Dear Wikimedians,
Sharing this from our internal WMF list for your visibility...
I'd like to introduce Jamie Villagomez, our incoming Chief Financial
Officer. He brings more than 20 years of experience leading finance in
small startups and large companies, and supporting non-profits as a
volunteer and an advisor. Jaime will be joining us February 1st, overseeing
our Finance, Administration, and OIT teams.
Most recently, Jaime served as CFO at two startups: AnyCOMM, a smart cities
startup, and Karum Group, which focused on extending credit services to
underserved, unbanked communities in Mexico. Before then he was Vice
President of Finance at Advent Software, QRS, and Northpoint
Communications. He held senior strategy and finance roles at several large
telecommunication companies, including AT&T, Lucent Technologies, and
Pacific Bell, often acting as an ambassador to local communities they
served.
Jaime is a first generation San Franciscan. He speaks fluent Spanish, and
has strong connections to his extended family in Latin America. Jaime holds
a deep appreciation for diversity, the importance of learning environments,
and the urgency of advancing the lives of those in need. He is committed to
bringing his experience to these issues through support for local community
organizations and non-profits, including the Salvation Army, the San
Francisco Conservation Corps, the San Francisco Hispanic Chamber of
Commerce, and Arriba Juntos, a San Francisco-based educational and
vocational training organization.
Jaime’s work gives him an important perspective on our current needs and
future opportunities. He has experience in small companies and large global
organizations, has planned and budgeted for major technology and
programmatic work, has led and developed strong finance and operating
teams, and mentored non-profits with a focus on integrity, accountability,
authenticity, and trust. He is a great fit for our values and needs.
Jaime has a BS in electrical engineering from Stanford University and an
MBA from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He lives with his
wife and their two children in Walnut Creek. He loves to spend time with
family and friends, travel to Latin America, and support the adventures and
passions of his children.
I would like to thank everyone involved in this search, especially Amy
Elder and Boryana , who managed the recruiting process through a new, open
approach. We had more than 200 candidates, interviewed 34 people, and
followed up with six finalists. Everyone who spoke with Jaime throughout
the process gave unanimously positive feedback (a combination of staff,
executives and board members). Jaime will be reporting directly to me. We
are very excited to have him as a part of the Foundation’s leadership team.
Please join me in welcoming Jaime.
Lila
While we have long discussions on this list about board composition, we
seem to almost ignore the fact that two long time veterans are leaving the
Wikimedia Foundation board, as scheduled. Jan-Bart de Vreede and Stu West
have been around longer than many regular editors nowadays, and I think
there are not many people who can recall the days that the board didn't
have them on it. I have never had the pleasure to serve on the board with
them, but a little thank-you from our community side, would seem in place.
Stu joined the board already in 2008 (filling Michael Davis' seat), and has
been a solid power on the board's audit responsibilities (I believe he
chaired the audit committee for quite a while) and was a force behind the
accountability of movement affiliates. While we often strongly disagreed on
affiliate issues, I appreciate the fact that he always remained
constructive and wanted to think about solutions rather than problems. He
served both as treasurer and vice chair.
Jan-Bart was on the board even longer, since early 2007, and I recall
already working with him through Kennisnet (a Dutch foundation for
education and IT) before that. Jan-Bart is one of those rare people who
went to ALL wikimania conferences, and can be easily recognised there with
his big smile. I can't remember a theme Jan-Bart didn't work on in the past
years (Affiliates, HR, searching a new Executive Director) and he served
the board in many positions, including as chair.
I'm sure that the WMF communications staff and/or board has a nice thankyou
coming up - with a more accurate description of the awesome work they did,
that I now made up from the top of my head. But in the mean time, I'd like
to do it myself: Thank you Jan-Bart and Stu for all the time, energy and
effort that you poured into our movement. I know that not all of us
appreciate this as much as we perhaps should, and sometimes you may even
have perceived us as hostile. I do sincerely hope that you had fun with us
though, and I'm confident that you made a big dent in our impossible
mission of sharing the sum of all knowledge with everyone.
I hope to meet you again soon, at least in Italy at Wikimania, and I hope
to see you around in our movement in many different ways.
Best,
Lodewijk
Recent threads query whether it is or should be a conflict of interest for
a board member to support the appointment of someone who used to work at
the same company, and whether multiple board members have shares or stock
options with a particular company. So I have read the Conflict of interest
policy <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest_policy>,
which from my lay person's reading does not appear to have been breached.
I have taken the opportunity to propose a couple of changes
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_transparency_gap#Confl…>
to that policy. Note I have not first tried to find out how long it is
since a certain new trustee left the same company that an existing trustee
works for, nor have I asked any board member how many Google shares that
they own. But I am making the assumption that no individual member of the
WMF board currently owns 10% or more of Google, so I would be very
surprised if any of them have managed to break the current conflict of
interest policy as I understand it.
To be clear I am not proposing any sort of retrospective change that would
mean a past decision was void because a trustee voted despite having an
interest according to these new rules. Any change to the rules could only
apply to decisions made after the rules were updated.
WereSpielChequers
In the very looong discussion re actions made by the Board, I want to
high-light two comments been made.I see them as good summaries and hope
they can be seen as conclusions and base to look into possible
improvement in processes
Anders
On James removal
2016-01-10 kl. 09:04, by MZMcBride:
* evaluate whether the Wikimedia Foundation bylaws should be changed to
make it more difficult (or easier) to remove a Board of Trustees member;
* strongly urge the Board of Trustees to be more transparent and
communicative, embracing the values that keep our projects running; and
* evaluate the process for filling community-selected Board of Trustees
seats, perhaps changing the seats to be community-elected.
Obligatory reference:<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law>!
On appointment of Arnnon Geshuri
2016-01-09 kl. 22:21, by Pete Forsyth:
(1) The Board did not apparently do basic due diligence in looking into his
background
(2) Mr. Geshuri himself did not highlight the Google firing issue to the
board prior to his appointment.
This is also followed up on
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_transparency_gap re
COI issues
Hoi,
In the last months too much has been said about quality and what others
have to do. This thread is about quality and its aim is not for Wikipedia
to change its way, it will not. It is to discuss lack of quality in
Wikipedia, a proposal that will improve quality but that will not be
accepted by "the community" because it is set in its ways.
In one blogpost [1] I discuss how redlinks can be improved using the
existing data of Wikidata as a start. In my latest blogpost [2] I discuss
Wiki links and how they can be improved by using Wikidata as a base. In the
item of the Spearman Medal, I have improved Wikipedia by 20% by fixing wiki
links, I have added 20% data by adding a few recent winners of the award.
When Wiki links are created, it is expected that they will "just" work. A
link is created, it is blue FINE :). However disambiguation often does not
happen and for whatever reason disambiguation pages do not exist.
Most of the functionality to replace wikilinks with Wikidata based
functionality already exist for a long time. People like Magnus build and
blogged about and I blogged about it.
What does it take for Wikipedians to consider their own issues in stead of
finding fault elsewhere ?
Thanks,
GerardM
[1]
http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2016/01/wikipedia-lowest-hanging-fruit-f…
[2] http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.nl/2016/01/wikipedia-20-error-rate.html
Dear all,
right now, we know very little about the removal of James. It is hard
for anyone not involved (which is the vast majority of this community)
to come up with any safe conclusions, because there is a lack of
evidence. This opens up the possibility of speculation. I would prefer
the stating of facts instead of speculation, but since that's not
happening, I think speculation might be a way to incentivize more
insiders to come forward with facts, if only to refute the content of
speculation.
I am going to attempt to do this in a neutral fashion, and I will also
follow another important tradition in the movement, assume good faith. I
do not subscribe to conspiracy theories that allege a secret plan by
Google or intentions of harming Wikipedia on anyone's part.
Here's what I think might have happened:
James, a longstanding community member, is accustomed to how we do
things on Wikipedia -- with transparency, an open discourse, but also
endless discussions on talk pages. Other members of the board have less
of a "Wikipedian" background, and are more accustomed to how things work
in companies: board meetings in secret, focus on being effective at the
cost of transparency, with a frank tone on the inside, and a diplomatic
and collective voice to the outside.
These very different conceptions clash, for instance when it comes to
the plans of a "Wikipedia knowledge engine": some prefer early community
involvement and plead openness, others, perhaps scared of the harsh
criticism of early announced and unfinished products by the community,
wish to wait with giving out more information. James is frustrated and
tries to push other board members towards more transparency, which in
turn makes them wary of him and they mutually develop distrust.
The pivotal part of the story then is the question of WMF leadership,
and the fact that there is a lot of discontent among WMF staff with
senior leadership, as indicated by an employee engagement survey. James,
being used to transparent discussions, pushes for a thorough and open
review, and talks to staff members to gain more information. The other
board members, perhaps somewhat in panic, think he will initiate a
public discussion about replacing senior leadership and (perhaps
inadvertently) will cause a major disruption to the entire foundation,
so they decide to call a halt before it's too late and remove him from
the board.
This is what, given the information publicly available, is in my opinion
at least one likely explanation of what happened. Please take it with a
grain of salt, it /is/ speculation. I intend this to undergo the process
of falsification and encourage anyone involved to call me out on what
they perceive is incorrect.
Tobias
Austin Hair wrote:
>On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 5:21 PM, Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello everyone, I would like to put out a friendly reminder that good
>> practice is to keep threads on topic within reason, and to create new
>> discussion threads for distinct tangents or complete spin off
>> discussions.
>>
>> "Community Tech Team" and "Lila's performance" are interesting, and to
>> be fair they deserve their own threads. If your email to this thread
>> does not mention the appointment of Arnnon Geshuri as a new WMF
>> trustee (see thread title), it is worth considering which thread it
>> ought to be posted under, or whether it is time to create a new
>> subject line.
>
>Not exactly coming from the source I would expect, but indeed, please
>keep your comments germane to subject line. (Starting new threads is
>entirely appropriate, and welcomed.)
Unexpected, eh? I'm not sure it's very surprising that the person who
started the thread doesn't want to see it derailed by tangents. And that's
fair. Though it can be difficult to know when to start a new thread. Plus
you have to create a new subject line (naming is hard) and there are no
do-overs (you can't move a thread like you can a wiki page). In an ideal
world, subject lines would always match the body content and I guess we
can strive for that.
I'm amused that neither of you seemed to follow your own advice here,
starting and continuing a tangential (meta-)discussion without changing
the subject line to create a new thread. We'll all strive indeed. :-)
MZMcBride
Reminder:
Scholarship applications for Wikimania 2016 which is being held in Esino
Lario, Italy on June 22–27, 2016 are now being accepted. Applications are
open until Saturday, January 09 2016 23:59 UTC. Applicants will be able to
apply for a partial or full scholarship. A full scholarship will cover the
cost of an individual's round-trip travel, shared accommodation, and
conference registration fees as arranged by the Wikimedia Foundation. A
partial scholarship will cover conference registration fees and shared
accommodation. Applicants will be rated using a pre-determined selection
process and selection criteria established by the Scholarship Committee and
the Wikimedia Foundation, who will determine which applications are
successful. To learn more about Wikimania 2016 scholarships, please visit:
https://wikimania2016.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships To apply for a
scholarship, fill out the multi-language application form on:
https://scholarships.wikimedia.org/apply It is highly recommended that
applicants review all the material on the Scholarships page and the
associated FAQ ( https://wikimania2016.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scholarships/FAQ
) before submitting an application. If you have any questions, please
contact: wikimania-scholarships at wikimedia.org
<wikimania-scholarships(a)wikimedia.org> or leave a message at:
https://wikimania2016.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Scholarships
--
Ellie Young
Events Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
eyoung(a)wikimedia.org
Hello everyone,
I’m happy to announce that the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has
awarded an exploratory grant of $250,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation’s
Discovery department [1], in order to conduct research and prototyping to
improve how people discover and engage with information on Wikipedia and
Wikimedia projects.
The Discovery team has begun six months of research and prototyping, with
the goal of building better experiences to help people discover knowledge.
You can learn more about the team’s work here
<http://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/23/search-and-discovery-on-wikipedia/>.
Our deliverables include:
- User testing and research on current user flows to understand the
search and discovery experience
- Creation and maintenance of a dashboard of core metrics to use in
product development
- Research on search relevancy and the possibility of integrating open
data sources
- Open discussion with the Wikimedia community of volunteer editors
- Creation of sample prototypes to showcase discovery possibilities
The need to improve our search experience has long been recognized across
the Wikimedia projects. We need better ways to help everyone discover the
most relevant, reliable information on Wikipedia and its sister projects. For
example, while people can search within one project (like Wikipedia or
Wikimedia Commons), they can’t easily search across the different projects.
Some people still receive zero results if they search and do not include
the right words in a search. There are open data sources that have the
potential to improve how people find information, and that should be
explored.
We look forward to discussing these projects with communities and anyone
with an interest. You can collaborate with the Discovery department in the
following ways:
- Subscribe <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery> to
the Discovery team’s public mailing list
- Read about these projects and others at the MediaWiki Discovery
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery> page
- Reach out to the Discovery team on their IRC channel:
#wikimedia-discovery on Freenode <https://freenode.net/>.
A press release and blog post will follow shortly, and more information in
the form of an FAQ has been posted here [2].
Wes Moran, VP of Product
User: WMoran_(WMF)
[1]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery
[2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/KnightFAQ
Hey All
Here is my statement of apology which I sent to my fellow board members Dec
19, 2015 and which has been commented on by a number of them on this list:
To my fellow board members,
After our conversation today it dawned upon me that I have not
communicated well just how much I have learned from this difficult
process. Over the last month I have put a great deal of thought into
what has brought us to where we are today.
First off, I acknowledge a large degree of responsibility for it. My
actions showed inexperience. What I did was out of process. I did not
communicate sufficiently. I ignored some of the advice that I
received.
Still, it seems I have not apologized in a meaningful way I want to
say clearly that I am sorry for my arrogant start as a board member,
and for the disruption it caused.
I need to mention how much I appreciate all the extra effort from
other board members to constructively address the issues we have been
facing. I especially note Guy and Jimmy's efforts with respect to
putting in place extra measures so that the staff can be heard.
While we have disagreed, I have committed to and have supported our
final decision. I have followed the agreed process since our
deliberations. I believe I have constructively contributed to the
fact that the WMF staff has taken the Board’s decision with a measured
degree of acceptance. I have been working hard on getting WMF staff,
as well as other stakeholders on board.
I have seriously considered stepping down; however, I am not one to
give up easily. I do learn from my mistakes. I know that I have great
deal to offer the board and feel a deep sense of responsibility to the
community that elected me.
You do need a Board member you can trust. I would like to ask you to
give me the second chance to prove that I deserve your trust--I intend
to work hard to earn it. Our board made the decision to give Lila a
second chance in the face of staff mistrust. In the long road ahead to
improve our movement, I would like to have the same opportunity to
continue working together with you as well.
Sincerely,
James Heilman
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine
www.opentextbookofmedicine.com