Copied and pasted from wikimediaannounce-l. --MZMcBride
Hey folks,
I'm delighted to tell you that the Wikimedia Foundation has a new
General Counsel.
Geoff Brigham, formerly of eBay, will start with us March 7 once he's
relocated from Paris to San Francisco. He'll report to me.
To recap: In late October, I hired m|Oppenheim to find us a new
General Counsel. I expected it to be a tough search, because
appropriate GCs for the Wikimedia Foundation don't exactly grow on
trees. As a growing U.S.-based non-profit that operates one of the
world's most popular websites in partnership with a global network of
volunteers, we need a GC who can handle a broad range of legal issues
including the legal defense of our projects in an international
context, an array of matters related to policy and regulatory
compliance, issues such as privacy, and helping us with the challenges
of opening a new office in India. Very few people have that kind of
breadth. And for our GC as with all our jobs, we are also looking for
someone who is passionate about the mission, has a collaborative and
inclusive personal style, is inclined towards transparency, and
ideally is a bit of an iconoclast. It's a lot to ask of one person :-)
So we braced ourselves for a long and difficult search. But in fact it
turned out to be highly enjoyable. Over a period of several months,
m|Oppenheim talked with hundreds of connectors and candidates, and in
the end we interviewed about a dozen finalists. They were terrific,
inspiring lawyers: I was glad to meet them all. And I am delighted
that we discovered Geoff.
Geoff spent eight years at eBay during its main growth years, which
gives him important experience managing the legal challenges and risks
inherent in operating a popular site. His work at eBay encompassed
North America, Europe, Asia and Australia where he handled legal
issues throughout the world. He's worked alone and led large teams. He
is hands-on, collaborative, open-minded and inclusive. And he is
extremely excited about working with us.
A little more about Geoff's background: Most recently, Geoff was
Vice-President and Deputy General Counsel at eBay in San Jose,
California. There, he directed legal affairs in more than 15 countries
throughout North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, encompassing
litigation, copyright and trademarks, privacy, ethics, product and
site content review, policy and regulatory compliance, new market
advice, contracts, governance and site security. Previously he worked
for eBay in Bern, Switzerland for four years as Vice-President &
Senior Director, and in Paris, France for two years as Senior
Compliance and Litigation Counsel.
Prior to joining eBay, Geoff was Assistant United States Attorney in
Miami, Florida. Before that he worked for the U.S. Department of
Justice in Paris and Washington, was an Associate with Finley, Kumble,
Wagner et al. in Washington, and was a law clerk for the Honorable
Howard F. Corcoran, U.S. Judge for the District of Columbia. Geoff
received his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in
Washington DC. He also holds a B.A. in Political Science and French,
from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
He speaks English and French. He's a passionate music fan and an
accomplished flute player: he used to busk many years ago, playing
jazz and classical music on the Parisian streets, and he was well
known at eBay for playing his flute in the office in the early
mornings. Maybe that will happen at the Wikimedia Foundation too :-)
Many thanks to Lisa Grossman of m|Oppenheim for leading this important
search for us. My thanks also to everyone who helped Lisa and me
define the General Counsel role and surface and interview candidates,
including (roughly in order of their involvement) Erik Moeller, Cyn
Skyberg, Kat Walsh, Arne Klempert, Stu West, SJ Klein, Barry Newstead,
Veronique Kessler, Danese Cooper, Zack Exley, Jimmy Wales, Bishakha
Datta, Matt Halprin, Gautam John, Pavel Richter and Shari Steele. My
thanks also to Derrick Coetzee, who happened to be in the office one
day and got pulled into an impromptu conversation helping brief Geoff
about some of the issues facing us. I also want to thank Wikimedia
France for staging its GLAM conference in Paris recently: Geoff
attended it and says that meeting Wikimedians there, and watching them
work, significantly contributed to his desire to join us.
If I remember correctly how this list works, replies to this mail
should go directly to foundation-l. (That's how it's intended to work:
I hope it's actually true.) Geoff is subscribed to foundation-l, so
if you do reply there, he'll see it. He doesn't yet have a Wikimedia
e-mail address, but once he does, you will likely see it turn up on
this and other lists. Please note he's not on the job until March 7:
until then, he's only really available to us socially, not for work.
Please join me in welcoming Geoff to the Wikimedia movement :-)
Thanks,
Sue
Copied and pasted from wikimediaannounce-l. --MZMcBride
I am very pleased to announce that Asaf Bartov has agreed to join the
Wikimedia Foundation as Head of Global South Relationships (pending the
completion of the U.S. visa application process) and Moushira Elamrawy
has agreed to a contract extension to serve as Chapter Relations
Manager. These positions are both part of the Global Development team
and seek to enhance WMF's relationships with and support of chapters and
other groups/individuals in the movement.
We expect Asaf to join WMF in March 2011 and the position will be based
in San Francisco. Asaf is a long-time Wikipedian and Wikimedian. He
began editing Wikipedia in 2001, his home project is the Hebrew
Wikipedia. His first contribution to Hebrew Wikipedia was to initiate
the article on Homer (not the four-fingered guy from Springfield) in
2003. He has been a member of Wikimedia Israel since 2008, and served as
board member and international liaison. Asaf has been making his living
in software, but has always cultivated a wide range of interests in the
humanities -- studying literature and classics, and then teaching
ancient Greek and Latin at Tel Aviv University -- as well as voluntary
activities in the open source and open content worlds. He is the
founding editor of Project Ben-Yehuda, a free 100% volunteer-run
repository of public-domain Hebrew texts. He is also active in
transforming library technology to 21st-century open standards, having
served as consultant at the National Library of Israel, and an invited
expert at the W3C's Library Linked Data Incubator Group (LLD XG).
Asaf's primary role will be to support the growth of the Wikimedia
movement in the Global South with a specific focus on working with
chapters, groups who seek to become chapters and mission-aligned
groups/individuals. He will play an advisory role to support these
groups to advance their work in support of the movement. He will manage
WMF's grants program (globally) with the aim of providing funding for
strategy-aligned initiatives with a strong focus on innovation. Asaf
will work with groups to design effective grants and help create model
grants that groups can readily adapt to their local needs. Finally, Asaf
will help improve our knowledge repository of program and grant
experiences with a priority to create systematic means for evaluating
and learning from each program.
I would also like to announce that WMF has extended the contract of
Moushira Elamrawy, who was serving as Global Campaigns Manager during
the 2010/11 fundraiser, to serve in a Chapter Relations capacity. She
will continue to be based in Alexandria, Egypt. Moushira was introduced
to Wikimedia in April 2007 during filming the footage of "Truth in
Numbers" in Alexandria, Egypt: a few weeks later she was appointed from
Bibliotheca Alexandrina to become the main organizer from the library's
side for Wikimania 2008. Her responsibilities started along with the
bidding process and extended until after the conference was over to
include co-organizing Wikipedia editing sessions, Arabic Wikipedia Day,
and an "Introduction to Free Open Source OS" sessions series. She
continues to help with new initiatives and offline activities concerning
Arabic Wikipedia, including ongoing efforts for creating an Arabic
Wikipedia signpost, organizing events that help attract new users such
as editing and licensee sessions. She recently initiated a cross
collaboration among Arabic users across north Africa, in order to create
a base of user groups across this region. Last fall, Moushira was
engaged by WMF's community department to focus on liaising between the
chapters and WMF during the 2010 fundraising campaign. Moushira has
previously worked for sustainable development projects in desert areas
of Egypt and Morocco focusing on ecological building approaches. She is
a Greenpeace volunteer and retired vegan.
Moushira's role will be to support WMF and chapters in living up to our
responsibilities to each other and to the movement, particularly with
regard to smoothing and systematizing communications mechanisms with the
goal of increased transparency and openness. She will help establish
processes that enable us to meet our commitments to each other and the
movement. She will facilitate the completion of requirements under our
fundraising and chapter agreements relating to revenue sharing,
reporting and accountability. She will support us monitoring progress
against these commitments, designing systems for tracking and creating
simple ways to work together in a manner that achieves mutual
accountability, while keeping the burden on volunteer board members and
other chapter members to a minimum. Moushira will also serve as WMF's
process manager over the next year for key activities such as the
signing of chapter agreements and fundraising agreements, compliance
with agreement requirements and more systematic capture of reports
to/from chapters. Please note that WMF doesn¹t intend this role to be an
oversight function nor do we expect that it¹s our role to remind
chapters of their responsibilities: the role is to both help WMF fulfill
our responsibilities and to help us all improve our processes. This is a
big challenge and she will work collaboratively with chapters to achieve
it.
I am thrilled to add Asaf and Moushira to the WMF Global Development team.
We will jointly host an IRC at the following times to address any
questions or comments that you might have about these roles.
1. Friday, February 11 at 1500 UTC
2. Friday, February 11 at 2200 UTC
________________
FAQ
How did we source candidates for these roles?
The Chapter Development Director position was publicly posted in August
2010, and we interviewed a number of candidates. We had some strong and
interesting candidates, but we did not find anyone who could fulfill the
role as we had initially designed it. Asaf Bartov applied for the
Chapter Development Director and was interviewed by a panel of
interviewers. Moushira Elamrawy did not apply for the position, however
she was fulfilling some functions in the Global Campaigns role that we
saw as needed in our Chapter Development work (items that were listed in
the original job description).
As such, we decided that the best course of action was to split the
initial role into two that would meet our needs and not require a reset
of the entire process. We did a review of the prior candidates to see if
any would be a good alternative to Asaf and Moushira and concluded that
we were comfortable with them as our selection. Please note that
Moushira¹s role is temporary: that¹s because the relationship between
the Wikimedia Foundation and the chapters is actively evolving, and so
we think this role may change significantly over time.
How does the appointment of these two roles change the relationship
between WMF and chapters?
Our hope is that these engagements will improve our relationship by
providing dedicated resources to our chapter interactions. This will
allow WMF to be more responsive and will provide resources to invest
time in creating new solutions to problems that we have dealt with in
the past, but haven't solved effectively.
We also hope that Moushira and Asaf will help to enhance the
effectiveness of chapters by serving as advisors on program work,
helping to make connections between program work in different places and
by creating systems that ease the administrative burden on volunteers,
freeing you to focus more time on program activities.
These engagements do not change the formal relationships between WMF and
chapters. We both will continue to be independently responsible for
meeting our commitments and for solving problems that arise in a timely
and collaborative manner.
Why is Asaf's position focused on the Global South vs. all chapters?
We do not have sufficient resources available to expend our resources
equally in all areas and still achieve impact and so we need to
prioritize. The movement priorities set out during the strategy process
set clear targets for our growth in the Global South and we are aligning
our resources to this priority. We will continue to support grants
across the globe and will engage with all chapters, but Asaf's first
responsibility will be to the work focused on the Global South.
What does WMF plan to do with other groups/individuals in the movement?
We continue to believe in the principle of a decentralized movement and
the importance of supporting good efforts by volunteers regardless of
organizational affiliation. While we expect chapters to play a strong
role in designing and running programs as well as funding
groups/individuals within their geographies to do such work, we also
want to keep the door open for groups or individuals who want to conduct
program work that supports the movement priorities outside of a chapter
structure. In recent months, this has included, for example, funding for
the Wikipedia in Schools program in Kenya and support for GLAM work by a
US-based volunteer, Aude.
Does the appointment of Asaf change WMF's view of grant-making?
We see grant-making as an important process for supporting chapters and
other groups/individuals to achieve movement priorities. The appointment
of Asaf provides us with an opportunity to expand grant-making and make
it more systematic. We believe that many chapters will not be in a
position to generate sustainable funding locally to fund the full array
of programs that may be needed to achieve our goals. Grant-making is an
effective way to fill that gap.
We would like to see our grant-making work evolve to include much more
community participation in helping chapters and other groups/individuals
design good programs, in helping WMF make good decisions and in
evaluating and capturing the learning from grants after they are
implemented. This will be a core initiative for Asaf in his first year.
I¹ve got other questions that aren¹t answered here.
Barry, Asaf and Moushira will host an IRC at the following times to talk
through the roles in more detail.
1. Friday, February 11 at 1500 UTC
2. Friday, February 11 at 2200 UTC
Barry Newstead
Once again, I get the joys of bringing you all fun video streams! Today's
stream(s) comes from the Data Summit [1] at O'Reilly HQ. Unlike my last set
of feeds (WCWC11/WikiX), this one should be basically all presentations and
hopefully a little more interesting (though we don't have a good pull for
the projections, sorry). As usual, the stream only need VLC [2].
The URL for the stream is: http://transcode1.wikimedia.org:8080 - All you
need to do is launch VLC > Media > Open Network Stream.
I give you the standard "there is no warranty". I'm going to (hopefully)
add a second stream later in the day and I'll send out an update when that
happens. If you've got questions/comments - email me directly or message me
on irc.freenode.net/#wikimedia (Username is in my signature)
Thanks-
-Jon
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_summit_2011
[2] http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
--
Jon
[[User:ShakataGaNai]] / KJ6FNQ
http://snowulf.com/http://ipv6wiki.net/
This is the first I've heard about this, as an OTRS volunteer for an English
language non-info-en queue. I do not have the luxury of being subscribed to
the OTRS mailing list, as it's restricted to those with access to the
info-en queue. That subset of OTRS members is not equal to all of them.
Therefore I was not been privy to the aforementioned discussion, which
involves procedures that theoretically would affect me. I do see that there
is discussion of it on the OTRS wiki.
-- Adrignola
Dear Wikipedians,
On December 4, 2010, Sue Gardner, the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation spoke with the audience at TedxDubai. She focused her talk around why Wikipedia works the commitment of the volunteers in the Wikimedia movement and the notion encyclopedias are meant to be radical.
Link: http://vimeo.com/19532861
I hope you enjoy,
James T. Owen
James Owen
Executive Assistant & Board Liaison
Wikimedia Foundation
Office +1.415.839.6885 x 6604
Mobile +1.415.509.5444
Fax +1.415.882.0495
Email- jowen(a)wikimedia.org
Website- www.wikimediafoundation.org
Sorry if you feel that I am repeating myself with trifles not worth to
bother the foundation list, but...
It seems that people have difficulties understanding the meaning of
"distribute unchanged Wikimedia content, including appropriate
attribution" at [[:foundation:Trademark Policy#Things You Can Do, a
Summary]] (1).
So I suggest to add a new paragraph, called [[:foundation:Trademark
Policy#Things You Cannot Do]], with:
* Anything that is not included in [[#Things You Can Do, a Summary]], including:
* Distribute any unfree WMF logo under a free license.
* Create adaptations or derivative works, which combine any unfree
WMF logo with a share-alike-free license, because it violates the
terms of that license : see "You may not offer or impose any terms on
the Adaptation that restrict the terms of the Applicable License" in
article 4-b of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode
.
Besides, I have the feeling, that "distribute unchanged Wikimedia
content, including appropriate attribution" at [[:foundation:Trademark
Policy#Things You Can Do, a Summary]] may require an explanation why
this does not contradict "your website may not copy the exact look and
feel of any Wikimedia website" at [[:foundation:Trademark
Policy#Services Related to Wikimedia Projects]] (2). That apparent
contradiction between "unchanged" and "not copy" would be best solved
by adding the following at [[:foundation:Trademark Policy#Things You
Can Do, a Summary]] or at a new paragraph called
[[:foundation:Trademark Policy#Definitions]] :
*"Wikimedia content" : A) the central part of a collaborative wiki
website page, including text, images and other media files, excluding
the margin with the logo, the footer and any unfree header. B) any
free file available from an internal download link on a File page.
Or we could replace the wording "Wikimedia content" by "Free contents
contributed by or uploaded by Wikimedia users, including bots".
(1) http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Trademark_Policy#Things_You_Can_Do.2C_a…
(2) http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Trademark_Policy#Services_Related_to_Wi…
Hi, folks,
After two months of work, I just release the alpha version of wikiedge.orghttp://www.wikiedge.org/ An online magazine for Chinese Wikipedia
The basic idea of the website is to remix good content from Chinese
Wikipedia into a magazine style.
It is still in early phase, lots of bugs and big room to improve, but the
concept itself was proven.
The goal of the project is promote reachness of Wikipedia in Mainland China.
Though it is not a big project, but I still think it would be helpful.
It is an opensource project hosted at github
https://github.com/mountain/distilled
I invite developers here to join the project, but you'd better understand
Chinese.
If you want to port the idea into other languages, please contact me, and I
can also help you.
Thanks.
Regards,
Mingli (Mountain)
Hi Everyone,
Apart from celebrating 10 years of Wikipedia 2011 is also an election year for the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation.
As you may recall the board has three directly elected representatives on it which serve for two years. Currently those are Mindspillage, SJ and Wing. As in the past years we rely on an effective election committee to coordinate the elections for us. They not only guarantee that the election is overseen by an independent body, but they also make sure that the tremendous amount of work that needs to be done is taken care of. My job is to coordinate the formation of this committee.
This is a call for volunteers to serve on the election committee. If you feel that you can contribute to this committee, please contact me and give a small summary of why you think you would be able to help out with this process. Just to make sure we all understand: you cannot be part of the election committee if you are planning to be a candidate or are planning to support any candidate publicly. Deadline for any extra volunteers is January 22 th 12:00 UTC.
The timeline for the next steps in the process will be published somewhere in February by the election committee. So if you are interested in becoming a candidate, time to start preparing!
Regards
Jan-Bart de Vreede
Wikimedia Board of Trustees
Board Liason Election Committee
PS: Should you want to know more about the role of a board member: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_board_manual
Books, LLC. respond. They say they included Wikipedia URLs on their
pages, but Amazon removed them.
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andrew <andrew(a)booksllc.net>
Date: 1 February 2011 23:29
Subject: BBC "5 Live Investigates"
To: dgerard(a)gmail.com, slimvirgin(a)gmail.com, geniice(a)gmail.com,
thewub.wiki(a)gmail.com
Hi David Gerard,
I totally understand your concern about Wikipedia getting proper
credit on wiki books! And I understand how annoying it is when that
doesn’t happen.
What Charlotte was investigating, as I understand it, was why Amazon
in the UK had dropped the wiki book descriptions we (Books LLC)
provide them with.
Those descriptions credit Wikipedia as the source, include an excerpt
of one of the Wikipedia articles, a URL to read the full article at
Wikipedia, and the titles of other Wikipedia articles in the book
(space permitting). The book itself credits Wikipedia on the
publisher’s page, the introduction and at the end of every article. I
agree with you that readers have a right to that information.
Hopefully, with our continued pleading Amazon UK will provide it.
While Amazon didn’t explained why they dropped the Wikipedia credits,
they did say that they don’t allow URLs in book descriptions. I guess
they don’t want their customers leaving Amazon and going to Wikipedia.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please do let me know. I
will be happy to help in anyway I can.
Kind Regards,
Andrew Williams
Public Relations Manager
Books LLC
BBC "5 Live Investigates" on Books LLC, Sunday night 9pm UTC Remove Highlighting
________________________________________
[.To WMUK-l for local interest, and foundation-l as the issue's been
discussed there at length.]
Just spoke to a researcher, Charlotte something, for BBC 5 Live
Investigates, Sunday 9pm, this item likely to go out 9:45pm or so.
This was just for her research, it wasn't a recorded piece.
The piece is on Books LLC and similar operations, which sell reprints
of Wikipedia articles as books on Amazon. She was after the Wikipedian
viewpoint.
I said that it's entirely legal - that you can use our stuff without
permission, even commercially, and we like that - "Please, use our
stuff!" - you just have to give credit and let other people reuse your
version: "share and share alike."
So the only issue is that it isn't clear enough these books are just
Wikipedia reprints. For us, the annoyance - I said that "annoyance" is
probably the word - is when a Wikipedian finds one of these books,
goes "aha, a source!", buys it and ... discovers it's just reprints of
stuff they have. "While trademark is an issue, we'd like them or
Amazon to make it a *bit* clearer that these texts are Wikipedia
reprints."
She wasn't clear on the business model. I said these are
print-on-demand books, where *no* copies exist until someone orders
one, at which point a single copy is printed and sent. POD is *very
good* these days - you can send a PDF to a machine, and the machine
will produce an *absolutely beautiful* perfect-bound book for you,
which previously would have been quite pricey. This is enough for them
to have a tiny, tiny niche.
I also pointed out that anyone can make their own PDFs of Wikipedia
articles and some of the projects have partnerships with outside
companies to do nice printed books of Wikipedia reprints. But in such
cases, everyone is very clear on what they're getting: a nice printed
physical copy of content they already have for free on the web.
I tried to answer very descriptively, as I can't speak *for* 160,000
people, but there's been enough foundation-l and related discussion to
get an idea of what people think. My apologies if I missed bits, this
was off the top of my head without referring to nuances of discussion
:-)
- d.
_______________________________________________
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foundation-l [at] lists
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
> I agree that the edit restrictions on the WMF wiki are very
> unfortunate and there's still much more that can be done (perhaps one
> day leading toward www.wikimedia.org as a single information,
> collaboration and discussion hub, subsuming both WMF and Meta, and
> possibly other backstage wikis).
>
> --
> Erik Möller
> Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
>
Perhaps have Meta: Strategy:, Outreach: Usability:, Tech:, and Wikimania*:
namespaces to replace the separated sites in existence today. The main
space could cover wikimediafoundation.org content. Wikimedia: for meta-wiki
discussion. Or any variation on that. At the least, there is no need to
keep creating new wikis for Wikimania if you properly tag content for the
year it applies to.
-- Aaron Adrignola