Dear WCA Council Members, dear Wikimedians,
most of you are probably already aware of Ziko's and my resignation as
Deputy Chair and Chair of the WCA Council. I don't want to reiterate the
whole story, as many things have already been said [6][7]. The
discussions that followed when it became clear that WMFR was about to
withdraw made it obvious to both of us that our resources are better
spent elsewhere:
* Support for the WCA within Chapters is very small.
* Chapters withdrew from the WCA long time ago by non-participation.
* The WCA is expected to do big things with no resources.
* It is virtually impossible to get rid of the structural debates.
Still, I firmly believe we need to continue the dialogue. There are some
projects (started by the WCA and others) that are very promising if they
get the attention they deserve. As a consequence, I will focus on
working on Chapter collaboration and the continuation of programmes.
Here's an (incomplete) list:
* Chapters Exchange [1] as a place of coordination for common projects.
* Boards Training [2] as a way of enabling good organisational work.
* Peer reviews [3] for learning from each other.
* Chapters Manual [4] as a sustainable documentation of the way
Wikimedia organisations work.
* Journal on Meta [5] for staying up to date.
Obviously, I need help for this :) So please participate, if you find
these projects useful. I suggest, for coordination, we gather around the
Chapters Exchange page on meta [1] for the time being.
Cheers,
Markus
P.S.: Thanks so much for the many kind words and your personal support.
That was really helpful during the course of these events!
[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Chapters_Exch…
[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Boards_training_workshop_proposal
[3] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Peer_review
[4] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Chapters_Manual
[5] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Journal
[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-08-07/News_a…
[7]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Journal#WCA:_…
--
Markus Glaser
WCA Council Member (WMDE)
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
<wiktionary-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>Hi,
If there is someone in Wikimania interested in participating in the talks
about the future support of Wiktionary in Wikidata, we will having a
discussion about the several proposals.
http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Support_of_Wiktionary_in_Wikidata
Date : Saturday, 10 Aug, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Place: Y520 (block Y, 5th floor)
See you there,
Micru
As an update to the previous wikimedia-l thread from February 2013
(<http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-February/124139.html>),
I'm happy to announce that earlier this week our OTRS installation was
upgraded from version 2.4 to version 3.2.9[1]. With this upgrade, our
team is provided an enhanced and more user-friendly interface, a
better ability to monitor and track long-term trends for statistics
and reports on customer service, and a number of other enhancements.
All of these new features and bug fixes should allow for faster
response times and general increased customer and user satisfaction.
On behalf of the OTRS administrators and the entire volunteer response
team, I'd like to thank all who were involved in this process.
Specifically Jeff Green and other Wikimedia operations staff, Maggie
Dennis and the LCA team, Martin (the inventor of OTRS) and Marcel (an
OTRS developer) for all of the time and assistance that they provided
during this much-needed upgrade. We look forward to continuing to
provide the best customer service[2] possible and being a voice for
the Wikimedia projects.
As always, for more information on Wikimedia OTRS, see Meta[3].
[1] - https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22622
[2] - http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/07/29/wikipedia-acsi-customer-satisfaction/
[3] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OTRS
--
Ryan
User:Rjd0060 // OTRS Admin
Hi guys,
Please be reminded that today is the Wikimedia Asia meeting! All Asian Wikimedians, from Turkey to Japan, Russia to New Zealand, are invited to attend! (Take note that this is not an "East Asia meeting": all Wikimedians on the Asian continent are strongly encouraged to attend.)
Today's meeting will be held at Y521 at 5:30 pm.
More information may be found at http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Asia_meeting.
Regards,
Josh
JAMES JOSHUA G. LIM
Block I1, AB Political Science
Major in Global Politics, Minor in Chinese Studies
Class of 2013, Ateneo de Manila University
Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines
Secretary (2013-2014), Wikimedia Philippines
Member, Ateneo Debate Society
Member, The Assembly
jamesjoshualim(a)yahoo.com | +63 (917) 841-5235
Facebook/Twitter: akiestar | Wikimedia: Sky Harbor
http://akira123323.livejournal.com
Hello,
Please allow me to send you a link to the Journal with my report about the
WCA Council meeting of Thursday.
Kind regards
Ziko
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Journal
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ziko van Dijk
voorzitter / president Wikimedia Nederland
deputy chair Wikimedia Chapters Association Council
Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland
Postbus 167
3500 AD Utrecht
http://wikimedia.nl
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(This press release is also available online:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/WMF_Board_Election_Augu…
)
Wikimedia Foundation announces 2013-14 Board of Trustees and elected
officers at Wikimania in Hong Kong
Hong Kong -- August 8, 2013 -- The Wikimedia Foundation today announced
recent additions and elected officers for the 2013-14 Board of Trustees.
Every year at Wikimania, the annual gathering of Wikimedia contributors
from around the world, the Wikimedia Foundation Board appoints its officers
for the coming year. This year's appointments were announced in Hong Kong,
where more than 1000 conference attendees came from nearly 90 countries.
This year, Jan-Bart de Vreede was appointed Chair of the Board and Phoebe
Ayers was appointed Vice Chair. De Vreede works at Kennisnet, the Dutch
public educational organization that supports primary, secondary and
vocational institutions in the effective use of IT in education.
"I am honored to have been chosen to chair the Board in the coming year"
said de Vreede. "I want to thank Kat Walsh for her service on the Board and
for the year she served as Chair during a critical stage of the
organization's development. We look forward to hearing her wise voice as
she continues to engage with our projects, community and mission."
"This is an exciting year and I look forward to using my energy to ensure a
successful transition of our Executive Director and to helping our newer
board members to be able to contribute in the best possible ways to our
mission," de Vreede said. "The next twelve months promise to be significant
for the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia movement and I'm excited to
have the opportunity to lead the Board."
There are 10 seats on the Wikimedia Foundation Board and according to its
bylaws, three members are elected by the Wikimedia community, two are
selected by the Wikimedia chapters, the Founder seat is held by Jimmy
Wales, and four members are appointed by the Board itself to provide
additional, specific expertise.
The Board expressed its great thanks to former Board Chair Kat Walsh.
Walsh, a long-term participant in the Wikimedia projects, has been a member
of the Wikimedia Foundation Board since June 2007. Her leadership has
strengthened and nurtured the growth of the worldwide Wikimedia movement.
"It's been a pleasure to serve on the Wikimedia Board for nearly 7 years
and as Chair over the past 12 months," said Kat Walsh. "During my time as
Chair, the Wikimedia Foundation has worked with the global Wikimedia
community to introduce the simplified editing interface, VisualEditor, and
to support the growth of the Wikipedia Zero program to give free access to
our sites on mobile, helping us reach our goals of increased reach and
participation worldwide. We've also begun an innovative, volunteer-led
grantmaking program to ensure sustainability for our movement and our
projects. Our Board has diversified and strengthened over the past years,
reflecting the diversity and strength of our community and enabling our
colleagues to accomplish remarkable things; I am proud of what we have been
able to do."
The Wikimedia Foundation is happy to welcome its newest member of the
Board, Maria Sefidari, a Computer Science Ph.D candidate at Universidad Rey
Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain. She has been an active Wikimedian since
March, 2006 and is a founding member and former Vice President of Wikimedia
Espana, the Wikimedia chapter in the country. She has served as a member of
the Affiliations Committee and the Individual Engagement Grants committee.
She lives and works in Madrid, Spain.
The Wikimedia Foundation is also happy to welcome Phoebe Ayers and Samuel
Klein back to the Board as the other two members elected by the volunteer
Wikimedia community. Ayers is a reference, instruction and collections
librarian at the University of California, Davis, specializing in computer
science, physics and engineering information resources. Klein is a
long-time Wikipedian and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and
Society at Harvard University.
Every two years the worldwide contributor community elects Board members
from among its peers to participate on the Board and help steer the
Wikimedia Foundation as it fulfills its mission to "empower and engage
people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a
free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and
globally."
In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Wikimedia Foundation
provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for
the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other
endeavors that serve the mission. The Wikimedia Foundation will make and
keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of
charge, in perpetuity.
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees for 2013-2014:
*Jan-Bart de Vreede, Board Chair
*Phoebe Ayers, Vice Chair
*Jimmy Wales, Founder
*Maria Sefidari
*Samuel Klein
*Alice Wiegand
*Patricio Lorente
*Bishakha Datta
*Ana Toni
*Stu West
About Wikimania
http://wikimania.org
Wikimania 2013 is being held in Hong Kong, where more than 1000 Wikipedia
contributors, Wikimedia advocates, researchers and educators from roughly
90 countries are in attendance. The previous Wikimanias were held in
Frankfurt, Germany (2005), Cambridge, USA (2006), Taipei, Taiwan (2007),
Alexandria, Egypt (2008), Buenos Aires, Argentina (2009), Gdańsk, Poland
(2010), Haifa, Israel (2011), and Washington DC (2012).
About the Wikimedia Foundation
http://wikimediafoundation.orghttp://blog.wikimedia.org
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix,
Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation
receive 500 million unique visitors per month, making them the fifth-most
popular web property world-wide (comScore, June 2013). Available in 285
languages, Wikipedia contains more than 28 million articles contributed by
a global volunteer community of roughly 80,000 people. Based in San
Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3)
charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.
Press contact
Jay Walsh
Senior Director, Communications
Wikimedia Foundation
Tel. +1 415-860-8166
jwalsh(a)wikimedia.org
(To be unsubscribed from the Wikimedia Foundation press release list, reply
to this email with "unsubscribe" in the subject line)
_______________________________________________
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
_______________________________________________
WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list
WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
Dear friends and colleagues,
This message is to announce that the names of the Wikimedia Foundation’s
grants programs are being changed to better reflect the purpose and
function they serve, while the names of the volunteer-driven committees
that serve these programs remain unchanged. We hope this will help any
current and future applicants to these programs understand their purpose
better at a glance, while keeping the continuity of names (a.k.a beloved
acronyms!) that our movement is already familiar with. :-)
Last year was a significant year for Grantmaking at the Wikimedia
Foundation, particularly through our narrowing focus exercise, in which we
emphasised that the Foundation will support the growth and development of
Wikimedia communities through the main platforms of technology and grants.
We moved from being a small team primarily led by Asaf and supported by
Winifred, to being a stand-alone department at the end of the year. The
Funds Dissemination Committee and the Individual Engagement Grants were
launched, with dedication and commitment from every community member
involved.
Now that we’ve moved into the new fiscal year of 2013-14, one of the
Grantmaking department’s efforts this year will be to improve the structure
and design of our grants programs so that they're effective in supporting
different constituencies and needs of our movement. This is the focus of
the first quarter of the year for our team, including developing much
clearer communication and guidelines for good proposals and reporting,
criteria for assessment of the proposals, and building out a back-end
grantsmanagement platform. We will be keeping you posted on this, and
welcome
your comments and suggestions for improvements.
In the meantime, part of our effort is to be clearer about what our
grantsprograms are *for*, so that their functions are pretty apparent
at first
glance.[1]
1. Annual Plan Grants/Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC): The grants or
funding that the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) allocates will be
called Annual Plan Grants, since they are essentially general support
grants for the annual plans of eligible entities. The name of the FDC -
the committee itself - stays unchanged.
2. Project and Event Grants/Grants Advisory Committee (GAC): The name of
the Wikimedia Grants Program (which made sense when it was the only
grants program
we had) is being modified to Project and Event Grants, which reflects the
purpose for which they now exist. Again, the GAC - as the advisory
committee - remains unchanged in name.
To be clear: chapters and other groups that have projects and programs that
need support for up to a year - including project management support (for
e.g. part time staff or administrative costs like payments to an accounting
firm) - can continue to apply for project grants under this program. In
fact, they may be consolidated such that these grants essentially support
most of an organisation or group's programmatic work. While some Wikimedia
entities may choose to apply to the FDC because they want full time support
for substantial operating and programmatic costs, others may wish to opt
for the agility of project grants that are simpler to apply and report for,
and can be accessed any time of the year.
3. Individual Engagement Grants/Individual Engagement Grants committee
(IEGcommittee):
This name will stay unchanged, as does the name of the IEG committee. The
program is meant to support individual Wikimedia contributors or small
teams, to lead projects with online impact. Over this next year, the
Grantmaking team would like to see more resources going to the core of our
contributing community as effectively as possible.
4. Travel and Participation Support: This program name changes to Travel
and Participation Support, from simply Participation Support, to make clear
that these grants are for travel related to active participation in
non-Wikimedia events. We are thinking about the purpose of this program
more closely, so that we can deepen its impact, and will be working on this
with our team (and our partners like WMDE and WMCH) over the next few
months.
In addition, we are moving our Brazil catalyst program into a ‘Partnership
Grant’ model as we did with India last year. I will be sharing more details
on this in the next few weeks, but essentially, Partnership Grants will be
with significant allied organisations - particularly in the Global South -
who support our communities in expanding reach and participation. These
grant proposals will go through substantial on wiki review by the local
community (for e.g. the Brazilian PT community), and then a short review by
the global Wikimedia community. After this, the proposal will be approved
(or not) by the Grantmaking team, primarily Asaf Bartov and Anasuya
Sengupta. This model is likely to be used sparingly, and only when the
opportunities offered by an allied organisation are significant to the
growth of a community. We hope that these allies will, after the initial
grants through this model, be familiar enough with our movement to apply
directly for annual plan grants through the FDC or project grants through
the GAC.
In order to move from setting up the appropriate structures for grants to
assessing their impact, we are also consolidating the Grantmaking Learning
and Evaluation team. The team is responsible for designing the grant
reporting processes and assessing the overall impact of grants, analysing
and supporting research on organizational development in our movement, and
monitoring the internal performance indicators of the
Grantmakingdepartment. Led by Jessie Wild (Senior Manager), it
includes Jonathan
Morgan (Learning Strategist) and Haitham Shammaa (Global South Learning
Strategist). Evan Rosen, who used to serve as the Data Analytics Manager,
has left the Foundation to pursue his interests in machine learning and
pure research. The Grantmaking Learning and Evaluation team will work in
close partnership with the Program Evaluation and Design team (Frank
Schulenburg, Jaime Anstee, Sarah Stierch), responsible for assessing the
effectiveness and impact of programmatic activities in the Wikimedia
movement, thereby supporting the Grantmaking staff and committees, as well
as program leaders across the movement.
To remind you all, the first Grantmaking Quarterly Review was held in May,
and notes from it offer significant context for our work.[2] In addition,
if you happen to be at Wikimania in Hong Kong this year, please do come
find us at the Grantmaking booth [3] or the Grantmaking lunch [4] or any of
the other events our team will be facilitating and leading. We look forward
to meeting you!
The Wikimedia movement - contributors, organisations, donors and allies -
expects and deserves to have its shared resources be as impactful as
possible. Putting responsive structures and processes in place is a key
step in ensuring that grants are effective in growing our communities and
content. We share in this responsibility together, and I look forward to
our continued conversations on how to do this as well as possible.
Warmly,
Anasuya
[1] For more information on the grants structures and processes:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Start <http://www.fluxx.io/>
[2] The first Grantmaking Quarterly Review notes
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_re…
[3] The Grantmaking booth at Wikimania:
http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grantmaking_booth
[4] The Grantmaking lunch at Wikimania
http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grantmaking_meetup
--
***Anasuya Sengupta
Senior Director of Grantmaking
Wikimedia Foundation*
*
*
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
Support Wikimedia <https://donate.wikimedia.org/>