Re: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board (February and March)

FEBRUARY Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Covering: February 2010 Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees MILESTONES FROM FEBRUARY Wikimedia Foundation receives $2 million grant from Google Conducted Interviews and engaged candidates for the Chief Development Officer position. Beta roll-out of new features and updates to the usability initative KEY PRIORITIES FOR MARCH Finalize the Stanton Public Policy Grant Bi-annual all-staff meeting. Begin the business planning phase of the strategy process. THIS PAST MONTH KEY PROGRAM METRICS Reach of all Wikimedia Foundation sites: 345 million unique visitors (rank #5) +14.8% (1 year ago) / -5.3% (1 month ago) Source: comScore Media Metrics Pages served: 11.1 billion +5.8% (1 year ago) / +0.0% (1 month ago) Active number of editors (5+ edits/month): 101,730 -1.5% (1 year ago) / -4.6% (1 month ago) Source: February 2010 Report Card <http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2010_02_detailed.html> KEY FINANCIAL METRICS Operating revenue year to date: USD 14.1MM vs. plan of USD 8.8MM Operating expenses year to date: USD 5.5MM vs. plan of USD 6.2MM Unrestricted cash on hand as of March 24: USD 5.2MM while unrestricted CDs and US Treasuries were USD 8.3MM STRATEGIC PLANNING PROJECT Following the Board's endorsement of the Wikimedia Foundation's high- level strategic priorities moving forward, the strategic planning process has shifted into two parallel processes. The first is the Foundation's business planning process, led by The Bridgespan Group. The goal is to develop a five-year action plan for the Wikimedia Foundation and a more granular one-year business plan for 2010-2011. This process will run through May. The second is to complete the larger, movement-wide strategic planning process. Late in January, a Strategy Task Force formed, which started discussing and evaluating the recommendations and feedback from the Phase 2 Task Force process. That Task Force will continue to work in March to articulate and propose a set of movement-wide goals. The sign of a good open process is that certain surprising things emerge. The team was surprised by the success of the Call for Proposals process in Phase 1, and are looking for ways to use those proposals as a way to activate the volunteer community. They were also surprised by the success of the Task Force process and people's desire to apply the processes of the strategy project beyond its original scope. Three new Task Forces have formed (BLPs, NASA, and Analytics), and the team is looking forward to seeing others form as well. GOOGLE GRANT AND VISIT In February, the Wikimedia Foundation received a $2 million (USD) grant from the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation. This is the Wikimedia Foundation's first grant from Google. The funds will support core operational costs of the Wikimedia Foundation, including investments in technical infrastructure to support rapidly- increasing global traffic and capacity demands. The funds will also be used to support the organization's efforts to make Wikipedia easier to use and more accessible. Several Wikimedia Foundation staff members met with Google product and engineering managers in Mountain View to discuss possible opportunities to work together, ranging from infrastructure and open source technologies to public outreach programs. Google has designated a liaison contact for all future Wikimedia Foundation inquiries. TECHNOLOGY – CORE As noted in the previous report, Danese Cooper joined the Wikimedia Foundation as CTO, succeeding Brion Vibber. Erik Moeller and the Wikimedia Foundation technology team organized several orientation and transition meetings. The process for decommissioning old, out-of-warranty Wikimedia Foundation servers and donating them to non-profit organizations continued in February: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/02/server-decommissioning-donations/ A follow-up meeting took place between Wikimedia and Microsoft Research India regarding MSRI's efforts to develop wiki language collaboration tools. Wikimedia's BugZilla server was updated to version 3.4.5 with REST APIs: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/02/wikimedia-bugzilla-upgraded-to-versio… A bug that caused 1.3 million Wikipedia article revisions from 2005 to appear as blank pages was resolved. TECHNOLOGY - USABILITY The usability beta was enhanced on February 4 with the following features: Improvement in precision of navigable table of contents Enhanced dialogs for links, tables, and search and replace Language-specific icons for Bold and Italics This release introduced an HTML iFrame element as a new technological foundation for richer editing features. Despite extensive cross- browser testing, the release introduced problems in editing such as extra line breaks, and the iFrame deployment and features dependent on it were rolled back for the time being. Babaco Release page, http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Releases/Babaco Blog: Deployment of Babaco Enhancements, http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/01/babaco-enhancments/ Browser Compatibility Matrix for features in Babaco, http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Releases/Babaco/Compatibility_Matrix Blog: Iframe bugs, http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/02/iframe-bugs/ In February, design refinements and development of template collapsing and expansion features continued and staging in the usability sandbox started. The objective of template collapsing is to hide complex wiki syntax from the editor, which is important because, we observed that templates are an intimidating factors for new users.. http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Citron_Designs#Templates http://prototype.wikimedia.org/sandbox.6/San_Francisco Based on the evaluation of proposals submitted by usability study firms, gotomedia was commissioned to conduct the last round of the usability study. The focus of the study is to evaluate the template collapsing and expansion features, and overall improvements in usability for the last twelve months. gotomedia: http://www.gotomedia.com/ February ended with a total of 571,579 users having tried the Beta. Approximately 59,100 additional users tried the Beta in February. This number is down slightly, even considering the fact that February is a shorter month. The cumulative retention rate across all projects held steady at 79.8% as of February 28. http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Beta_Feedback_Survey#Update:_February_28.2C_2010 Regression tests across all supported browsers, interaction automation suites were set up using the opensource quality assurance software, Selenium. This test automation system will be used by the user experience team to increase the efficiency of software testing and release cycles. The plan is to open up this automation system to the wider MediaWiki developers community. Selenium, http://seleniumhq.org/ MULTIMEDIA USABILITY PROJECT Development of the new upload interface continued in February and preparations for setting up the system infrastructure for prototype system started. Product specification for a temporary staging area for incomplete uploads has started. http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:NewUpload http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:Incomplete_uploads A call for proposals for the first study of the multimedia usability initiative was initiated. Four usability study firms submitted proposals. A usability study firm in San Francisco, gotomedia, was chosen based on quality, cost, and references. The study is scheduled to be conducted in March 2010. http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:UX_study,_March_2010/CfP Guillaume Paumier and Neil Kandalgaonkar appeared on IRC office hours on February 4. They received lots of interesting questions, including technical questions, from the participants. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2010-02-04 OTHER PROGRAM ACTIVITIES During February, Frank Schulenburg and Pete Forsyth embarked on writing a grant proposal for the second phase of the Public Policy Initiative. The Initiative's overarching goal is to develop a model for how to systematically improve articles of a specific topic area by encouraging and enabling subject-matter experts to contribute to Wikipedia. For this purpose, the Wikimedia Foundation will reach out to faculty members at select universities and encourage them to use Wikipedia as a teaching tool during the fall semester 2010 and the spring semester 2011. Over these two phases of the project, the Wikimedia Foundation will pilot in-classroom and didactic usage and improvement of Wikipedia in an experimental manner. Ongoing and systematic metrics development and evaluation will measure the project's success in terms of article improvement and educational experience. Pete and Frank continued to strenghten the Wikimedia Foundation's ties to universities by giving a presentation at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Under the title "Wikipedia – the encyclopedia that works only in practice, not in theory" they gave students and faculty at Harvard an introduction into the internal mechanisms of Wikipedia and answered the diverse questions of the audience. The presentation was part of a new lecture series called "Digital Workshops for Students" at the Kennedy School's Joan Shorenstein Center. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/students/digital_workshops.html The Public Outreach Team did preliminary/exploratory work toward developing opportunities for collaboration and education among the community. Pete explored a possible partnership with Ontier, a producer of screen casting software; and had discussions with Howie Fung of the User Experience team about the dynamics that surround editor departure. Frank launched a chapters events calendar on the Outreach Wiki; and the Public Outreach department had preliminary discussions with Eugene Kim and Cary Bass about establishing a Compassionate Communications training program for community members. Also in February, Frank hired Rod Dunican as a Education Programs Manager. Rod is a senior learning professional with more than twenty- five years of experience in corporate training, consulting, coaching, and project management, working in the areas of organizational development, operations, marketing, eLearning and instructor-led training programs. He will be the Project Manager for the second phase of the Public Policy Initiative. Cary Bass worked on organizing the Wikimania Scholarships committee for Wikimania 2010 in Gdańsk. He also a acted as a staff coordinator for the very first meetup of San Francisco Wikipedia volunteers in the new office. Furthermore, Cary organized the relaunch and rebranding of the Living Persons Task Force on the English Wikipedia and selected, appointed and installed the current ombudsmen commission. COMMUNICATIONS A busy, though short month for Wikimedia communications. The Google grant announcement mid-month delivered the highest amount of coverage - resulting in more coverage than the closing of this year's annual campaign. Other coverage through the month focussed on general Wikipedia topical issues and interviews with Jimmy Wales. * Announcements Wikimedia Foundation announces $2 million grant from Google 17 February 2010, Donation will support capacity investments in Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Foundation_ann… Telefónica and Wikimedia Foundation Partner to Advance Learning and Increase Access to Free Knowledge 1 February 2010, Strategic partnership will improve access to Wikimedia educational and informational content in Latin America and Europe. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Telefonica_and_Wikimedia… * Blog posts http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/02/ * Media contact http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#February_2010 * Major coverage through February 1. Wikimedia and Telefonica partner to expand access to Wikipedia (February 1) Considerably less coverage of the Telefonica/WMF partnership than previous major telco partnerships. Most media outlets copied press release verbatim or offered neutral perspective on the details. http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Item/Telefónica-Wikimedia-Fou… m http://www.finchannel.com/Main_News/Tech/57337_Telefónica_and_Wikimedia_Fou… / 2. $2 million Google grant for Wikimedia Foundation (February 16-17) Heavy coverage of Google's grant/gift to Wikimedia Foundation later in February, in major blogs and mainstream media around the world. Prompted by an advance tweet from Jimmy, news spread quickly on blogs with mainstream coverage following the formal press release on February 17. Mostly positive coverage, with many bloggers highlighting the positive intentions of Google (most coverage focussed on Google rather than Wikimedia or Wikipedia). http://mashable.com/2010/02/16/google-wikipedia-donation/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/16/google-donates-2-million-to-wikimedia-foun… http://license.icopyright.net/user/viewContent.act?tag=3.5721%3Ficx_id=D9DU… http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&cf=all&… Other worthwhile reads http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/02/10/more-video-coming-wikipedias-way http://media.www.mcgilltribune.com/media/storage/paper234/news/2010/02/02/N… http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Students-at-McGill-U-Band/21033/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/why-wikipedia-beats-wikinews-as-a-collabor… http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/companies_on_wikipedia_apple_bt_nokia.… * Communications campaign update The Fenton communications team continued work on the three key communications products associated with part two of the campaign: the wikimedia story presentation, a leave-behind printed product, and a story video. The team held a consultation with Sue Gardner in late February to break down the basic pieces or 'acts' of a Wikimedia presentation, and submitted an initial creative brief framing up a collective voice for the communications products. Fenton and SeaChange strategies also conducted survey design work with Wikimedia Foundation staff for the first qualitative, on-line focus groups of Wikimedia donors. This data will be combined with broader survey results to form a draft, compound demographic analysis of our donors - culminating in an donor audience tool to determine next steps for strategic outreach with donors. During Februay, the Wikimedia Foundation participated in interviews with SWISS Magazine (Basel, Switzerland); Televisió de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain); NHK (Tokyo, Japan); KCBS (San Francisco, California, USA); DataCenterDynamics (San Francisco, California, USA); Wall Street Journal (New York, New York, USA); Associated Press (San Francisco, California, USA);UN Special Magazine; Wall Street Journal (New York, New York, USA); Denver Post (Denver, Colorado, USA); Parade Magazine (New York, New York, USA); Media Bistro (New York, New York, USA); Cell magazine (New York, New York, USA); BBC 2 (London, United Kingdom). FUNDRAISING, GRANTS, & PARTNERSHIPS The Wikimedia Foundation received 3,450 donations in February, totaling approximately USD 2,108,885. Year-to-date, the Foundation has raised USD 11,259,228 in individual donations, 50% above its annual goal of USD 7,500,000. In February, the Foundation also raised USD 500,000 of restricted and unrestricted grants, brining the total fundraising related revenue for the year to USD 13,309,228, 43% above the goal of USD 9,297,000. The Community Giving team continued to wind down the 2009-10 Annual Fundraiser. The team entered in the final gifts from Dexia, Moneybookers, Citibank, and various other accounts in order to complete the transaction record for the fundraiser. They also processed refunds for suspected and real fraudulent credit card transactions. The Community Giving team began the 2010 Fundraising Survey project in conjunction with SeaChange to better access our donors and messaging. In the area of major gifts, the month of February was packed with donor stewardship meetings, both to thank recent donors and explore new partnerships. In addition, Rebecca Handler planned and led a three- hour stewardship workshop for the board, and met with Jimmy Wales to discuss his Davos trip and our upcoming trip to New York City. Jan- Bart attended a donor meeting and was on message and a wonderful ambassador for the Foundation. Rebecca helped Anya prepare for the World Affairs Council, which ended up being a successful sold-out program on February 22nd. LEGAL In February, the Legal Department won an important domain-name decision through a Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (UDRP) proceeding and blocked a commercial entity from using the domain name "softwarewikipedia.com". The decision was tweeted to general approval in the community. Mike increased demand letters and other actions against trademark infringers, domain-name squatters, and other unauthorized users of Wikipedia marks. This action is in line both with the Foundation's efforts to build positive branding of the Wikimedia projects in the public interest world and with our business partnerships that center on co-branding. MARCH Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Covering: March 2010 Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees KEY PROGRAM METRICS Reach of all Wikimedia Foundation sites: 371 million unique visitors (rank #5) +13.3% (1 year ago) / +7.4% (1 month ago) Source: comScore Media Metrics Pages served: 11.7 billion +0.3% (1 year ago) / +0.0% (1 month ago) Active number of editors (5+ edits/month): 100,950 ~+1% (1 year ago) / -0.76% (1 month ago) Source: March 2010 Report Card <http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2010_03_detailed.html> KEY FINANCIAL METRICS Operating revenue year to date: USD 14.3MM vs. plan of USD 9.0MM Operating expenses year to date: USD 6.3MM vs. plan of USD 7.1MM Unrestricted cash on hand as of April 28: USD 12.8MM while unrestricted CDs and US Treasuries were USD 8.7MM STRATEGIC PLANNING PROJECT The working groups have finished most of their preliminary planning with the help of The Bridgespan Group. The strategy team will spend April and May finalizing and integrating that work into a cohesive plan. The Strategy Task Force has made progress toward drafting a movement-wide set of goals and priorities. A draft for comments should be completed by the end of April. There have also been a number of substantive conversations about the scope of content across different Wikimedia projects, which has resulted in a new Task Force. TECHNOLOGY – CORE Operations Wikimedia sites suffered from a global outage on March 24, that lasted up to several hours for some users, due to a DNS corruption problem in the standard fail-over procedure to divert traffic from Amsterdam to Tampa. The tech team have reduced the Foundation's DNS update interval from standard 30 minutes to 5 minutes, and will be reviewing enhancing notification / escalation procedures to keep communications better informed of status during outages. The entire Tech Team came together in San Francisco for its twice- annual Tech Meeting, and discussed both plans and issues. The plan for Operations has been further developed in the Tech Strategy Work Group. The Amsterdam network has been extended for the upcoming server capacity expansion. This new network equipment will also be used to migrate to a much more fault tolerant network topology. Preparations were made for the caching servers expansion in Amsterdam, and new servers were ordered. The team expects to complete the expansion by the end of April. External Storage (i.e. wiki revisions data) was re-compressed into a more efficient format: from 1.9 TB to about 140 GB, a saving of 93% on our storage servers. Rob Halsell made progress on research and experimentation with Ubuntu Cloud for the development server cluster. Mobile The technology team released a new version of the Wikimedia Mobile App to the iTunes store which is awaiting Apple acceptance. The team is also on the verge of deploying a new version of the Mobile Server and migrating m.stats to stats.wikimedia. Analytics A planning group on analytics begun assessing different options for web analytics and other analytics requirements across the whole Wikimedia Foundation. Privacy issues were a key part of the discussion to-date, and both open source and proprietary solutions have been considered. The group expects to reach a better sense of decision tradeoffs (features/cost/privacy/timing/risks etc.) by May. TECHNOLOGY - USABILITY The usability beta was updated on March 17, to decouple the HTML iFrame, which introduces considerable additional complexity, from the features for inserting links, tables and, search & replace. Dialog features were enabled for over 500,000 beta users.[1] The main features for Citron, such as template collapsing, inline expansion and the dialog for templates were enabled for the usability study. (Citron features are not available for wider audience due to iFrame dependency.) [1] Usability Update: Introducing Dialogs, http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/25/usability-update-introducing-dialogs/ The third round of the usability study was conducted in March in partnership with gotomedia[2]. Ten people participated at Fleischman Field Research in San Francisco and eight other participants were surveyed remotely using web conference technology. The objective of the study was to evaluate the new features such as template handling features (collapsing, inline expansion, and pop-up) and side-by-side preview tab and overall evaluation of the Stanton Wikipedia usability project. The findings from the study and videos will be published in early May. [2] gotomedia, http://www.gotomedia.com/ The usability team is preparing to offer the usability beta as default user interface and interaction to all Wikimedia projects. The beta has been tried out by over 600,000 users since August 2009, and an average of 80% of users continue using it. The plan is to roll out to Commons on April 5, and evaluate the responses and system capacity and continue on to Wikipedia and the rest of Wikimedia projects towards end of the month. The announcements were made though WMF blog and tech blogs. [3][4][5] [3] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/25/wikimedia-gets-ready-for-some-big-chan… [4] http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/the-change-in-interface-is-coming/ [5] http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/the-power-of-translators/ March ended with a total of 635,942 users having tried the Beta. [6] [6] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Beta_Feedback_Survey#Update:_March_31.2C_2010 MULTIMEDIA USABILITY PROJECT Development of the new upload interface continued and the prototype was staged in a lab environment. The two types of user flow are staged, 1) “my own work” and 2) “found on Internet.” The user flow which requires author's permission will be staged later time. Once the prototype is finalized, it will be used for the usability study and be opened up for the community for feedback. Assets uploaded but missing mandatory information, such as author or copyright status, require flags or some protection, so that assets are not distributed without permission from authors or without confirming the appropriate copyright status. A feature for incomplete uploads that supports graceful handling of this interim status is under active discussion.[7] [7] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:Incomplete_uploads The usability study was postponed from March 30 and 31 to early May, in order to incorporate feedback and avoid conflicting schedule with conferences in the second half of April. Ten study participants were recruited and screened for the usability study through the banner on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. The usability study will be conducted in partnership with gotomedia. OTHER PROGRAM ACTIVITIES During March, Rod Dunican, Pete Forsyth and Frank Schulenburg finalized the grant proposal for the second phase of the Public Policy Initiative. They started to outline a Wikipedia Campus Ambassador training and certification program as a key deliverable of the Initiative. Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors will serve as trainers, working directly with classroom instructors to teach the basics of Wikipedia editing. Furthermore, Campus Ambassadors will help to start Wikipedia student groups, facilitate the exchange of ideas regarding Wikipedia as a learning tool, and plan social events. The grant proposal outlines the establishment of this Campus Ambassador Program and includes a high-level program view of the Ambassador training sessions. Frank Schulenburg also participated in a video conference with the winners of Google's Kiswahili Challenge in Nairobi/Kenya. The participants of the Challenge discussed with Frank, Erik Möller, Naoko Komuara and Samuel Klein Wikipedia's upcoming new usability features, Wikimedia's outreach resources and opportunities for the contest participants to get more involved in the Wikimedia movement. As part of the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic planning process, Frank Schulenburg embarked on planning the outreach department's priorities for the fiscal year 2010/2011. Together with the members of the Program Team Workgroup, he worked on a mission statement for the Program Team, the Team's core processes, and the potential implications for the future structure and activities of the Program Team. Rod Dunican, Wikimedia's new Education Program Manager, started to discuss a potential meeting – "Using Wikipedia as a Learning Tool in the Classroom" – with librarians and professors. He reached out to instructors who are currently using Wikipedia as a teaching tool and have first-hand knowledge of the pitfalls and successes that the Public Policy Initiative may experience. Rod investigated their interest in sharing their experiences with WMF and helping the Wikimedia Foundation to develop sample lesson plans and other instructional materials for universities. Pete Forsyth continued his communication with schools who participated in phase one of the Public Policy Initiative. He secured verbal commitments from professors for the second phase of the Initiative. Pete worked with contacts at Harvard's Taubman Center --who wish to dedicate 18 public policy case studies under a Creative Commons license for use in the Public Policy Initiative-- to clarify licensing issues and seek consensus on how to move forward. He also met with the Internet Archive, American Field Service, and BunchBall, and explored Yahoo Answers and the Open Directory Project, in ongoing efforts to stay abreast of current thinking about online communities and volunteerism, and to maintain a network in that arena. Pete also began to coordinate the setup of a Contact Relationship Management database for the program team. Together with members of Wikimedia's tech team he set up a CiviCRM installation for testing purposes and started to get trained. Furthermore, Pete started to plan a meeting with members of the German Mentoring Team, to be held in April in Berlin. The meeting will aim at sharing best practices and discussing the necessary steps for building sustainable Mentoring Programs in other Wikipedia language versions. Cary Bass worked with the User Experience team to plan and develop the roll-out of Vector onto the Wikimedia projects; including advanced planning for the development of the Wikipedia 2.0 logo for extended languages. With Sara Crouse, he organized the Wikimania 2010 scholarship team. In conjunction with Austin Hair, Cary updated 2009's scholarship application and database, submitted the call for applications and worked with making phase one application review work efficiently for scholarship team. Cary coordinated the board certification of the results of the Steward election. On March 26 and 27, Erik Zachte attended the Critical Point of View conference (CPOV) in Amsterdam. (Mark, Jose and Hay also attended one day.) The CPOV conference brings together researchers and Wikipedians from around the world to share and build insights into the complex and messy reality of Wikipedia: What are the new processes for determining the threshold of knowledge and how do they actually play out? What are the new relations that emerge between this knowledge reference and external institutions such as schools and governments? How is agency distributed within the Wikipedia platform? The conference was staged by the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures (INC) and the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). It's the second event staged by those two organizations: the first was 'WikiWars,' in Bangalore, India in January 2010. In September 2010 there will be a third even in Leipzig, Germany. Erik reported back that the conference was very well organized, with pictures and talk summaries later put online at networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/. About 100 people attended. COMMUNICATIONS March was a quiet month for media coverage and communications operations. Major media interest focussed on Wikipedia downtime in late March. Jay Walsh spent much of March focussing on strategy/ business plan support, support and planning for vector roll-out, and design strategy planning. * Blog posts http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/ (Blog traffic peaked later in March, on both techblog and Wikimedia blog with global interest in brief WP downtime.) * Media contact http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#March_2010 * Major coverage through January 1. Suspected gunman had Wikipedia connections (March 5) Some neutral-tone coverage through the US about a gunman who open- fired on the Pentagon in March, who allegedly had connections to Wikipedia, as well as many other online properties. http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/gunman-outlined-theories-online/ 2. Wikipedia as a trusted news source (March 15) Moka Pantages garnered a few tech headlines and considerable micro- blogging mentions during a SXSW presentation in Austin focussing on digital journalism.  The claim that Wikipedia should be trusted as a news source was backed up by bloggers and supported by reporters attending the social media gathering. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_wikipedia_should_be_trusted_or_how… 3. "Get Video on Wikipedia!" (March 18) The campaign to get video on Wikipedia, led by Kaltura and the HTML5 open video alliance received headlines in mid-March.  The news focussed on major advances in open video and HTML5 and how these improvements stood to increase the quality and quantity of video on Wikipedia. Coverage was largely positive. http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Wikipedia-Pushes-for-Users-to/22035/ http://mashable.com/2010/03/18/video-wikipedia/ http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/03/18/open-source-video-company-kaltura… 4. Wikipedia down (March 24) A one-hour plus downtime for Foundation web properties in late-March resulted in a deluge of tech blogger and micro-blogger coverage. Most coverage was short and neutral in tone, and quickly updated once the site resumed service.  Major media combined the news with the similarly but unrelated timing of a youtube.com site outage. http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=7795&tag=content;col1 http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361778,00.asp http://mashable.com/2010/03/24/wikipedia-is-down/ 5. Wikipedia readies for User Interface overhaul (March 26) Largely positive coverage of the blog post from the Wikipedia Usability team announcing the details of the forthcoming vector roll- out on Wikimedia Foundation properties. Coverage on almost all major tech blogs, as well as main stream media. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/29/new-wikipedia-layout-2010_n_517007… http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/are_you_ready_for_the_new_easier_wikip… http://mashable.com/2010/03/26/wikipedias-redesign-is-coming-soon/ http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/03/26/wikipedia-prepares-for-user-inter… Other worthwhile reads http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/03/23/urnidgns852573C… http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2010/03/23/25575/ http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/from_haiti_to_the_oscars_wikim.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/digital_giants/8564348.stm http://opensource.com/business/10/3/wikimedia-foundation-doing-strategic-pl… http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100311/you-ask-jimmy-wales-answers-a-crow… http://www.nrcu.gov.ua/index.php?id=148&listid=113390 During March, the Wikimedia Foundation participated in interviews with the Wall Street Journal (New York, New York, USA); the Associated Press (San Francisco, California, USA); National Public Radio (Washington, District of Columbia, USA); PR Week (London, United Kingdom); the National Post (Toronto, Canada); ABC News (New York, New York, USA); CNBC (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, USA); Together Magazine (Brussels, Belgium); Daily Princetonian (Princeton, New Jersey, USA); Streaming Media (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA); Radio Netherlands (Hilversum, Netherlands). * Communications campaign update Fenton's communications work through March focussed on refining concepts for the executive presentation kit, as well as presenting refined concepts for an accompanying video. Wikimedia fundraiser research focussed on evaluating pre-existing donor research ideas and refining ideas for the upcoming donor survey. FUNDRAISING, GRANTS, & PARTNERSHIPS The Wikimedia Foundation received 1,968 donations in March, totaling approximately USD 99,095. Year-to-date, the Foundation has raised USD 11,358,323 in individual donations, 53% above its annual goal of USD 7,500,000. Including revenue from restricted and unrestricted gifts the Wikimedia Foundation has raised USD 13,408,323, 45% above the goal of USD 9,297,000. In March, the Community Gifts began planning for the 2010 Annual Fundraiser. The team began compiling reports of the make up on the Foundation's donors and the effects of various donor cultivation and stewardship efforts. The fundraising department plans to use the reports to fuel planning and upcoming budgets. In addition, the Community gifts team continued working the 2010 Fundraising Survey (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Survey ) with intents to understand the Foundation's donors, how they perceive the foundation’s work, and what kinds of interactions would be most valuable in maintaining long-term philanthropic relationships. The survey will launch in May after translation efforts are completed. With the assistance of the Technology team Community giving posted and boarded activity recruiting for two staff positions to support the 2010 Fundraising efforts. These positions should mitigate peak demand for engineering to support Fundraising without diverting resources from other technology functions. Major gifts activities in March including working with Bridgespan on the fundraising business plan, mapping out and event for the end of 2010, developing fundraising communications for Jimmy Wales and preparing for April donor meetings in New York. In addition, Rebecca conducted prospect/donor meetings with over ten individuals. LEGAL The legal team began a pro-bono relationship with the Perkins Coie law firm, which may be able to provide significant litigation work for the Foundation. BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Business Development focused its attention on mobile and offline areas and its development in the strategic plan. In March Kul and Tomasz attended Mobile World Congress and spoke at the event about user data, trust, and the worldwide growth of content on mobile devices. Kul is directing developments in mobile apps with existing partners Orange and Telefonica, and is working toward a system to engage with many more partners in geographic regions such as Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and throughout Asia. Kul is also working with various partners to test several initiatives to bring Wikipedia in offline forms/ devices in markets. Currently the focus on offline Wikipedia has been on market research and product development with market and distributions tests soon to come. FINANCE & ADMINISTRATION In March Veronique and KPMG worked to finalize the 2008 Form 990 Tax Return. The return was approved by the Audit Committee on March 24. The Board of Trustees will be presented with the final Form 990 during their April meeting in Berlin, Germany. To facilitate the rapid growth of Foundation staff as outlined in the preliminary version of the Strategy Plan, the administration team visited a vacant office space on the 6th floor of 149 New Montgomery Street, in San Francisco. After their visit the administrative team began negotiating a lease and hope to obtain the 6th floor to facilitate the Foundation's projected growth. With the current growth rates the Foundation will likely require the extra floor by early 2011. Bill Gong, the Foundation's accountant, began working with vendors to find an updated accounting system for the Foundation. Currently the organization has been using Quickbooks, but with the rapid growth of the organization this software is no longer a practical solution. The accounting team hopes to find a system that will be compatible with the open-source fundraising software CiviCRM. VISITORS AND GUESTS In March, the following people visited the Wikimedia Foundation offices for meetings and talks: Jesse Ansubel of the Sloan Foundation; Melissa Hagemann, Advisory Board member and Senior Program Manager with the Open Society Institute; a delegation from the Chinese State Department; New York Times journalist Jenny 8 Lee; former IDEO engineer and founder of BunchBall, Rajat Paharia; User: Erdrokan from Switzerland; a delegation from intercultural learning and student exchange non-profit AFS Intecultural Programs; User:Elonka; Bishakha Datta; Meghan Murphy of the X Prize Foundation; Megan Smith of Google, and Thomas Dalton of Wikimedia UK. STAFF ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES No changes were made during March. STAFF ACTIVITIES The bi-annual All Staff meeting was held on March 4th and 5th. Sue opened this year with an overview of the goals and targets coming out of the Strategic Plan for the next 5 years including a focus in on the 2010-2011 fiscal year. Bridgespan attended the meetings and helped facilitate as we broke into groups by department to determine the necessary positions and logistics that would get us from here to there with an emphasis on the next fiscal year. James Owen Executive Assistant & Board Liaison Wikimedia Foundation Office +1.415.839.6885 x 604 Mobile +1.415.509.5444 Fax +1.415.882.0495 Email- jowen(a)wikimedia.org Website- www.wikimediafoundation.org _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l