Dear Anasuya,
Loved working together - it was a real pleasure.
Apart from everything you did to drive grantmaking, a big thumbs up to you for dreaming up and organizing the community consultation in India last October.
Hope you're back on your feet soon! Bishakha
On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 8:23 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Thank you very much for sharing this, Lila.
A special thank you to Anasuya for all of her work in the grantmaking area. She has been a driving force, and her contributions will be missed.
Congratulations to Luis, Siko and Asaf in their new roles. I will look forward to working with all of them in their new capacities.
Out of curiosity, and bearing in mind that the WMF has put itself forward as having its major focuses on techology and grantmaking, is there a reason that the person leading the third-largest group of staff, in one of these priority areas, is a "Senior Director" when smaller departments have "Chiefs" and the other focus departments have VPs? The organizational chart is getting a bit tricky to follow. :-)
Risker/Anne
On 19 February 2015 at 17:15, Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
Dear Wikimedians,
Among the WMF’s top priorities for 2015 is strengthening our engagement with Wikimedia editors and volunteers. Today we are taking the first step by bringing together the people who know our communities best and asking them to break barriers and improve engagement. Everyone at the WMF who carries responsibilities directly related to the communities will join a new Community Engagement department.
I have asked Luis Villa to lead the Community Engagement organization as the Senior Director of Community Engagement, reporting to me. Promoting from within the WMF for this critical role will allow us to leverage the knowledge and experience with our communities and reinforce the strengths of our people.
Luis’s experience with communities is lengthy and deep. He has been involved in open communities since the late 1990s, from communities as small as the Lego Mindstorms hackers to those as large as Mozilla. He worked in open communities as a lawyer, a programmer, a bugmaster, an engineering lead, a community leader, and a board member. Luis has performed exceptionally within the Foundation and supported some of our most fruitful community engagements. The Grantmaking, L&E, Education, Community Advocacy and Community Liaisons teams will join the new
Community
Engagement department [2] under his leadership.
Unfortunately, Anasuya Sengupta -- our beloved leader of grantmaking -- will be leaving us due to personal health concerns at the end of March.
We
will invite you soon to celebrate her time with us, her work at the WMF
and
the deep insight she brought to the Foundation. We are saddened to see
her
go. The team she has nurtured will provide an important foundation for
our
upcoming work.
Siko Bouterse will move up to lead the day-to-day work of the
Grantmaking
team as Director of Community Resources, supervising all department Grant programs and the Global South strategy. Siko has been instrumental in innovating programs at the WMF, including initiatives like the
Teahouse[1]
and the IdeaLab[2] combining vision with strong support for volunteer community, tough decision making, and great project management skills.
These changes are an opportunity to improve the coordination of our work supporting the communities. To accelerate this, I have asked Luis to lead an internal “tiger” team to better understand the needs, concerns and priorities of our volunteers, and to develop recommendations for future programs. This work will be shared with all of you as it becomes
available.
Please join me in congratulating Luis and Siko and in supporting our
teams.
The Wikimedia communities are what makes the projects strong, unique, and irreplaceable. This is the next step forward in our support to them, and
in
service of our mission.
[1] As Director of Community Resources, Siko will oversee the IdeaLab, Annual Plan Grants, Project and Event Grants, and Travel andParticipation
Support. Her team will include Katy Love, Winifred Olliff, Alex Wang, Janice Tud, Jonathan Morgan, and Asaf Bartov. Asaf will also take on a
new
title as Senior Program Officer, Emerging Wikimedia Communities.
[2] Rachel DiCerbo, Philippe Beaudette, Siko, and Anasuya’s other direct reports, and their respective teams (CL, CA, and Grantmaking/GLEE) will report to Luis. The Engineering Community team will be part of the tiger team but will continue to report to Engineering.
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse
[4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab
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