Congratulations to Anya, and it sounds like Rand made a nice choice.
Anya, if you wish to continue receiving my assistance on the 2009
Fundraising Survey that I helped design, I hope that Rand will put you in
touch with me during the data analysis phase. I think a key "break-out" for
analysis will be the $500+ donor segment. They are a key constituency in
supporting the financial stream, as every single one of them is worth 16 or
more "average" donors.
Kindly,
Greg
--
Gregory Kohs
Hello Everyone,
I'd like to announce the upcoming office move for the Wikimedia
Foundation. We have outgrown the current office space in the SOMA
district of San Francisco. This was a great space for us when we
first landed in SF, but it's small, and we've been over capacity for
several months now. We want to provide space that enables the staff
to get their work done (including sufficient meeting space and
collaborative space, which we don't currently have) and we'd also like
to be open to other people spending time with us, including hosting
local meet-ups, and visits (including workspace) from out-of-town
community members, Board and Advisory Board members, and people from
like-minded organizations. None of that has been possible in the
current space.
A move was approved as part of our 2009-10 annual plan, and we started
looking for space a few months ago. There are many good things about
looking when we did; the local commercial real estate market is in a
low point which afforded us the ability to find larger spaces for less
$$ per square foot, and the vacancy rate allowed us to be very
thoughtful about where we ended up.
We ran a highly collaborative internal site selection process, which
included some good conversations about accessibility, openness and
brand fit. (For example, being near South Park, the heart of dot-com
land, has not been ideal for us from a brand perspective. Lots of
people assume Wikipedia is a dot-com, and we don't want to
accidentally encourage that misunderstanding.)
In the end, one location was the shining beacon that as a group we all
agreed 100% on. I have never worked with an open, collaborative
office move process in the past and I certainly didn't expect we'd
find a space that we all liked and were excited about, but we did. It
met all of our current needs and should accommodate us in the years to
come as it offers expandability and flexibility. Today, we signed the
lease, and we will move in mid-to-late October.
As many of you may know, we have been somewhat secretive with our
current address. We made this decision for several reasons, the
largest concern was for staff safety and reduction of interruptions
that would keep us from our work. The offices of any big website are
vulnerable to all kinds of stalkers and gawkers, and -unlike Google or
Yahoo or AOL- we don't have elaborate sign-in processes, security
staff, or armies of receptionists intercepting visitors. Our current
space is on a back alley and the ground floor, with no security, so we
have been worried about the safety of the staff.
On reflection though, we don't think being secretive about the address
was a good idea. It ran counter to our values of openness and
transparency, and it wasn't successful: anyone interested was easily
able to find our address. And, our new office is somewhat more
secure: it's on a busy street, we'll be on the third floor, and there
is a security person on-site. So, we have decided not to continue to
try to keep the address hidden. It will be posted on the website and
will be on our business cards and office stationery. There is still
the risk that we may have interruptions, but we are putting in place
safe-guards to reduce this while also looking to the future and how we
can be more receptive and approachable.
Having said that, I invite you all to Google the new location to see
for yourselves where we will be:
149 New Montgomery Street, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105. Our
phone and fax numbers will remain the same.
Another positive aspect that will come with this move is the ability
to repatriate the Wikipedia Usability team. As our current office did
not have enough space for them, we had to find nearby subleased office
space. This move will allow us all to be under one roof and will
allow us to freely collaborate with them, something we all value
immensely.
We do have some additional time on our current lease and will be
looking to sublease the office space or turn it over to someone who
will take it as a direct lease and remove us from the responsibility.
We have had much interest since we started looking and have a short
list of possible sub-lessors. Our hope is to have the office leased
out by the end of November 2009.
We look forward to the future in our new location and hope that we get
a chance to have you all visit us. We will do our best to post photos
as we settle in so that people can imagine us all in our new setting.
--
Daniel Phelps
Wikimedia Foundation
I've decided to take a different approach to the one I have been
taking on the subject of our new expert board member. I'm going to
make a constructive suggestion (perhaps I should have started with
that approach...).
It is self-evident that the WMF board needs to make decisions about a
wide range of subjects and that often those decisions will require
some knowledge and experience of the subject in question. It is also
self-evident that the community is not likely to select board members
that, between them, have knowledge and experience of all the subjects
required. This is why there are expert board members, to fill in the
gaps.
So, the need for experts is beyond question. I am, however, going to
question the need for them to be on the board. The rest of the board
do not, to my knowledge, abstain from voting when the subject for
discussion is not one they are an expert on. This means the expert has
just one vote of many, so that vote being based on expertise is
largely irrelevant. The expertise is useful because the expert uses
that expertise to advise the rest of the board, which means many votes
become based on expertise.
There are two main things a board member can do to shape the way the
foundation works. They can speak up in discussions and they can cast
their vote. I believe I have shown that the speaking up part is far
more significant for an expert than the voting part. For that reason,
I suggest that the vote be taken away from expert board members, they
don't need it. Experts should sit on the advisory board where they can
advise members of the community who sit on the board of trustees.
This would allow more community involvement, but would also allow more
expert involvement. At the moment we can only have four experts since
we don't want experts to outnumber the community and having too many
people on the board makes it inefficient. If the experts were moved to
the advisory board, there would be no real limit to how many of them
we could have. Those that have expertise relevant to whatever is on
the agenda for a given board meeting could be invited to that board
meeting, offer their advice, and then the community members could
vote. This is the key thing - the members of the advisory board need
to actually be used. At the moment I believe the advisory board is
largely dormant. If the board of trustees consulted the relevant
members of the advisory board more, there would be no need for experts
to be on the board of trustees.
To summarise, my suggestion is to abolish all the expert seats on the
WMF board of trustees and replace them with community selected seats
(either direct elections, chapter selections or some other method
entirely). The advisory board would then be filled with experts on all
the subjects required, which the board of trustees would then
routinely consult. This would, of course, need to happen over time -
the damage to continuity that would happen if that were done in one go
right now wouldn't worth it.
Hi folks,
I'm sorry to tell you that as of September 18, Jennifer Riggs will be
leaving the Wikimedia Foundation.
Since joining us last April, Jennifer has helped the Wikimedia
Foundation to improve in some important ways. She has helped Frank,
Cary and Jay better structure their work, and she supported the
staging of the NIH Wikipedia Academy in Bethesda, managed the chapters
grants process, and represented Wikimedia at the GLAM-Wiki conference
in Australia. That was all good work, and I thank her for it.
However, Jennifer and I have agreed that despite those contributions,
she ultimately will not be a good fit for the Chief Program Officer
role. That doesn't mean her path will never cross ours again, and
it's not a decision intended to reflect badly on her skills or
abilities. Obviously we both wish things had played out differently.
As you know, the Wikimedia Foundation has never had a Chief Program
Officer - it's a completely new position and there's no obvious career
path to prepare someone for it. It's sad this first attempt to fill
the role hasn't worked out, but it is perhaps, in retrospect, not that
surprising. Over the next month or so, we'll be revisiting the role
and its responsibilities to ensure the conditions are in place to
enable a new Chief Program Officer to succeed: I am looking forward to
beginning that process. I expect it will take at least three months,
and possibly more, to place a new person in the role: I'll keep you
aware of our progress. You can expect that at some point the position
will be posted on the Wikimedia Foundation website, and we'll announce
that here when it happens.
I recognize that Jennifer's departure may leave you with questions
about what happened, or what will happen next. I know you'll
understand that some information will be confidential, but I'll be
happy to tell you whatever I can.
I want to thank Jennifer for her contributions to Wikimedia during her
time with us, and for her professionalism. Please join me in wishing
her all the best in future.
Thanks,
Sue
--
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation
415 839 6885 office
415 816 9967 cell
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
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 2009/9/16 Samuel Klein <meta.sj(a)gmail.com>:
>> Putting aside the unnecessary bad faith and challenges to the
>> foundation's integrity: I find this all exciting - planning for
>> significant tech budget support, possible major sponsorships (I've
>> always hoped we would one day find multiple sources for long-term
>> in-kind support of servers and bandwidth), &c. I would simply like to
>> see more open discussion of what our perfect-world tech dreams are,
>> and how to pursue what sorts of sponsorships.
>
> Thanks, Sam. I find the discussion of the last few days symptomatic of
> the problems we've begun to brainstorm about with regard to the
> signal/noise ratio, healthiness and openness of this particular forum.
> (And by openness I mean that a forum that is dominated by highly
> abrasive, high volume, low signal discussions is actually not very
> open.) I do want to revisit the post limit question as a possible
> answer, but let's do that separately.
>
> The thread did surface some topics which are worth talking about, both
> in general and specific terms, and I'm taking the liberty to start a
> new thread to isolate some of those topics. For one thing, I think
> it's always good to revisit and iterate processes for defining
> priorities, and for achieving the highest impact in those identified
> areas.
>
> Developing more sophisticated processes both for short-term and
> long-term planning has been precisely one of the key focus areas of
> the last year. Internally, we've begun experimenting with assessment
> spreadsheets and standardized project briefs, drawing from the
> expertise of project management experts as well as Sue's specific work
> in developing a very well thought-out prioritization system at the
> CBC. Publicly, we're engaged in the strategy planning process -- the
> associated Call for Proposals is a first attempt to conduct a
> large-scale assessment of potential priorities. (I hope that with
> future improvements to the ReaderFeedback extension we'll be able to
> generate more helpful reports based on that particular assessment.)
>
> Ideally, the internal and public processes will converge sooner rather
> than later. For example, I posted a project brief that I developed
> internally through the strategy CfP:
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Volunteer_Toolkit
>
> I believe this one was submitted by Jennifer:
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Volunteer_Management_practices_…
>
> And this one by Tim:
> http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposal:Directed_community_fundraising
>
> The next phase of the strategy planning process, the deep-dive task
> forces, will be an interesting experiment in serious community-driven
> planning work, complemented by the research conducted with the help of
> our partners at The Bridgespan Group. All of this will become part of
> the institutional memory of the Wikimedia movement, and hopefully
> we'll continue to raise the bar in our thinking, planning, and
> collaboration.
>
> - - -
>
> Of course separately from setting priorities, there's the critical
> need to improve our ability to execute upon those priorities. This
> includes the further development of project pipelines, more systematic
> volunteer engagement, additional internal HR support, additional
> hiring of staff to address key capacity gaps, etc. I'm thrilled by how
> far we've come, and to be able to have supported, and continue to
> support, an unprecedented large-scale initiative like the usability
> project. I'm well-aware that there continue to be key priorities that
> we aren't executing as effectively as we could.
>
> The first thing many partners, donors and friends say when they visit
> Wikimedia Foundation is how astonishing it is that an operation of
> this scale can function with so little funding and staff. The truth is
> that by any reasonable measure of efficiency and money-to-impact
> ratio, we're achieving wonderful things together, and that's easy to
> forget when looking at issues in isolation. (Yes, it would be
> wonderful to have the full-history dumps running ASAP. Hm, it would be
> nice to have the full-history dumps for some other top 50 content
> websites. Oh, right, they don't provide any.)
>
> But I don't measure our success compared to other organizations. The
> most important question to me is whether we are continually raising
> the bar in what we're doing and how we do it. The most recent
> Wikimania was the most thoughtful and self-aware one I've ever
> attended, with deep, constructive conversations and very serious
> efforts of everyone involved to re-ignite and strengthen our movement.
> There are elements of groupthink, but also very systematic attempts to
> break out of it.
>
> There are great opportunities today for anyone to become engaged in
> helping to shape the future of what we do, and to accomplish real
> change in the world as a result. Ultimately we all have to make a
> choice how we spend our time -- how we spend our lives -- but I hope
> we're creating a legacy that will fill us with pride and joy, and
> inspire others to do the same.
> --
> Erik Möller
> Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
I'm encouraged by taking the positives out of the earlier discussion
and moving forwards.
I have a specific question regarding the CTO role which has been
floating around not yet completely defined. Brion announced the
impending opening a while ago now and the formal definition of the job
role (and possibly title, I suggest it's more of a CIO role than CTO
per se) was to follow.
As operational technical concerns are a credibly large part of the
overall concerns people have about strategy and execution, can you
tell us if there's a defined timeline on the new CTOish role being
formalized, announced, etc?
Thanks.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com
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Hash: SHA1
Hello,
I wanted to let folks know that WMF is decommissioning some 35 servers,
and is willing to accept requests from users interested in using them
for Wikimedia-related purposes. If you can ship a server from Tampa to
where you are, and if you can put it to good use, please see
http://tinyurl.com/r3xhp7 and send your request in.
Many thanks to the tech team (in particular RobH - looks like he's
handling most or all of this) for reaching out to community members
first. I'm sure we can find happy homes for lots of this hardware, which
will help community members be productive in helping achieve Wikimedia's
mission.
- -Mike
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Fellow Wikimedians--
In July of 2008, the WMF fundraising team was hired and established with
a planned team of four: Head of Major Gifts (Rebecca Handler), Head of
Partnerships and Foundation Relations (Sara Crouse), Head of Community
Giving (Rand Montoya), and a Development Associate (Anya Shyrokova,
hired in October 2008).
We have successfully grown our fundraising infrastructure and process
over the last year and we've certainly seen some very nice results (last
year's Annual Fundraiser, Omidiyar Network, Ford, Stanton, and other
large grants, several large individual major gifts).
As we move towards the next fundraiser and even bigger goals, we are
extending our capacity and reach by creating the new position of
Stewardship Associate (job duties below). The fundraising team feels
that there is tremendous opportunity for growth within the $500 to
$10,000 gift range and we have seen the need for more cultivation of
those gifts. This hire was approved by the Board and is reflected in the
2009-10 Annual Plan
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2009-2010_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Ans…).
After crafting the job description for the Stewardship Associate, we
realized that we already had the ideal candidate in-house: Anya
Shyrokova. Over the last year, Anya has been an integral part of our
fundraising team dealing with all sorts of donor requests, gift entry,
and database needs. Even more so, words from Rebecca Handler: "Anya has
become a master donor cultivator during her time here. She is a
wonderful ambassador for the Wikimedia Foundation in the way that she is
open to new ideas, respectful of others, and can communicate our vision
to a diverse group of donors. I am extremely proud to work with her."
With that, I am pleased to announce that Anya Shyrokova has been
promoted to the new position of Stewardship Associate effective October
1, 2009. This is especially poignant because we are such a small
organization there are few opportunities for advancement; that Anya's
growth and this position meshed nicely in fitting the need with a solution.
We are in the process of hiring a new Development Associate
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Development_Associate)
to replace Anya. We encourage all interested and qualified parties to
apply.
Congratulations Anya!
-Rand
Brief Job Overview of Stewardship Associate
* Assist in stewardship of current $500 to $10K donors
* Research and test cultivation techniques to find the best approach to
engage our Middle Donors
* Work with Head of Community Giving and Head of Major Gifts to create,
design, and run stewardship and cultivation events for Middle Donors
* Work with Public Relations and Project staff to develop media for
distribution to Middle Donor
* Work with Development Associate to develop proper processes for
organizing Middle Donor information in our donor database, CiviCRM
* Assist in finding and training of Volunteer Solicitors
* Perform Major Gift Prospecting/Research as needed
* Basic donation entry, gift processing, and thank-you letter writing as
needed
* Assist with day to day donor relations, recurring donor management, &
other fundraising tasks as required
* Support general data integrity in CiviCRM
--
Rand Montoya
Head of Community Giving
Wikimedia Foundation
www.wikimedia.org
Email: rand(a)wikimedia.org
Phone: 415.839.6885 x615
Fax: 415.882.0495
Cell: 510.685.7030
“At some future time, I hope to have something witty,
intelligent, or funny in this space.”
Dear list,
List summary service for August is done. Whew! Busy month. Sorry I
didn't manage to do a biweekly edition last month.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2009_August_1-31
Now to start on September :)
And a questions: I've gotten a couple requests for an RSS version of
the LSS updates. What would the most useful way to do this be?
I haven't added gmane links to this month yet, but will do so, and
will try for more regular updates as well. What would the most useful
updating frequency be?
let me know what you think of the LSS,
-- phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *