Dear movement fellows,
I'm pleased to announce that Wikimedia Argentina has a new Executive
Director. Please welcome Anna Torres Adell to our movement!
Anna was born in Barcelona but settled in Buenos Aires a couple of years
ago. She is a licentiate in Political Science for the Universitat Pompeu
Fabra and has post-graduate studies in International Cooperation;
Management and Control of Public Policies; and Local Development and the
Social Economy.
She developed an interest on international cooperation and social matters
since her teens, helping establish an educational NGO in Guatemala when she
was just over 20. She has since lived and worked in Spain, México,
Guatemala and Argentina. Before joining us at Wikimedia Argentina, Anna was
the ED of PROEM Foundation, an organization aimed at coaching small
businesses. Anna's track record also includes working with AECID, the
Spanish agency for international cooperation, and the United Nations
Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM).
She has extensive knowledge and experience in the five dimensions that we
cared the most when recruiting: commitment with the social goal of free
knowledge, working with volunteers, administration, program management and
funding.
Selecting Anna was not easy, but not because we couldn't find the right
person: We had just too much good EDs we wanted to hire! Thankfully we
could choose from an important pool of candidates and proceed to evaluate
thoroughly each one of them. We received over 100 applications, of which
not less than half were pertinent. We gave all of them a score and made
successive filtering stages before arriving to the eight people we
interviewed in person over the last days.
As you may have read on this list back in January, our decision to hire a
new ED has to do with Osmar leaving us to return to his home country. Let
me highlight that this good news could not have been possible without
Osmar's work and commitment. Not only he helped designing the work
description for his replacement, but he also participated in the recruiting
and hiring process.
We are extremely grateful to all what he has done to advance our mission in
Wikimedia Argentina, and while we are certainly saddened to see him go we
know that both he and us are doing everything possible to leave the
organization on track and in good hands. Programmatic work will not suffer
from this leadership change; if any, we as Board will ensure it gets
reinforced.
Anna will formally start working with us on March 1, and throughout all of
that month Osmar will continue with us in Benedict fashion as "ED emeritus"
to ensure that all the necessary knowledge, proceedings and contacts are
transferred from one administration to another. We are glad to have
achieved this level of stability as an organization, and we'd love to
spread the word about this happy and smooth transition in the
WikimediaConference with whoever wants to hear us :).
We asked Osmar to be one of our representatives in Berlin as his last act
of service, so it will also be a nice opportunity for you to meet him. In
the meantime, please welcome Anna to the Wikimedia movement and to this
mailing list!
Best regards,
*Galileo Vidoni*
Presidente
A. C. Wikimedia Argentina