Jimbo, I accept the appointment as Chief Research Officer, and thank you for your trust, and for this recognition. Given Anthere's posting here on positions that were appointed by you before the Board was created: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2005-April/002998.html .. I would briefly like to ask the rest of the Board to comment on whether they consider these new official positions to be fully valid, i.e. "official" official positions that will be listed on the Foundation website etc. It is my understanding that this appointment reflects an internal agreement of the Board, but it would be nice to have a confirmation of that belief. As for what exactly Chief Research Officer means, I am working on a more comprehensive proposal for an open (!) Wikimedia Research Team that I will put on Meta later today, and which includes a definition of this role. (The Board is familiar with this proposal.) I will state here in advance that I consider it to be a role that exists *alongside* development and is in no way intended to interfere with the existing software development processes. As Tim correctly notes, it's important that we're not introducing a new element of authority here, but primarily first points of contact for certain issues. Beyond that, I think the holders of these official positions should take a basic *organizational* role in the fields they are working in, e.g., propose meetings and agendas, though that is certainly also an open process. I also see it as my role to write regular reports, and to build bridges between the Board, other researchers, and the community. Regarding Sj's earlier arguments, I believe it *is* important that we have titles like these. Giving people a title is free, and it's a nice way to show appreciation, especially when we only have 2 elected members of the community on the Board. It would not be fair to have these two titles, "Vice President of Wikimedia" (Anthere) and "Executive Secretary of Wikimedia" (Angela), while delegating all other users to be mere members of vague "Special Interest Groups" -- this only creates jealousy and friction, not to mention that it overloads these two members of the community. More on this in my Research Team proposal. All that being said, with the exception of Brion and Chad, Wikimedia is still just a hobby for all of us, including even the trustees. I therefore hope it goes without saying that any time commitments I can give to this may change based on real life requirements. However, I consider this role more important than anything else I've done within Wikimedia, and will shift most of my activities towards it. I personally consider Wikimedia and the principles for which it stands to be of historical significance. There's more than just the much-cited peer review issues (which I definitely want to work on), and Wikimedia is not just Wikipedia. One of my key goals, in fact, is to help these other ideas to really take off: * to create and distribute free and reliable learning resources on any topic (Wikibooks) * to build a neutral and open news source with citizen reporters around the planet (Wikinews) * to digitize and translate source texts into as many languages as possible (Wikisource) * to define every word in every language (including sign languages) and to make these free dictionaries easy to search, download, use and interface with (Wiktionary) * to build the world's largest repository of useful and free media content, to harness the creative energy of millions to create original videos, photos and artwork for our projects, and to make the whole thing easy to search and use (Wikimedia Commons) * to open up the gigantic field of structured databases to the wiki model, from databases of scientific articles to catalogs of movies and books, from chemical structures to biological taxonomies (Wikidata) * to establish a free, world-wide institution of learning, certification, research and publication that allows anyone to participate (what I call Wikisophia). Take all this, and everything else we're doing and will be doing, and imagine we succeed in only half of the goals we set for ourselves, and you get an idea how important the whole thing is. It's a massive challenge, but it would be a grave error in judgment not to undertake it. As Jimmy said in a recent radio interview, "There's no going back." The collaborative model is here to stay. We have the chance to lay the groundwork for the knowldege society of tomorrow. In many ways, we have already done it, but Wikipedia today is merely scratching the surface of what is possible. I'm too much of a futurist to imagine Wikimedia's technology in 10 or 20 years as recognizable from our perspective today, but the content we are creating, the global community we are building, and the basic organizational framework: these things will continue to exist. I cannot imagine being part of a single more interesting project in the world today. All best, Erik