Hi all, The Sept-Oct activity report for the Board of Trustees is published on Meta here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_Reports/September-October,_2011
This is an informal report that we started doing a few months ago to try and communicate more about what the board and individual trustees are doing. You can find past reports (July-August and May-June) at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_Reports.
Text of the report follows. Feedback is welcome! -- phoebe -----
Board of Trustees -- activity report September-October 2011
* Resolutions and votes
New chapters: The Board approved three new chapters in September-October: Wikimedia District of Columbia, Wikimedia Bangladesh, and Wikimedia Venezuela. Congratulations to all!
Update to the donor policy: The donor privacy policy, an updated version of which was approved in July by the Board, had some small amendments which the Board approved; the latest version of the policy can be found at donor policy.
* Other Board work
Meetings: The Board met for its regularly scheduled meeting on October 7-8, in San Francisco (agenda). The next IRC meeting is scheduled for November 6, and the next regular quarterly meeting is scheduled for 3-4 February 2011 in San Francisco. Agendas will be posted here.
Audit Committee: The Audit Committee met in late September to review the preliminary results of KPMG's independent audit of the 2010-2011 fiscal year. Other agenda items included an update on the 2011 fundraiser. Stu and also Renata from the Audit Committee spent time with new Chief of Finance and Admin Garfield Byrd, helping orient him to the foundation and broad movement.
Future of fundraising process: The Board, led by Jan-Bart, kicked off a process to develop a fundraising model for 2012 and beyond. The first step is developing criteria against which fundraising and funds dissemination models will be judged; the Board will then ask Sue and the staff, with community input, to develop potential models and judge them against the criteria. The process is laid out here, with links to the pages for criteria, which everyone is encouraged to edit and discuss.
* Trustee outreach and other activities
- Kat attended the Creative Commons Global Summit in Warsaw, Poland.
- Phoebe attended WikiSym 2011, an academic conference about wikis and open collaborative software that was held this year in Mountain View, California. There were many papers about Wikipedia research presented; some of them are summarized here. Phoebe also presented a workshop at WikiSym, with Reid Priedhorsky, about collecting the literature about wikis and Wikipedia; see the workshop page for details.
- Ting attended WikiConvention 2011 in Nürnberg, Germany from Sep. 9th to 11th, a community gathering of German Wikimedians. On Sep. 23rd he made a speech on the OpenWorldForum in Paris about the Biography of Living People Policy on Wikimedia projects.
- Stu continued to help develop Reports and started a new movement-wide transparency page, Financial reports.
- Sam attended the launch of the Digital Public Library of America in Washington, DC on October 21-22, as part of their Audience and Participation workstream. He spoke in their plenary session about the need to improve digital citations and the m:Wikicite project proposal.
- Bishakha was neckdeep in supporting the community team behind WikiConference India 2011 which will take place from 18 to 20 November 2011.
- Jimmy spoke around the world in September: in Cambridge (YouGov), Lima, Peru (conference of former South American Presidents), Indianapolis, Indiana (marketing conference), London (ICT4D conference), and Austin, Texas (school board members conference). Additionally, he attended the unveiling of the new Human Rights Logo in New York (where he was one of the judges). October took him to London, Istanbul, San Francisco, Frankfurt, Bologna, New York, and Amsterdam.