Dear all,
I am happy to announce that the the WMF Board of Trustees have resolved to
recognize Wikimedia Armenia as the newest Wikimedia chapter:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Recognition_of_Wikimedia_Arm…
This group has already put a lot of effort into promoting Wikipedia and
the other projects in Armenia on their road to recognition and I am really
looking forward to hearing of their future endeavours.
Please give a warm welcome to Wikimedia Armenia!
Best regards,
Bence
(Affiliations Committee)
Hi all,
I think this event is of interest of the Wikimedia movement, since it
englobes open knowledge in a broad sense
http://okcon.org/
It would be nice to see Wikimedia and OKFN local chapters
collaborating for this event.
Tom
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christian Villum <christian.villum(a)okfn.org>
Date: 2013/3/21
Subject: [OKFN-Local-Coord] OKCon is live!
To: Open Knowledge Foundation Local Coordinators Mailing List
<okfn-local-coord(a)lists.okfn.org>
Cc: local <local(a)okfn.org>
In case you haven't heard it through the Internet tubes today:
http://blog.okfn.org/2013/03/21/announcing-the-open-knowledge-conference-20…
Please tweet / blog / shout / smoke-signal like your life depends on it :)
We really hope to see many of you there! (there will be a bursary
program, more info later).
-Christian
--
Christian Villum | @villum
Community manager, Open Government Data (OGD)
Community manager, Local Groups network (LG)
Open Knowledge Foundation | @okfn
Building the digital commons - support our work: okfn.org/support
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--
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
OKFN Brasil - Rede pelo Conhecimento Livre
http://br.okfn.org
Hello Wikimedia community members,
This is not an easy e-mail to write, and it’s been a very hard
decision to make. But I’m writing to tell you that I’m planning to
leave my position as the Executive Director of the Wikimedia
Foundation.
My departure isn’t imminent -- the Board and I anticipate it’ll take
at least six months to recruit my successor, and I’ll be fully engaged
as Executive Director all through the recruitment process and until we
have a new person in place. We’re expecting that’ll take about six
months or so, and so this note is not goodbye -- not yet.
Making the decision to leave hasn’t been easy, but it comes down to two things.
First, the movement and the Wikimedia Foundation are in a strong place
now. When I joined, the Foundation was tiny and not yet able to
reliably support the projects. Today it's healthy, thriving, and a
competent partner to the global network of Wikimedia volunteers. If
that wasn’t the case, I wouldn’t feel okay to leave. In that sense, my
leaving is a vote of confidence in our Board and executive team and
staff --- I know they will ably steer the Foundation through the years
ahead, and I’m confident the Board will appoint a strong successor to
me.
And I feel that although we’re in good shape, with a promising future,
the same isn’t true for the internet itself. (This is thing number
two.) Increasingly, I’m finding myself uncomfortable about how the
internet’s developing, who’s influencing its development, and who is
not. Last year we at Wikimedia raised an alarm about SOPA/PIPA, and
now CISPA is back. Wikipedia has experienced censorship at the hands
of industry groups and governments, and we’re --increasingly, I
think-- seeing important decisions made by unaccountable
non-transparent corporate players, a shift from the open web to mobile
walled gardens, and a shift from the production-based internet to one
that’s consumption-based. There are many organizations and individuals
advocating for the public interest online -- what’s good for ordinary
people -- but other interests are more numerous and powerful than they
are. I want that to change. And that’s what I want to do next.
I’ve always aimed to make the biggest contribution I can to the
general public good. Today, this is pulling me towards a new and
different role, one very much aligned with Wikimedia values and
informed by my experiences here, and with the purpose of amplifying
the voices of people advocating for the free and open internet. I
don’t know exactly what this will look like -- I might write a book,
or start a non-profit, or work in partnership with something that
already exists. Either way, I feel strongly that this is what I need
to do.
I feel an increasing sense of urgency around this. That said, I also
feel a strong sense of responsibility (and love!) for the Wikimedia
movement, and so I’ve agreed with the Board that I’ll stay on as
Executive Director until we have my successor in place. That’ll take
some time -- likely, at least six months.
Until then, nothing changes. The Wikimedia Foundation has lots of work
to do, and you can expect me to focus fully on it until we have a new
Executive Director in place.
I have many people to thank, but I’m not going to do it now --
there’ll be time for that later. For now, I’ll just say I love working
with you all, I’m proud of everything the Wikimedia movement is
accomplishing, and I’m looking forward to our next six months
together.
Jan-Bart’s going to write a note in a couple of minutes with
information about the transition process. We’ll be hosting office
hours this weekend as well, so anybody with questions can ask them
here or turn up to talk with us on IRC.
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!
https://donate.wikimedia.org/
_______________________________________________
Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
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Hi,
thanks for sharing the IdeaLab portal. [1] I didn't know it, although
I knew portals and individual inside him, like the Individual
Engagement Grants. I don't have time now to make longer comments, but
two questions:
1) Is there a possibility for thie committee to be more open, like the
WMF grants program? [2]
2) Isn't time for we think out of the box, I mean, out of the wiki and
try technologies that can foster the community evaluation of
projetcs/idea and discussions? I know the question is too general, but
recently, for isntance, I thought about using a reddit like system for
the Portuguese Wikipedia village pump for the community distringuish
try to distinguish what is good or not. I mentioned something like All
Our Ideas once <http://www.allourideas.org/>, but I think there are
other things worth trying, if possible.
P. S. Just look the discussion system inside a wiki. Damn.
Tom
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Index
On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 1:30 PM, Jessie Wild <jwild(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Any initial thoughts on how to maximize the effectiveness of those two
> ideas (IdeaLab and Learning Portal)?
--
Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful
than a life spent doing nothing."
> Message: 5
> Date: Sun, 24 Mar 2013 15:57:44 -0300
> From: Everton Zanella Alvarenga <tom(a)wikimedia.org>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Cc: "gyoung(a)wikimedia.org" <gyoung(a)wikimedia.org>, Nitika Tandon
> <nitika(a)cis-india.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Office hour inside out (program evaluation)
> Message-ID:
> <CAEXLhE9T3ci=
> iFnwN1h313530MpJKqcYg0HeZGriVDr+1Vv9RA(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi, Pine.
>
> On Sun, Mar 24, 2013 at 3:41 PM, ENWP Pine <deyntestiss(a)hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Tom, I'm glad that you studied the IEP.
>
> I did this in the beginning mainly through Jessie Wild's support, who
> always kept articulating the SF staff for improve the education group
> learnings, and Nitika Tandon, now at CIS - a pity I barely talk to Nitika
> since a long time ago, although I have called her independently to learn
> more once.
>
> Although I have studied, we should have had more time for that. And I
> believe now with the learning team this will be improved at WMF. I'll share
> here also some thoughts I sent to my colleagues at the former global
> develoment efforts mainling list...
>
> "I discovered some time ago an organization with interesting ideas
> regarding failures, Admiting Failure <http://www.admittingfailure.com/>.
> They say in the main page
>
> "We have a conundrum. It is really hard to talk about failure. Admitting
> Failure is here to help. This is a community and a resource, created to
> establish new levels of transparency, collaboration and innovation within
> civil society.
>
> Fear, embarrassment, and intolerance of failure drives our learning
> underground. No more. Failure is strength. The most effective and
> innovative organizations are those that are willing to speak openly about
> their failures. Because the only truly "bad" failure is one that's
> repeated."
>
> Pretty interesting. :)
>
> Also, I discovered an interesting article of professor Daniel Dennett these
> days, which I would like also to recommend, How to make
> mistakes<http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/howmista.htm>,
> where I quote
>
> "The main difference between science and stage magic is that in science you
> make your mistakes in public. You show them off, so that everybody can
> learn from them--not just yourself. This way, you get the benefit of
> everybody else's experience, and not just your own idiosyncratic path
> through the space of mistakes. This, by the way, is what makes us so much
> smarter than every other species. It is not so much that our brains are
> bigger or more powerful, but that we share the benefits that our individual
> brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.
>
> The secret is knowing when and how to make mistakes, so that nobody gets
> hurt and everybody can learn from the experience. It is amazing to me how
> many really smart people don't understand this. I know distinguished
> researchers who will go to preposterous lengths to avoid having to
> acknowledge that they were wrong about something--even something quite
> trivial. What they have never noticed, apparently, is that the earth does
> not swallow people up when they say, "Oops, you're right. I guess I made a
> mistake." You will find that people love pointing out your mistakes. If
> they are generous-spirited, they will appreciate you more for giving them
> the opportunity to help, and acknowledging it when they succeed, and if
> they are mean-spirited they will enjoy showing you up. Either way, you--and
> we all--win."
>
> Which reminded me a TED talk of Igor Nikolic on Complex Adaptive
> Systems<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS0zj_dYeBE> I
> saw sometime ago, where he says
>
> "What we really do is make mistakes all the time. The question is, how can
> we make mistakes in such a way we can recover from them? How do we do
> social experiments? [...] How do we do without making a big mess? How do we
> try different things in a environment without distroying it? And how do we
> learn from things that went wrong? That is something that we really have to
> address.
>
> We have to grow. What do I mean by that? It has to be a step-by-step thing
> evolving, adapting, learning. You cannot jump in the future. [...] And
> maybe most importantly, we have to do it together.""
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Tom
>
> --
> Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom)
> "A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful
> than a life spent doing nothing."
>
>
> -----------------------------
>
If we try out a new initiative and it turns out not to work we should not
regard that trial as a mistake. Rather as something we have tested and
found not to work. Our focus should be on what we should learn from such
experiments, not who we should blame and fire. One of the downsides of a
hire and fire culture is that people who are running a failing project have
a vested interest in keeping it going until they can move on to something
else. It is much healthier if such people have the attitude that ending a
failing project as soon as it is clearly failed is a positive thing to do.
More importantly a culture of willingness to end experiments that have
failed would have seen both the IEP and the AFT killed far more quickly
with far less waste and angst in the process.
One of the things that the IEP and the AFT had in common was that they
required a lot of support from the existing editor community, and they were
seen by some as disrespectful to the existing community because of their
substantial cost in editor time. (Disclosure, I was one of the early
critics of the AFT, but IEP I largely ignored until February 2012 when I
made a number of proposals in edits on Meta, for example
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=IEP%2FMeasure_of_success&diff=3…
but I found that no-one else was editing the IEP pages there). Another
thing they had in common was that they were top down initiatives in a
community that works better with approaches that stem from the community
and start by seeing consensus.
If we truly want to learn from these two, I would suggest running an
election on meta where editors can lobby for the next initiative. This is
what I'd hoed that the Strategy wiki would foster, and it might have done
if the Strategy debate had been on Meta rather than hidden on a separate
wiki made more complex by liquid threads. Maybe the result would be Global
watchlists, maybe it would be software changes to resolve more edit
conflicts without losing edits (both currently languishing as low
priorities in Bugzilla). The important thing is that the resulting
initiative would be likely to make a positive difference to the project and
unlikely to share the fate of liquid threads, the IEP or the AFT.
WSC
Hi WSC,
I agree with you on several points, although I think I am more
supportive of holding project supervisors accountable for problems.
I hope that WMF is paying attention to this conversation. I'll be very
interested in hearing what Gayle has to say. After hearing from Gayle,
I may have some questions for Frank.
Cheers,
Pine
--
If we try out a new initiative and it turns out not to work we should not
regard that trial as a mistake. Rather as something we have tested and
found not to work. Our focus should be on what we should learn from such
experiments, not who we should blame and fire. One of the downsides of a
hire and fire culture is that people who are running a failing project have
a vested interest in keeping it going until they can move on to something
else. It is much healthier if such people have the attitude that ending a
failing project as soon as it is clearly failed is a positive thing to do.
More importantly a culture of willingness to end experiments that have
failed would have seen both the IEP and the AFT killed far more quickly
with far less waste and angst in the process.
One of the things that the IEP and the AFT had in common was that they
required a lot of support from the existing editor community, and they were
seen by some as disrespectful to the existing community because of their
substantial cost in editor time. (Disclosure, I was one of the early
critics of the AFT, but IEP I largely ignored until February 2012 when I
made a number of proposals in edits on Meta, for example
http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=IEP%2FMeasure_of_success&diff=3…
but I found that no-one else was editing the IEP pages there). Another
thing they had in common was that they were top down initiatives in a
community that works better with approaches that stem from the community
and start by seeing consensus.
If we truly want to learn from these two, I would suggest running an
election on meta where editors can lobby for the next initiative. This is
what I'd hoed that the Strategy wiki would foster, and it might have done
if the Strategy debate had been on Meta rather than hidden on a separate
wiki made more complex by liquid threads. Maybe the result would be Global
watchlists, maybe it would be software changes to resolve more edit
conflicts without losing edits (both currently languishing as low
priorities in Bugzilla). The important thing is that the resulting
initiative would be likely to make a positive difference to the project and
unlikely to share the fate of liquid threads, the IEP or the AFT.
WSC
Hello!
Some of you may already know me, but I thought it would be good to send out
a message to this list to let everyone know that I'm a new member of staff
at Wikimedia UK working on Education matters.
A blog post announcing this can be seen here:
http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2013/03/toni-sant-joins-wikimedia-uk-as-educat…
Best regards...
...Toni
--
Dr Toni Sant - Education Organiser, Wikimedia UK
toni.sant(a)wikimedia.org.uk +44 (0)7885 980 536
--
Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and
Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered
Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT.
United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia
movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who
operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects).
*Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control
over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.*
Congratulations to Markus on becoming the Chair of the WCAC.
The election results is available at
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Elections/201…>,
with an associated detailed Q&A from the candidates on the associated
talk page.
Thank you to all candidates for coming forward and taking part in the
public debate so well.
I look forward to supporting Markus in his role as our Chair, and the
discussions with everyone at the Milan conference next month.
Cheers,
Fae
--
Ashley Van Haeften (Fae) faewik(a)gmail.com
Chapters Association Council <s>Chair</s> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WCA
Guide to email tags: http://j.mp/mfae