ours. You will not get a Board that can do that by simply picking the people with the highest edit counts and giving them responsibility over the organization. That's a way to create an organization that has good intentions but which cannot necessarily balance its books or hire competent staff. In other words, it's a way to create purely a social movement and not an organizational support layer for one. But WMF is the support layer: We all are the social movement. Our Board of Trustees is present on wikis, IRC and mailing lists; it's electronically reachable and responsive in ways I would posit no other Board of Trustees of a similarly large organization is. This, and the absence of other decision making bodies, creates a fallacy of power: the false belief that, because the Board exists and participates, it represents an operationally involved ruling body _for_ the social movement, rather than an organizational body for _corporate oversight_. But, really, the primary function of the Board is to sustain and protect the organization. And, if anything, these Board meeting outcomes are the Board's acknowledgment of the fact that the true power rests with the community volunteers, and that the Board should not interfere with community processes. You can disagree, but the easiest way to prove this point is to look at the decisions the Board actually makes: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolutions The most recent Board resolution that was highly project-facing was the one on our content licensing, from December 2007: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:License_update And this resolution explicitly called for a community decision making process. Other recent resolutions include: * Approval of chapter organizations * Approval of financial statements * Approval of a credit card usage policy * Approval of the job description for the Executive Director * Update of the gift policy What relevance do these decisions have to your daily project work? In contrast, what relevance do they have to WMF as an organization (rather than a social movement)? What qualifications do you need to vote on such resolutions? I believe that the proposed Board structure is a very reasonable response to these questions. It's no coincidence or conspiracy that the current Board, made primarily of respected and trusted community volunteers, has reached the conclusions it has. It's easy to direct negative energy towards listservs and wiki pages. It's much harder to direct positive energy towards solutions that actually work. It seems to me that volunteer energy would now be most usefully guided towards developing mechanisms of self-governance, per project and across projects. Decision-making bodies and processes have arisen, on a small scale, without any Board involvement. The challenge is to scale them up. And it's a challenge to all of us. Erik

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Re: [Foundation-l] Our first defamation case?
by Mike Godwin 02 May '08

02 May '08

Florence writes: > However, note that contrariwise to this case, we actually removed the > alleged diffaming comments. The judge estimated that we reacted in a > suitable fashion for a website provider and rejected the request for a > financial compensation by the plaintiff. Note that there's no entry for "Barbara Bauer" on en.wiki at present, and there hasn't been for some time. --Mike

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[Foundation-l] Board-announcement: Board Restructuring
by Jan-Bart de Vreede 02 May '08

02 May '08

Dear all, As most of you know, the Board of Trustees met at the Foundation's new San Francisco headquarters a few weeks ago. At that meeting, we talked about how best to represent the full array of community members, and how best to provide professional oversight for the work of the staff. As a result of those conversations, we're announcing today some changes to the makeup of the Board, and to the Board member appointment process. We think these are positive changes that will help the Board to safeguard the Wikimedia Foundation's ability to fulfill the mission. We hope you agree. I've laid out the most significant changes below. We are increasing the number of Board positions to 10 overall, comprised of the following: * Three seats elected by you, the community * Two seats to be selected by the chapters * One Board-appointed 'Community Founder' seat * Four 'specific expertise' seats, also to be Board-appointed The most significant change here is probably the addition of two chapters-selected seats. This has been under consideration for a long time, and we are glad to finally be implementing it. We want to acknowledge that the chapters are an important player in the fulfillment of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission, and that they therefore deserve a voice in the governance of the Foundation. Please note that the two chapters-selected seats are not intended to represent the interests of the chapters vis-a-vis the Foundation. The chapters are being asked to pick trustees who they feel will represent the interests of the Wikimedia Foundation, and help it fulfill its mission as well as it possibly can. We are also specifically naming four seats as designated for “specific expertise.” The goal here is to add skills and capacities to the current board. For example, we might decide to actively recruit board members with deep non-profit governance experience, or fundraising expertise. We are also formalizing Jimmy's role as Community Founder, by designating a seat for that purpose. These changes are effective today, but we will not be filling all of these roles immediately. It will take some time -likely several months to a year- before all the changes are implemented. Here's how that will work: Nothing changes immediately. The current Board membership will stay in place, and will fill out the new roles/positions as follows: * Three community-elected seats: - Florence Devouard (seat up for election July 2008; then, next up for election July 2009) - Kat Walsh (seat up for election July 2009) - Frieda Brioschi (seat up for election July 2009) * Chapter-selected seats: - Domas Mituzas, Executive Secretary (to be held until chapters make their own appointment) - Michael Snow (to be held until chapters make their own appointment) * Community Founder - Jimmy Wales (term expires December 31, 2008) * 'Specific expertise' seats - Jan-Bart de Vreede , Vice Chair (term expires December 31, 2008) - Stuart West, Treasurer (term expires December 31, 2008) - Vacant (term expires December 31, 2008) - Vacant (term expires December 31, 2008) The 'specific expertise' seats, and community founder seat, will be re-appointed starting in January 2009. The chapter-selected seats will be filled as soon as the Chapters appoint representatives. Domas Mituzas and Michael Snow, who were originally asked to sit on the Board until June 2008, will be extended in their seats until the chapters make their choices. Both the community-elected and chapter-selected seats have a duration of two years. These seats will expire in alternating years, which means that community-elected seats will be up for renewal on the July 1st 2009, 2011, and 2013, and chapter-selected seats will be up for renewal on July 1st 2010, 2012, 2014, etc. In the short-term, the next significant date for the Board is the election for the one seat, which expires in July of this year. This is the seat currently held by Florence Devouard. The term of that seat will last for one year, to July 2009. This is a shorter term than normal, but the intent is to have the three community-elected seats all line up to one consistent election date in July 2009. You will hear more later today from the elections committee. Once all of these positions are in place, we trust we will have built a strong Board that is well-positioned to safeguard the Wikimedia Foundation's mission, and our ability to fulfill it. We hope you agree. We know this is all pretty complicated and hard to follow, so we asked Jay Walsh, head of communications, to put together an FAQ and a “board makeup” graphic, intended to help make it more understandable. He'll be posting both on the Foundation wiki in about an hour. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board Thanks, Jan-Bart de Vreede Vice-chair, Board of Trustees

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Wikimedia-l May 2008