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
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)
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.
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
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)
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)
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
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
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
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