It occurs to me that when people donate money to something, it is to
some degree with an expectation that the recipient entity grows to
eventually gain a certain kind of financial self-sufficiency. Is this
not also the case with Wikimedia and many charitable donations to it?
-Steven
I thought I'd better write up a report about the conference I went to
last week, to justify the time I spent there. I'll give some general
observations followed by some technical ones.
GLAM-WIKI was a two-day conference billed as a meeting between
Australia's GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and
Wikimedians. GLAM representatives outnumbered Wikimedians, but we had
enough people there to make sure our point of view was heard both inside
and outside of the formal program. Many of the talks were from people in
the GLAM sector who were already converted to our way of thinking, and
who endeavoured to convert the rest of the GLAM audience by speaking in
their language.
The GLAM representatives were generally very receptive. When dissenting
questions came up, they were often answered in our favour by another
GLAM representative. I asked one of the delegates about this favourable
mood, and he said that the delegates were generally self-selected people
who had a favourable opinion of Wikimedia and free content, and that the
skeptics did not attend. However, the discussions had at the conference
would provide valuable ammunition against those skeptics back in the office.
As far as I know, only one speaker expressed a completely contrary
opinion to the general mood of the conference, and that was Ian
MacDonald of the Australian Copyright Council. He said, in essence, that
institutions need to prevent reuse or modification of the content they
hold in order to preserve its purity, which risks sullied by the
cumulative distortions of the general public. This was passionately
countered by Jessica Coates during question time, with some success
judging by nearby whisperings. MacDonald also warned the audience about
evil Wikimedians like the one who "hacked into" the NPG (UK) website and
stole a million pounds worth of images. The factual errors in this
statement were briefly addressed during question time.
I tried to get a feeling for what sort of hard drive capacity we would
need if the institutions in the room decided they wanted to share large
amounts of content with us. Many of them have tens or hundreds of
terabytes of data storage, in tape and hard drives. However, the bulk of
this is in restoration-quality images (e.g. TIFFs tens of thousands of
pixels wide), which they would not be willing to share with us even if
we wanted them. Liam Wyatt proposed as a business model or compromise
with management, the idea of sharing images of a 1000-2000 pixel width
and charging a fee for access to the full resolution images. That seems
like the most likely arrangement, and if so, it wouldn't need a
significant change to our current capacity planning for file storage.
A GLAM delegate expressed an opinion in question time that they would be
reluctant to have us mirror their collection, since they've spent a
large amount of money setting up their data storage, so mirroring would
seem like a waste. Brianna Laugher was receptive to the idea of having
Wikimedia projects hotlink or cache images from galleries. I kept quiet,
the significant technical challenges with that approach were not discussed.
There is a need for bulk upload tools to be better advertised and more
readily accessible. One of the institutions reported paying students to
upload hundreds of photos to commons via the usual web-based UI, but
found it to be too time-consuming and expensive to consider on a large
scale.
Special:BookSources came up a couple of times. The libraries would love
to see software improvements, such as geolocation giving the ability to
present the nearest few libraries at the top of the page, without the
user having to click on the world map. Liam mentioned the geolocation
projects based on detecting nearby 802.11 access points. I think
MaxMind's GeoIP City would be a better as a software development
starting point.
Delegates from the National Library of Australia reported that they have
an ongoing project to collate collection metadata from all libraries in
Australia. It may be possible to replicate this data to Wikimedia
servers, or otherwise make it available. This would enable a feature
whereby the user is told which libraries have the book being searched
for, in the requested edition or a different edition. It may even be
possible to report whether the book is on the shelf or not.
-- Tim Starling
Thanks for the information. I'll spread the word to Acehnese community.
------Original Message------
From: Milos Rancic
Sender: foundation-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
ReplyTo: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: [Foundation-l] New projects opened
Sent: Aug 13, 2009 15:30
Yesterday, new projects were opened:
* Sorani Wikipedia (http://ckb.wikipedia.org/)
* Western Panjabi Wikipedia (http://pnb.wikipedia.org/)
* Mirandese Wikipedia (http://mwl.wikipedia.org/)
* Acehnese Wikipedia (http://ace.wikipedia.org/)
* Turkish Wikinews (http://tr.wikinews.org/)
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
--
Ivan Lanin. http://www.wikimedia.or.id
Dikirim dari BeriHitam® 25704A0F
Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Covering: May 2009
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
PRIORITIES FOR JUNE
1. Finalize 2009-10 Annual Plan for WMF Board of Trustees Approval
2. Begin hiring the Strategy Development team
3. Conduct end of year staff performance evaluations and finalize
individual staff goals
REACH
In May, the Wikimedia Foundation sites held steady as the number four
most-popular sites in the world with 317,255,000 global unique
visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix.
2009-10 ANNUAL PLAN
During May, the main focus for the Wikimedia Foundation was the
development of the 2009-10 Annual Plan, with departments developing
their funding requests for 2009-10. In addition to normal
departmental funding requests, three proposals for non-recurring
programmatic activities were developed:
* Sue Gardner developed a proposal for the Wikimedia Collaborative
Strategy Development project, in which the Wikimedia Board, staff,
chapters and individual volunteers will work with each other and
external experts and advisors, supported by non-profit strategy
development firm Bridgespan, in order to collaboratively develop a
five-year strategic road-map for the Wikimedia movement. This project
began being discussed at the Board level six months earlier, and was
first discussed publicly at the Chapters Meeting in Berlin in April.
* Frank Schulenburg developed a proposal for the Public Outreach
Bookshelf Project, designed to create a core set of
awareness/engagement/training public outreach materials, in English,
to later be translated, localized and used by volunteers and partner
organizations such as schools.
* Jay Walsh developed a proposal for a communications campaign,
designed to increase public understanding of Wikipedia as a serious
educational endeavor, and of the Wikimedia Foundation as a charitable
organization.
The 2009-10 Annual Plan will continue to be developed throughout June,
while simultaneously staff develop their individual performance goals
for 2009-10. The Plan will be delivered to the Board of Trustees for
approval in mid-June.
LICENSE MIGRATION
On May 21, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees passed a
resolution bringing about significant changes to the licensing of the
content of the Wikimedia Foundation projects. This resolution follows
a vote among the international Wikimedia community, during which 88%
of all voters who expressed an opinion supported the change. It will
result in all of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects moving from the
GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) to the Creative Commons
Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) as their primary content
license. This change means that all Wikimedia project content will be
more interoperable with existing CC-BY-SA content, and therefore
easier to re-use in multiple ways for multiple purposes. The Wikimedia
Foundation staff will now begin taking steps to ensure that correct,
updated licensing is in place for all Wikimedia project content.
A press release about this important change can be found here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Dual_license_vote_May_20…
TECHNOLOGY - DEVELOPMENT
The official Wikipedia iPhone client was beta-tested by a small set of users.
Erik Zachte submitted a new version of proof-of-concept Monthly Report
Card statistics with enhanced views and has been generally moving
forward on improvements to statistics generation. As the template
matures and the generation of these statistics is regularized, we will
develop a public version to accompany the Report to the Board.
Tim Starling continued preparing MediaWiki for a 1.15 quarterly
release, which is expected to be complete in June. Tim also completed
ongoing code reviews for the release and code updates on the live
site.
The Collection (PDF book) extension was tweaked in response to issues
with UI and save permissions, but continues to run.
TECHNOLOGY - CORE OPERATIONS AND OFFICE IT
Database dumps other than the English Wikipedia full-history dump were
all generated correctly and consistently, feeding Erik Zachte's
statistics jobs and other uses. Tomasz Finc continues to experiment
with Hadoop as infrastructure for the more scalable next-generation
dump system.
Brion Vibber, Ariel Glenn, and Daniel Phelps reviewed candidates and
conducted interviews for the newly created Head of Office IT Support
position. After interviewing a variety of candidates, Steven Kent was
hired to fill the position. Steve Kent comes to Wikimedia with more
than 20 years of IT systems management experience. He has been in
similar roles with several organization including; RR Donnelley,
Charrette LLC, Communicomp and CMP Media. Steve was most recently the
Director of Information Technology for Sandbox Studios located in San
Francisco. Steve will start in mid-June.
Search servers were upgraded with additional RAM, improving search
performance enough to enable advanced features such as spelling
correction for all wikis. Old wiki configuration change requests were
collected from Bugzilla and mostly completed.
The Ops team is experimenting with use of Puppet configuration-control
system on a few servers. Initial test rollout uses these to replace
more fragile data sharing such as NIS and LDAP for server-internal
use.
Wikimedia's phone system was transitioned to primarily use plain old
telephony (POTS) for calls, to improve call quality and reduce call
drop problems. At present call usage, this is the cheapest solution.
The phone system continues to run on the open source Asterisk PBX, and
can be switched to IP usage as a backup and for external users such as
the usability satellite office.
OTHER PROGRAM ACTIVITIES
On May 3, Sue Gardner spoke at a Wikipedia Academy in Tel Aviv,
organized by the Israeli chapter. About 250 people attended, and
sessions covered the use of Wikipedia and wiki systems in schools,
Wikipedia's credibility and neutrality, and legal aspects of free
content and freedom of information. Almost all major Israeli
newspapers covered the event, and it was favourably discussed in many
local blogs, forums and bulletins. The Wikimedia Foundation
congratulates the Israeli chapter for organizing a very successful
event.
Planning continued towards a Wikipedia Academy with the U.S. National
Institutes of Health, with a strong emphasis on creating a scalable
event model with sustainable participation outcomes.
Jennifer Riggs has assumed responsibility for managing the Chapters
Funding Request Process, and is beginning to also develop planning
towards a Wikimedia Fellows and Interns Program.
Wikimedia participated in interviews with CNN (Atlanta, Georgia); the
Associated Press (Dublin, Ireland); Agence France Presse (Paris,
France); the Globe and Mail newspaper (Toronto, Canada); the
television program 60 Minutes, CBS (New York, NY); City TV (Edmonton,
Canada); the New York Times (New York); KCRW (Santa Monica,
California); Bloomberg News (San Francisco, California); PR Week (New
York); the San Francisco Daily Journal (San Francisco, California);
the St. Petersburg Times newspaper (St. Petersburg, Florida); Business
Week magazine (New York); ABCNews.com (New York); and the Wall Street
Journal (New York).
FUNDRAISING, GRANTS & PARTNERSHIPS
The Wikimedia Foundation received 1,126 donations in May totaling
approximately USD 137,604. This included three large gifts which
total USD 82,500. Year-to-date, the Foundation has raised USD
5,629,019 in fundraising related revenue, 41% above the annual goal of
USD 4,000,000. When combined with unrestricted grants, the
Foundation's fundraising department has raised a year to date total of
USD 7,101,656, 43% above last year's total of $4,083,370.
Rand Montoya and Tomasz Finc are continuing to work with Four Kitchens
on improvements to the CiviCRM fundraising database and a new payment
gateway for the 2009-10 fundraiser, allowing direct giving via credit
card through the Wikimedia interface. Rand has also started
development of a donor survey with the help of a volunteer, Jeff
Pilisuk, and has commissioned work on button designs for a potential
permanent donation button as part of the sidebar of all Wikimedia
projects.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
After finalizing the Wikimedia Foundation's recent business deal with
Orange, Kul Wadhwa worked closely with the Orange team to insure the
proper implementation of Wikipedia content into Orange web and mobile
properties. Kul also negotiated and executed a licensing deal with
Palm to include Wikipedia as part of the Pre WebOS platform and
marketing campaign.
LEGAL
In May, Mike Godwin spoke at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
conference in Washington, D.C., and virtually attended a board meeting
of the U.S.-based Student Press Law Center,a non-profit organization
devoted to supporting student news media who face censorship. Mike and
Erik Moeller, following consultation with colleagues at the Mozilla
Corporation, began work crafting a plan to develop a set of policies
and practices enabling appropriate usage of the trademarks by the
chapters and community for activities in line with the Wikimedia
mission.
Mike released a second version of the draft new Chapters Agreement to
the chapters, and discussions about it began to take place.
--
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the
board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the
candidates ranked as follows:
Final ranking
1 Ting Chen (Wing)
2 Kat Walsh (mindspillage)
3 Samuel Klein (Sj)
4 Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
5 Domas Mituzas (Midom)
6 Thomas Braun (Redlinux)
7 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro)
8 Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist)
9 Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester)
10 José Gustavo Góngora (Góngora)
11 Brady Brim-DeForest (Bradybd)
12 Lourie Pieterse (LouriePieterse)
13 Adam Koenigsberg (CastAStone)
14 Ralph Potdevin (Aruspice)
15 Beauford Anton Stenberg (B9 hummingbird hovering)
16 Gregory Kohs (Thekohser)
17 Kevin Riley O'Keeffe (KevinOKeeffe)
18 Relly Komaruzaman (Relly Komaruzaman)
A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly.
These names have been respectfully submitted to the Board, which has
moved to seat the top three candidates.
The Committee wishes to thank all those who submitted themselves as
candidates. It was a broad and diverse field this year. We also wish
to recognize the many volunteers that helped with this process. The
committee extends its gratitude and thanks to them
For the committee,
Philippe
My first response is that's probably a reflection of the voting system. When you have a non-partisan system like this, there are no clear political pro/con reasons to vote for/against particular candidates and the anti-incumbency factor doesn't really work. Candidates are likely to be successful if they're well known, and that will give an advantage to more established editors.
However, you might be over-stating this conclusion. All three retiring candidates stood again and only two were re-elected - Domas Mituzas lost out to sj.
----- "Steven Walling" <steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> From: "Steven Walling" <steven.walling(a)gmail.com>
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, 12 August, 2009 20:07:00 GMT +00:00 GMT Britain, Ireland, Portugal
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Election Results
>
> While I personally am very pleased with the results, I wonder how the
> election results will be perceived outside Wikimedia.
> With numerous media outlets reacting to PARC's research about the state of
> the community, I fear this endorsement of seemingly "old guard" Wikimedians
> as our Board representation will support claims about the community becoming
> unfriendly to new participants.
> Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too?
>
> If I'm not alone, perhaps any official announcement about the elections
> (i.e. on the Wikimedia blog and in press releases) should address this, even
> if only tacitly.
>
> Steven Walling
>
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:55 AM, Chad <innocentkiller(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Philippe
> > Beaudette<pbeaudette(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > > The Wikimedia Foundation's Board Election Committee has concluded the
> > > board selection process, and is pleased to announce that the
> > > candidates ranked as follows:
> > >
> > > Final ranking
> > >
> > > 1 Ting Chen (Wing)
> > > 2 Kat Walsh (mindspillage)
> > > 3 Samuel Klein (Sj)
> > > 4 Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)
> > > 5 Domas Mituzas (Midom)
> > > 6 Thomas Braun (Redlinux)
> > > 7 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro)
> > > 8 Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist)
> > > 9 Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester)
> > > 10 José Gustavo Góngora (Góngora)
> > > 11 Brady Brim-DeForest (Bradybd)
> > > 12 Lourie Pieterse (LouriePieterse)
> > > 13 Adam Koenigsberg (CastAStone)
> > > 14 Ralph Potdevin (Aruspice)
> > > 15 Beauford Anton Stenberg (B9 hummingbird hovering)
> > > 16 Gregory Kohs (Thekohser)
> > > 17 Kevin Riley O'Keeffe (KevinOKeeffe)
> > > 18 Relly Komaruzaman (Relly Komaruzaman)
> > >
> > > A full pairwise defeats table will be posted shortly.
> > >
> > > These names have been respectfully submitted to the Board, which has
> > > moved to seat the top three candidates.
> > >
> > > The Committee wishes to thank all those who submitted themselves as
> > > candidates. It was a broad and diverse field this year. We also wish
> > > to recognize the many volunteers that helped with this process. The
> > > committee extends its gratitude and thanks to them
> > >
> > >
> > > For the committee,
> > > Philippe
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > foundation-l mailing list
> > > foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> > >
> >
> > Congrats to the winners!
> >
> > -Chad
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > foundation-l mailing list
> > foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> >
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Covering: April 2009
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
MILESTONES FROM APRIL
1.Berlin Board and Chapters meeting
1.Licensing update vote launched
2.Chief Program Officer hired
KEY PRIORITIES FOR MAY
1.Further development of 2009-10 Annual Plan and staff goals
2.Israeli Wikipedia Academy
3.Begin hiring for Strategy Plan project
4.Implement license update
In April, the Wikimedia Foundation sites held steady as the number
four most-popular sites in the world, with 320,043,000 global unique
visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix.
CHAPTERS MEETING, BOARD MEETING, & MEDIAWIKI DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE
Many Wikimedia Foundation staff attended the All Chapters meeting,
Board meeting, and MediaWiki developers conference in Berlin in early
April.
The following people gave workshops: Frank Schulenburg gave a workshop
on public outreach; Rand Montoya gave a workshop on fundraising; Erik
Moeller gave a workshop on the Chapters Funding Request process, and
Mike Godwin gave a workshop on trademarks.
Sue Gardner and James Owen attended the Board of Trustees meeting,
which was held concurrent with the All Chapters meeting. Key agenda
items at the Board of Trustees meeting included a recap of the
2009-2010 Annual Plan development process and solicitation of Board
member feedback; a discussion of Biographies of Living People,
approval to proceed with the Strategic Planning project, and a
discussion of trademark policy and practices. During the closing
session of the All Chapters meeting, the Board and Sue announced the
Strategy project, and participated in a general discussion about it.
Concurrent with the All Chapters and Board of Trustees meetings,
Wikimedia Germany developer Daniel Kinzler organized a conference for
MediaWiki developers. It was attended by Wikimedia Foundation
technical staff Brion Vibber, Tomasz Finc, Mark Bergsma, Tim Starling,
Trevor Parscal and Arash Boostani. Many volunteer developers from
Europe and elsewhere also attended. Among the many productive
discussions, the most notable was a decision to integrate maps from
OpenStreetMap, a free and open mapping project, in Wikimedia projects.
A project to set up a map tile server mirror locally in our Amsterdam
hosting cluster is underway, and development is ongoing on a
functional inline map display widget.
The Wikimedia Foundation congratulates Wikimedia Germany on
successfully organizing a very useful and productive conference.
TECHNOLOGY
Fred Vassard began improvements to operations infrastructure such as
spam filtering, logging, and status monitoring as well as
investigating commercial monitoring options.
After discussion with Manuel Schneider from the OpenZim project, the
OpenZim format was identified as a likely target for future offline
distributions such as DVD and USB stick versions of Wikipedia. Tomasz
Finc will explore integration of OpenZim into the dump process, once
the primary issues around database dump reliability are fully
addressed.
The Wikimedia Foundation officially opted out of the “Phorm”
traffic-scanning targeted-advertising system which is being rolled out
by some ISPs in the UK. This may be a largely symbolic measure: it is
intended to demonstrates the Wikimedia Foundation's commitment to
Internet freedom and privacy for the Wikimedia Foundation's users.
In April, the team began soliciting more active testing for the new
mobile gateway at m.wikipedia.org, which is targeted for a full public
release later this year.
Other areas of department focus:
* Tim Starling is preparing an upcoming MediaWiki 1.15 release, which
addresses some low-level data storage and installer/upgrade issues.
* FlaggedRevisions and the new AbuseFilter extension have continued to
see maintenance development from contract developers Aaron and Andrew.
* Kul Wadhwa and Tomasz began assessing a lead on sponsorship of
development time and hardware for improved reliability of database
dump generation. In the meantime Tomasz will coordinate with external
partners on partial or complete Commons/Wikimedia file mirroring.
* Summer of Code student applications were received and four projects accepted.
The focus of the usability team in April was to review and analyze the
findings from the usability study. After the team completed its
initial analysis, Naoko Komura released the study's methodology and
findings to the public project site. (usability.wikimedia.org) The
team began to brainstorm solutions to problem areas revealed during
the initial data collection, and conducted an environmental scan of
available extensions and tools potentially related to usability.
OTHER PROGRAM ACTIVITIES
On April 12, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a community vote on
whether to adopt Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike as the
primary license for all eligible GFDL-licensed content. The vote will
be concluded in May. (For this purpose, a new MediaWiki software
extension, SecurePoll, was developed, which will be refined further as
a general-purpose extension for secure elections and polls.) The vote
was administered by Software in the Public Interest (SPI), a
non-profit organization which aims to help develop and distribute open
hardware and software. SPI also administers the Wikimedia Foundation's
Board of Trustees elections process.
On April 13, the Wikimedia Foundation welcomed Jennifer Riggs as its
first-ever Chief Program Officer, and Jennifer began orienting herself
to the work and culture of the Foundation. Jennifer comes to
Wikimedia from the American Red Cross Bay Area chapter, where, as
Manager of Volunteer Resources, she managed the work of more than a
thousand volunteers. Prior to the Red Cross, she worked at the
California School-Age Consortium and with the Peace Corps. Jennifer's
orientation will include numerous informal discussions with Wikimedia
volunteers as well as Advisory Board members.
Cary Bass and Sara Crouse worked with Wikimedia volunteers to launch
the Wikimania scholarship application process.
The Wikimedia Foundation participated in interviews with KNX/CBS 1070
Radio (Los Angeles, California); National Public Radio (Seattle,
Washington); VEJA Magazine (Sao Paulo, Brazil); the Wall Street
Journal (San Francisco, California); Les Echos (Paris, France); Gazeta
Wyborcza (Warsaw, Poland); Cinco Dias (Madrid, Spain); Creativity
Magazine (New York, New York); Symbol Report (Frederick, Maryland);
Telephony (Chicago, Illinois); the Associated Press (New York, New
York); MediaPost (New York, New York); and the Times newspaper
(London, United Kingdom).
FUNDRAISING, GRANTS, & PARTNERSHIPS
During April, the Wikimedia Foundation received 922 donations, with a
combined total value of USD 78,453. Year-to-date, the Wikimedia
Foundation has raised USD 5,491415 in donations from individuals, 37%
above the full-year target of USD 4,000,000.
Rebecca Handler organized a trip for herself and Sue Gardner to
cultivate current and prospective donors in New York City in mid-May.
Rand Montoya continued planning for the Annual Giving Campaign as well
as longer term community giving activities, and began work with Four
Kitchens on upgrades to the open source CiviCRM donations database,
including improved reporting functionality based on best practices in
fundraising.
FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION
Work continued on the 2009-10 Annual Plan, including planning by all
departments. Following Board review and approval of the 2008-09 Form
990 Tax Return, Veronique Kessler filed the return and posted a public
copy of the return and an FAQ to the Wikimedia Foundation website
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Form_2007_Questions_and_Answers).
Veronique also began researching the implications of the Wikimedia
Foundation beginning to offer grants to individuals and chapter
organizations, and Veronique and Jennifer began creating draft
procedures related to approving grants.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
After several months of negotiations, Business Development executed
its first major strategic partnership with a Fortune 500 company. This
is a mission-friendly three-year deal with Orange (France Telecom) to
integrate Wikipedia content and marks into Orange's web and mobile
properties.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Orange_and_Wikimedia_ann…
Future developments may include improving mobile functionality, new
applications, expansion to IPTV and other platforms.
LEGAL
At the April Board meeting, Sue presented a position paper outlining
recommendations for the handling and development of the Foundation's
commercially valuable trademarks. The paper was developed by Mike
Godwin with co-authors John Slafsky and Nathan Ferguson of the law
firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati. Following its review, the Board
requested that Mike take appropriate steps to register and protect the
Wikimedia marks, and also develop a strategy, policies and practices,
to allow uses by the chapters and community for activities in line
with the Wikimedia mission. Following the Board meeting, Mike
distributed a first-draft policy to the chapters, and began collecting
feedback.
--
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
I'm very excited to announce some new upcoming hiring for tech... I've
also posted this on our tech blog which is mirrored on Planet Wikimedia:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/08/cto-position-split/
--
Back in 2005, Wikimedia brought me on as the Foundation's first paid
employee after two years leading MediaWiki development as a volunteer.
Naturally as the *only* member of the tech staff, I started at the top:
Chief Technology Officer.
In the 4 years since, we've gone from one tech employee to a dozen, from
50 servers to 350, from upstart novelty to established web juggernaut.
As our operations and our staff have grown over the years, so have my
responsibilities. Beefing up our tech staff is in some ways just like
adding servers to our data center -- we can get more things done with
less task switching, but scaling still has its overhead.
With the increase in administrative and organizational duties, I've been
less and less able to devote time to the part of the job that's nearest
and dearest to me: working with our volunteer developer community and
end users -- Wikimedians and other MediaWiki users alike -- who have
bugs, patches, features, ideas, complaints, hopes and dreams that need
attention.
The last thing I want to be is a bottleneck that prevents our users from
getting what they need, or our open source developers from being able to
participate effectively!
Multicore brain upgrades aren't yet available, so to keep us running at
top speed I've suggested, and gotten Sue & Erik's blessing on, splitting
out the components of my current CTO role into two separate positions:
As Senior Software Architect, I...
* maintain the MediaWiki development roadmap
* give timely feedback and review on feature ideas, patches and commits
* ensure that end-users and bug reporters are treated respectfully and
that their needs are met
* get developers & users involved and talking at local and worldwide
events as well as online
* represent the "face of the developers" interacting with our user
community (both Wikimedians and third-party MediaWiki users)
As CTO, I...
* set high-level strategic priorities with the rest of WMF
* handle administrative management for the Wikimedia Foundation's
technical department & internal IT
** budgeting
** vendor relations & purchase approval
** hiring & personnel details
* work with the fundraising side of WMF to seek out and make use of
potential resources:
** grants for projects we need
** in-kind donations of infrastructure
** sharing development work with like-minded orgs
* ensure that the operations team has what they need to address current
and predictable future site needs
* ensure that the developers have what they need and are coding smoothly
* plan and implement internship programs and volunteer dev events both
on-site and elsewhere
I'll continue to act in both roles until we've found a satisfactory
candidate to fill the CTO position (full job description will go up
soon), at which point I'll be freed up to concentrate on being a
full-time Senior Software Architect. (Yes, I'll review your patch!)
I will of course continue to work closely with our eventual CTO... the
idea is to find someone who'll make the decisions I would have wanted to
if I only had time. ;)
-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco
On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Steven Walling<steven.walling(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Thoughts? Am I being too nervous, or do others see that potential too?
I didn't.
Speaking of PARC, does anyone have any contacts with them?
I wrote asking about how they removed vandalism from their revert and
have not had a reply (and my comment on their blog was either deleted
or never published). In particular I'm curious because their revert
concentration over time appears to show the same seasonal trend in
vandalism that you get from charting the proportion of vandalism over
time. (Its much easier to identify a subset of vandalism and track its
behaviour than it is to remove all vandalism).