Hi everyone,
As is customary, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees met right
before Wikimania and appointed new trustees and elected its officers.
This is a rare occasion as I will not need to write a farewell email. The
two Board members that were finishing their terms, María and Dariusz, were
re-elected after the recent community election. And as of today, James
Heilman has formally rejoined the Board of Trustees.
Today the Board also elected the officer positions. I am pleased to report
that the Board has reiterated its trust in the current officers, and both
María and I will continue serving as Vice Chair and Chair of the Board,
respectively, for another year.
It feels a little weird to write this email as there's not much change from
last year. But I believe that stability and continuity are more than
welcome!
So please, join me in "welcoming" María, Dariusz, and James as trustees of
the Wikimedia Foundation Board.
María Sefidari began contributing to the Wikimedia projects in 2006 and has
since served in several roles across the Wikimedia movement. She was a
founding member of Wikimedia España and Wikimujeres Grupo de Usuarias, and
she also helped create Spanish Wikipedia's LGBT Wikiproject. She has served
on several Foundation governance committees, including the Affiliations and
Individual Engagement Grants committees. María is a professor in the
Digital Communications, Culture and Citizenship Master's degree program of
Rey Juan Carlos University at the MediaLab-Prado in Madrid, Spain. She has
previously served on the Board from August 2013 to July 2015, and most
recently joined the Board once again in January 2016. She has been selected
for a second term which will conclude at Wikimania 2020.
Dariusz Jemielniak has held a variety of roles on Wikimedia projects,
including administrator, bureaucrat, checkuser, steward and ombudsman. He
served as the chair of the Wikimedia community’s Funds Dissemination
Committee for three terms and is the author of “Common knowledge?: An
Ethnography of Wikipedia.” Dariusz is a full professor of Management, the
head of the Center for Research on Organizations and Workplaces, and a
co-founder of the New Research on Digital Societies (NeRDS) group at
Kozminski University. Dariusz has been re-appointed for a second term as a
Trustee after first joining the Board in July 2015.
James Heilman, M.D., has helped to found both Wikimedia Canada and
WikiProject Med Foundation. As an emergency physician in Cranbrook, British
Columbia, and a faculty member of emergency medicine at the University of
British Columbia, James is an active member of the medical community on
Wikimedia projects. James has also been involved in establishing
collaborations with several organizations, including Translators Without
Borders and the World Health Organization, to improve Wikimedia’s coverage
of medical content. James previously served on the Board of Trustees from
July to December 2015.
Christophe Henner has been a leader within the Wikimedia community for more
than 12 years. Prior to joining the Foundation Board in 2016, he served as
Board Chair of Wikimedia France, and had been a member of the chapter’s
Board since 2007. During this time, he spent nearly three years in Vice
Chair and Chair positions. Christophe is currently the Chief Operating
Officer (COO) of the Blade Group, a cloud computing company headquartered
in France. At Blade, Christophe is scaling up operations to support the
company's transition from a start-up to a global company.