Dear all, The Board has been working on a report of our activities; please find the first report, covering May and June of this year, below. This is a short summary, meant to help share our work with the community and movement, and help make Board work and trustee activities more accessible & transparent. This first report took some time to put together, but we hope to post future reports on a regular schedule. Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions. -- Phoebe
-----------------------
*Board of Trustees -- activity report May-June 2011 Resolutions and votes*
*Controversial content*
* Controversial content resolution -- this resolution was passed in May after a year-long process of discussion and research. It reaffirms the Board's position on censorship, calls for continued community involvement in image review and asks for the creation of a personal image filter feature which would allow readers to not choose whether to view certain classes of images.
* Images of identifiable people resolution -- this resolution was passed in May along with the controversial content resolution. It lays out the Board position on image subject consent, specifying that evidence of consent should be obtained and documented from the subject of the media for images and videos of living, identifiable persons in private situations that are hosted on Wikimedia projects.
*New chapters * * Wikimedia Canada and Wikimedia Chile were recognized. Both are recently incorporated.
*New advisors and observers*
* Advisory board additions -- Jessamyn West and Veronique Kessler were nominated for the advisory board by trustees and approved by Board vote. Jessamyn is a U.S.-based librarian and blogger who is also a community manager of Metafilter, a global online community; and Veronique is the WMF's outgoing Chief Financial Officer.
* Board Visitors -- passed in May, this resolution lays out parameters and criteria for inviting visitors to Board meetings, and defines that approved Board visitors may be invited to one meeting a year for most agenda items. Visitors will not have voting rights or email list access.
* Visitor appointment -- the first visitor to be invited was Doron Weber from the Sloan Foundation, invited in June for the coming year.
*Strategy and planning*
* Annual plan approval -- The Board unaminously approved the WMF's annual plan for 2011-2012. The plan is developed by the executive director with input from the Board and senior staff, and lays out WMF's budgeting, hiring and programmatic plans for the year. A draft of the plan was shared with the Board in May, and the final document was reviewed in June, with review led by Stu as the board Treasurer. * Other Board work*
* The Board Governance Committee (Matt, Jan-Bart and Ting) contracted with a consultant and scheduled the 2011 trustee evaluation process. They also kicked off the officer election process by calling for candidates and candidate statements. Elections will be held in Haifa.
* The Audit committee, led by Stu, wrapped up its work for its 2010-2011 year. During the year, the committee held three meetings in August, October, and March. It covered the basics, reviewing the audit plan, audit results, and the Foundation's annual IRS filing, as well as helping improve the FAQs and other public disclosures of the Foundation's financial position. The primary non-routine issue this year involved the transparency and financial control implications of certain chapters directly receiving donor funds, and the committee contributed some energetic editing to support the new consolidated movement-wide reports page on meta. The Committee also weighed the alternatives for independent auditors over the upcoming year and decided to re-engage KPMG and expand KPMG's role somewhat to provide further guidance and assistance around fundraising models. Finally, Stu sent out a call for volunteers for the 2011-2012 fiscal year.
* As Board Treasurer, Stu held a few meetings with Sue and her staff to review the annual plan and then provided a recommendation that the Board approve the plan.
* Stu was also active in the interviewing process for the Foundation's new Chief of Finance and Administration.
* Movement roles work to define the relative roles of Wikimedia entities continued on Meta, including Sam, Bishakha, and Arne, producing a set of draft recommendations to the Board and to movement groups.
* In May-June 2011 the Board met twice online to review the annual plan.
* The Board's next in-person meeting is scheduled for Wikimania in Haifa, Israel.
* Meeting agendas and details are shared at m:Board meetings.
*Trustee outreach and other activities*
* In May, Kat visited the WMF offices, to meet with Foundation lawyer Geoff Brigham and to help develop a summary of WMF legal practices. This has been posted for comment.
* In June, Ting attended an event organized by Wikimedians in Almaty, Kazakhstan and spoke to an audience of students. The local Wikimedia group has freed an entire 16-volume Kazakh-language encyclopedia by getting the publisher to agree to a free license and release the digital files, with the goal of adding the content to the Kazakh Wikipedia. They have received a grant to work on this project, and are also interested in becoming a chapter.
* June 14, Sam attended a meeting of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) project, which is bringing together several major research and public libraries as well as library organizations to develop a common framework for shared digital library collections in the U.S.
* ALA: in June, Phoebe, along with Sue and staff members Frank Schulenberg and Annie Lin, attended the American Libraries Association (ALA) annual conference, the largest library conference in the world, in New Orleans, USA. Sue gave the keynote address, Frank and Annie staffed a booth promoting the campus ambassador project, and Phoebe participated on a panel called "The Wikipedia Effect: How Wikipedia Has Changed the Way the World Finds and Evaluates Information" (also on the panel: Paul Kobasa, editor-in-chief of the World Book encyclopedia).
* In May, Bishakha visited Bangalore and met with the India chapter's Executive Committee members and attended Bangalore meetup 33. On May 14, she attended Pune meetup 13 and met with prospective Campus Ambassadors in Pune. In June, Bishakha attended the daylong 4th Malayalam wikimeet in Kannur, Kerala. Highlights: the release of the first Malayalam WikiSource CD, a visually impaired man's demo of using text to speech software on Wikipedia, and meeting the youngest Malayalam contributor, a 7-year-old who shot and uploaded 14 images of food to Wikimedia commons. National program consultant Hisham Mundol was also present at all these meetups.
* Jimmy was as usual traveling the world for meetings, speeches, and press work. He was scheduled to speak at a conference of Nobel Prize winners in Morocco in early May, but the conference was cancelled due to the terrorist attack. In mid-May he went to Germany at the request of Wikimedia Deutschland to film a video in support of the UNESCO initiative, as well as a fund raising video. At the eG-8 meeting in Paris, he was invited to a private lunch with President Sarkozy at the Élysée Palace. Other attendees included Rupert Murdoch (News Corporation), Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (New York Times), Eric Schmidt (Google), and others; copyright enforcement was high on the agenda, and Jimmy spoke about the importance of free culture and community sharing. Other meetings took place in London, Washington DC, Moscow, Zermatt (Switzerland), and Israel (met with Shimon Peres).
phoebe ayers wrote:
The Board has been working on a report of our activities; please find the first report, covering May and June of this year, below. This is a short summary, meant to help share our work with the community and movement, and help make Board work and trustee activities more accessible & transparent. This first report took some time to put together, but we hope to post future reports on a regular schedule. Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions.
Looks pretty good. Thanks for putting this together. :-)
I think posting the reports (or links to the reports) on Meta-Wiki or wikimediafoundation.org would be good. There is already some infrastructure in place, e.g., http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Reports.
There's also the blog to consider: http://blog.wikimedia.org/. It's a matter of weighing how much "the outside" would care about Board internals, though, I suppose.
A wiki page or blog post might also make adding links easier. For example, "In May, Kat visited the WMF offices, to meet with Foundation lawyer Geoff Brigham and to help develop a summary of WMF legal practices. This has been posted for comment." could include a link to the page on Meta-Wiki.
These are minor issues that can be tweaked going forward. Definitely a step in the right direction, toward accessibility and transparency.
MZMcBride
On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 8:42 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
phoebe ayers wrote:
The Board has been working on a report of our activities; please find the first report, covering May and June of this year, below. This is a short summary, meant to help share our work with the community and movement,
and
help make Board work and trustee activities more accessible &
transparent.
This first report took some time to put together, but we hope to post
future
reports on a regular schedule. Please let me know if you have any
feedback
or suggestions.
Looks pretty good. Thanks for putting this together. :-)
I think posting the reports (or links to the reports) on Meta-Wiki or wikimediafoundation.org would be good. There is already some infrastructure in place, e.g., http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Reports.
There's also the blog to consider: http://blog.wikimedia.org/. It's a matter of weighing how much "the outside" would care about Board internals, though, I suppose.
A wiki page or blog post might also make adding links easier. For example, "In May, Kat visited the WMF offices, to meet with Foundation lawyer Geoff Brigham and to help develop a summary of WMF legal practices. This has been posted for comment." could include a link to the page on Meta-Wiki.
These are minor issues that can be tweaked going forward. Definitely a step in the right direction, toward accessibility and transparency.
MZMcBride
Thanks! All good suggestions. I'll get after it when I'm not at Wikimania with a dying computer :)
cheers, Phoebe
On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 11:19 AM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 8:42 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
phoebe ayers wrote:
The Board has been working on a report of our activities; please find
the
first report, covering May and June of this year, below. This is a short summary, meant to help share our work with the community and movement,
and
help make Board work and trustee activities more accessible &
transparent.
This first report took some time to put together, but we hope to post
future
reports on a regular schedule. Please let me know if you have any
feedback
or suggestions.
Looks pretty good. Thanks for putting this together. :-)
I think posting the reports (or links to the reports) on Meta-Wiki or wikimediafoundation.org would be good. There is already some infrastructure in place, e.g., http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Reports.
Meta link: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_Report,_May-June_2011
-- phoebe
Meta link: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_Report,_May-June_2011
-- phoebe
Thanks for the link, Phoebe. Since none of the meta pages linked to this page, I created
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_Reports
which I hope will be updated on a regular basis by adding new reports.
Cheers Yaroslav
phoebe ayers, 04/08/2011 07:29:
The Board has been working on a report of our activities; please find the first report, covering May and June of this year, below. This is a short summary, meant to help share our work with the community and movement, and help make Board work and trustee activities more accessible& transparent.
Thank you! For the next reports, you might consider to define the scope of the report better. For instance, it's probably not suitable for blog.wikimedia.org because it's not for the general public, but this means that you can worry less about some things which are difficult to explain. As far as I understand, it's meant to cover the activities of all board members and represent the board as a whole: this is going to be very hard work! But another consequence is that it will contain only "official board positions", as opposed to e.g. the point of view of the 3 or 3+2 community members. This is up to you, but then I don't understand the purpose of the first half of the report (before "Other Board work"): as it is, it might be just a duplicate of the resolutions and minutes on the wiki; not more informative, nor significantly shorter, nor providing different insights. In other words, you could consider to drop that part reducing your work and the community could just learn to read the resolutions (which are few and short) and minutes (which are not so long after all) on the wiki. For those who don't know, there are also feeds for them (as for any wiki page, hence quite raw, but still serving the purpose). http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolutions http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Meetings http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Resolutions&feed=atom&a... http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Meetings&feed=atom&...
Nemo
On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 12:16 PM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:
phoebe ayers, 04/08/2011 07:29:
The Board has been working on a report of our activities; please find the first report, covering May and June of this year, below. This is a short summary, meant to help share our work with the community and movement,
and
help make Board work and trustee activities more accessible&
transparent.
Thank you! For the next reports, you might consider to define the scope of the report better. For instance, it's probably not suitable for blog.wikimedia.org because it's not for the general public, but this means that you can worry less about some things which are difficult to explain. As far as I understand, it's meant to cover the activities of all board members and represent the board as a whole: this is going to be very hard work! But another consequence is that it will contain only "official board positions", as opposed to e.g. the point of view of the 3 or 3+2 community members. This is up to you, but then I don't understand the purpose of the first half of the report (before "Other Board work"): as it is, it might be just a duplicate of the resolutions and minutes on the wiki; not more informative, nor significantly shorter, nor providing different insights. In other words, you could consider to drop that part reducing your work and the community could just learn to read the resolutions (which are few and short) and minutes (which are not so long after all) on the wiki. For those who don't know, there are also feeds for them (as for any wiki page, hence quite raw, but still serving the purpose). http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolutions http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Meetings
http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Resolutions&feed=atom&a...
http://wikimediafoundation.org/w/index.php?title=Meetings&feed=atom&...
Nemo
Thanks Nemo!
It is true that the first part of the report is a duplication of the resolutions & meeting minutes that we publish. My assumption here was that not everyone keeps up with all of the board resolutions etc :) It is also nice to have a single record of everything we did in a given time period; I was mainly trying to be complete. Of course those who are already familiar with all of this should feel free to skip over this section. (But if there's a way to make it more useful, that would be great -- and if others think it should be dropped as well let me know!)
I'm not sure why you say this is not for the general public. I would not mind if the general public read it -- there's nothing confidential. The only reason to not disseminate it as-is on the blog is that it is kind of dry and not especially well written :)
My hope here is that the reports would be: a) a way for our wider community (i.e. people who don't follow the wmfwiki) to know what the board is up to; b) a way for everyone, internally and externally, to see some of the other work the board does that is not well known -- for instance the board governance committee stuff; c) highlight some of the awesome work our trustees do on their own out in the world with communities and outreach. (And maybe some of these activities will turn into more interesting blog posts!)
I imagine that the people potentially interested in this might be Wikimedians, internal folks of all types, and even external people like our partners. Part of my motivation is to answer the question "what does the board do???" which seems to come up at every board election :)
At any rate I will be working on July-August this weekend and then I expect it will take a couple of weeks for the board members to get all of their submissions in and review the report. And then I hope to refine the schedule so we can get it out sooner. So please do keep the comments coming and let me know what needs to be changed.
best, phoebe
phoebe ayers, 24/08/2011 18:39:
Thanks Nemo! It is true that the first part of the report is a duplication of the resolutions& meeting minutes that we publish. My assumption here was that not everyone keeps up with all of the board resolutions etc :) It is also nice to have a single record of everything we did in a given time period; I was mainly trying to be complete. Of course those who are already familiar with all of this should feel free to skip over this section. (But if there's a way to make it more useful, that would be great -- and if others think it should be dropped as well let me know!)
Good to know, now that you clarified this I know that I can avoid reading everything twice to spot the small differences :-p It can indeed be useful to put everything together and if it's not too much work for you, good for us. :-)
I'm not sure why you say this is not for the general public. I would not mind if the general public read it -- there's nothing confidential. The only reason to not disseminate it as-is on the blog is that it is kind of dry and not especially well written :)
Yes, that's just it, you can write it with less effort if it's not meant for the blog.
My hope here is that the reports would be: a) a way for our wider community (i.e. people who don't follow the wmfwiki) to know what the board is up to; b) a way for everyone, internally and externally, to see some of the other work the board does that is not well known -- for instance the board governance committee stuff; c) highlight some of the awesome work our trustees do on their own out in the world with communities and outreach. (And maybe some of these activities will turn into more interesting blog posts!)
I imagine that the people potentially interested in this might be Wikimedians, internal folks of all types, and even external people like our partners. Part of my motivation is to answer the question "what does the board do???" which seems to come up at every board election :)
At any rate I will be working on July-August this weekend and then I expect it will take a couple of weeks for the board members to get all of their submissions in and review the report. And then I hope to refine the schedule so we can get it out sooner. So please do keep the comments coming and let me know what needs to be changed.
Great! Thank you, Nemo
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