Hey Fæ,
Considering your proposal, on one hand I'm not sure using Wikimedia
resources to create Yet Another Forum for discussion would provide any
benefit to the movement. We're fractured enough as it is. Especially
given that this proposal is to make a more inviting atmosphere for
_all_ participants, not create a smaller (frequency, participation)
space to shunt folks into.
On the other hand if a subset of folks need a release valve, and would
use a more appropriate place to discuss than this (IMHO, the
main/primary movement list), then I'm all for that.
A small aside, while "alt" has a long tradition in meaning
"alternative" like alternative rock, [0] my personal history (as a BBS
user) has established its meaning as "Anarchists, Lunatics, and
Terrorists’.” (that's an old BBS joke, by the way). [1]
Less of a joke is the obvious contemporary meaning of the alt- prefix,
which, ugh, I don't think anyone wants to have folks inadvertently
associate our projects with. [2] Naming stuff is hard, but I would
avoid that prefix at the moment. Heck, I have enough difficulty
explaining to friends and family that I don't work on that other leaky
"wiki" project. :p
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_rock
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt.*_hierarchy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right
Yours,
Chris K.
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.
Hi everyone,
The Community Tech team is currently working on Global preferences, the #4
wish from the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey, and we've got a question for
folks who are interested in using the feature.
We're adapting an extension developed by Legoktm, updating the code and
making some changes to the interface. There'll be a new special page,
Special:GlobalPreferences, where you'll be able to set a preference on all
wikis at once. There's more description and screenshots on the project
page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Global_preferences
Our question is about how people might use local overrides for the global
preferences -- setting a preference as global, but making an exception for
one or more wikis. If that sounds like the kind of thing you would have an
opinion about :), then please check out this section:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Global_preferences#For_discu…
and leave some feedback on the talk page. Of course, you can also feel free
to post any questions, suggestions or comments about the feature. Thanks!
Danny Horn
Senior Product Manager
WMF Community Tech
Hi,
I would like to join Lodewijk both in thanking the list administrators for
opening and framing this discussion, and in thinking out lout that maybe "
constructiveness" should somehow be made a rule for posting on this list.
Kind regards,
Lukas
--
Dr. Lukas Mezger
Mitglied des Präsidiums / member of the Supervisory Board
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Tel. (030) 219 158 260 – (0151) 268 63 931
http://wikimedia.de
Stellen Sie sich eine Welt vor, in der jeder Mensch an der Menge allen
Wissens frei teilhaben kann. Helfen Sie uns dabei!
http://spenden.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter
der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für
Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
Forwarding this message from publicpolicy list which could benefit
from a larger audience:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jan Gerlach <jgerlach(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 8:09 AM
Subject: [Publicpolicy] We need your vote for our panel for SXSW 2018!
To: Publicpolicy Group for Wikimedia <publicpolicy(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hello everybody
Some of you may know SXSW ("South-By-Southwest"), an annual
tech/music/film festival in Austin, TX. For next year's event, held in
March 2018, we have submitted a proposal for a panel that will discuss
a worrying trend: countries increasingly enforce their national laws
globally to take down content from the internet.
We believe that this trend causes harm to the internet and access to
knowledge. (See our blog posts about this problem in the context of a
case in Canada and another one in France.) The panel will address how
countries that enforce their national laws globally online threaten to
break the internet into pieces and hurt fundamental rights. We're very
happy to have secured the participation of three fantastic speakers:
Nani Jansen Reventlow (a Dutch freedom of expression litigator)
Malavika Jayaram (a privacy researcher and the Executive Director of
the Digital Asia Hub)
Carlos Affonso Souza (Director of the Institute for Technology and Society, Rio)
Now, before the proposal is considered for the official program, it
has to go through a voting process. Everybody can vote (after creating
an account on the SXSW website):
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/70062
We need your help to get as many votes as possible. Please vote for
our panel, help spread the word, share with your friends and networks.
THANK YOU!
Best,
Jan
==
Jan Gerlach
Public Policy Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
149 New Montgomery Street, 6th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
jgerlach(a)wikimedia.org
_______________________________________________
Publicpolicy mailing list
Publicpolicy(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/publicpolicy
On 19/08/2017 12:05, Lodewijk wrote:
> Thanks for the link, Rogol. It is wonderful to hear that these generous
> donors have decided to match a deposit of $5 million into the endowment.
>
> It is always a good thing if someone from the board could expand on what
> (if anything) the board is planning to do with the proposed expenses. The
> way you're framing this decision is not something I consider fair.
I agree with Lodewijk.
On 21/08/2017 18:48, Rogol Domedonfors wrote:
> I'm know that the WMF has determined that it should have some form of
> endowment, The question is -- as is usual in question of this sort -- one
> of balance: in this case, balance between current spending for the benefit
> of the projects today, and accumulating capital for the benefit of the
> projects tomorrow. I am asking the Board to say why they decided to
strike
> that balance where they did -- given the obvious need for that support
> right now -- and whether it is appropriate for large donors to apparently
> influence that decision.
This is a much better way to approach this discussion. I recognize the
concern, and - although admittedly I don't know in the detail how the
endowment is managed - I wouldn't say that the donor is influencing the
decision as long as there are no further restrictions on how the money
will be invested.
Cristian
Hi.
This message is only to advertise the ongoing candidacies for the new
affiliation committee members.
Everyone is invited to participate with questions and to support or not any
candidate in this page:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/Candidates/June_2017
I am posting here as I haven't seen any message related and the requests
could have a better community engagement IMO. I hope it is not duplicated.
Regards,
Teles
--
Steward for Wikimedia projects. Administrator at Portuguese Wikipedia and
Wikimedia Commons.
Sent from mobile. Please, excuse my brevity.
+55 (71) 99707 6409