FYI - belatedly forwarding after internal announcement:
- - -
Hi folks,
Guillaume Paumier has been Technical Communications Manager in the
Engineering Community Team since early 2011. In this role, he's been
instrumental in developing the monthly engineering reports (including
all the underlying infrastructure on mediawiki.org), vetting and
writing technical blog posts and social media updates, and most
recently, co-launching the weekly tech newsletter and keeping it
running.
Guillaume's role is changing, and he will shift to my department as
part of the Engineering/Product department division. He will report
directly to me as Senior Analyst, and I will deploy him to projects of
strategic importance that require his expertise (any Guillaume
deployments will not be noted on the deployments calendar). Guillaume
will continue to put some of his time towards the tech newsletters and
reports for the time being (though we're considering to merge the
two), but other communications responsibilities will be handled by
Katherine's team.
What does it mean to be a Senior Analyst? As a long-time Wikimedian
(since 2005), Guillaume understands many of Wikimedia's workflows
deeply. As a self-confessed OCD introvert, he loves documenting,
analyzing; breaking apart things and putting them back together in
novel ways. He's awesome at information architecture, and at really
thinking through all the options to solve a complex product problem.
In other words, when I see a product that benefits from deep community
expertise, I can throw Guillaume at it and he'll help. :)
The first project Guillaume is taking on in this new role is the file
metadata cleanup drive, preparatory to the Structured Data work the
multimedia team will focus on in coming months. You can read more
about it here:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File_metadata_cleanup_drive
Finally, it's my pleasure to announce that Guillaume is also
relocating (back!) to the San Francisco Bay Area. Please join me in
congratulating Guillaume in this new role and wishing him a
stress-free move to San Francisco.
Warmly,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation
Dear friends and colleagues,
I am delighted to announce that Jake Orlowitz (User:Ocaasi, User:Ocaasi (WMF))
is joining the Grantmaking department at WMF to lead The Wikipedia Library
(TWL)[1], an online resource for Wikipedians to get free access to
journal subscriptions.
In the last year, TWL has helped nearly 2000 unique users access 3000
accounts of sources like JSTOR, Elsevier, De Gruyter, and Oxford University
Press,[2] and is now experimenting with community-run branches in Arabic,
German and other languages.
Jake will be a full-time contractor with part-time support from Alex Stinson
(User:Sadads, User:Astinson (WMF)) for an initial period of six months.
They are both working with an amazing volunteer team of Wikipedians guided
by Head of Volunteer Coordination (User:Nikkimaria). We're particularly
looking forward to seeing how TWL can expand its global (non-English) work,
and what it can teach us about the best ways to support some of our top
contributors, and improve content on our projects.
Many of you know Jake well, but for those who don't: Jake (Ocaasi) is a
long time Wikipedian, with two Individual Engagement Grants from us, and he
has been on the IEG grants committee for the past two years. Jake works
remotely from Philadelphia but is frequently in the Bay Area, especially
during long and dark East Coast winters. Alex has been involved for many
years with both Education and GLAM outreach. He resides in Kansas where he
works on Digital Humanities at Kansas State.
You can catch up on all of TWL's new happenings in the latest edition of
the Books and Bytes newsletter.[7] We're excited to bring The Wikipedia
Library on board and look forward to its growth and evolution!
Warmly,
Anasuya
Jake Orlowitz (User:Ocaasi) started editing in 2007 as an ip. Early on he
worked on articles about religious groups, political movements,
and alternative health. Around 2010 he shifted focus from editing
to helping new users, working in the irc-help channel and developing the Plain
and Simple guide for New Editors [3] and its COI counterpart [4]. In 2012
Jake began developing projects through the Individual Engagement Grants
department at WMF. He built The Wikipedia Adventure,[5] a playful
interactive game to onboard new editors. He also began establishing and
expanding donation partnerships in The Wikipedia Library to provide free
research access to top article contributors. He helps out as a board member
of Wiki Project Med Foundation [6] and gives talks about Wikipedia's role
in education. Jake grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs and studied
political theory at Wesleyan, before starting a tutoring company in
Colorado. He currently splits his time between coasts, working
full-time on Wikipedia
projects. His contract with WMF will focus on expanding the number and
global reach of Wikipedia Library partnerships.
Alex Stinson (User:Sadads) is a 9-year editor with over 80,000 contributions,
actively involved in different forms of outreach. He
is currently a project manager with the The Wikipedia Library, a long time
volunteer with The Wikipedia Education Program, and supporter of GLAM-Wiki
outreach. Alex has a Masters degree in English Literature from Kansas State
University with research focused on cultural studies and the digital
humanities. He works as a digital humanist at K-State, where he helps
develop projects and create partnerships with educators and cultural
institutions.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library
[2]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/The_Wikipedia_Library/Renewal/Fi…
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:PANDS
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:PSCOI
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Adventure
[6] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WPMED
[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library/Newsletter/Au…
--
*Anasuya SenguptaSenior Director of GrantmakingWikimedia Foundation*
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in
the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
Support Wikimedia <https://donate.wikimedia.org/>
TL;DR: Please comment on any or all of the 11 2014-2015 Round 1 proposals
from Wikimedia movement organizations to the Annual Plan Grants program
from now til 31 October!
Greetings, Wikimedia community:
We are happy to share with you that eleven applicants have submitted
proposals in 2014-2015 Round 1 of the Annual Plan Grants (APG) process.
These Wikimedia organizations are requesting general funding to support
their annual plans, which include both programmatic and operational costs.
These eleven requests in Round 1 total about US$5.2 million of US$6 million
available in both rounds this year. In November, the Funds Dissemination
Committee (FDC) will meet to review and deliberate on these proposals. They
will make a recommendation to the WMF Board of Trustees about how to
strategically grant funds to these applicants in order to achieve the most
impact.
>From now until October 31, we invite everyone to review the proposals, and
to provide thoughts and ask questions on the discussion pages of the
proposals:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/Community/Review.
About community review: The APG proposal submission date on October 1 is
followed by a 30-day open comment period, when anyone is invited to provide
input on and ask questions about specific proposals on the discussion pages
of the proposal forms. Applicants are also expected to respond to input and
questions during this period, although they are not able to change the
proposal form itself after the submission date.
The FDC will review the discussion pages during their deliberations in
November as one of many inputs to the decision-making process. While anyone
can comment on proposals after the open comment period closes on October
31, the FDC may not be able to take comments made after this period into
consideration when making its decisions.
How to join in the review: Please visit the community review page to view
the proposals being considered and follow the instructions on that page.
The proposals are only available in English, but your comments on the
discussion pages can be in your own language.
Why your feedback matters: We hope that this open comment period will add
to an in-depth and robust review of each proposal. The community review
process also helps make our grantmaking transparent and collaborative. The
FDC highly values feedback and insights from the Wikimedia community in
making its funding recommendations.
Here are a few milestones to keep in mind with the FDC process:
* Proposal forms submitted: 1 October 2014
* Open comment period / Community review: 2 October 2014, until 31 October
2014
* Staff proposal assessments published: 8 November 2014
* FDC deliberations: 15-18 November 2014
* FDC recommendation published: by 1 December 2014
* Board decision: by 1 January 2015
* Start of new grant terms: 1 January 2015
Visit https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Information for more
information about the APG program, the FDC, or the dates listed here. Please
let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or feedback about the
process. We are always happy to talk! The FDC support staff can be reached
at FDCsupport(a)wikimedia.org
Warm regards,
Katy Love and the FDC staff
This press release is also available online here:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/The_Wikimedia_Foundatio…
Wikimedia Foundation hires Damon Sicore as Vice President of Engineering
- *New role strengthens Foundation’s commitment to excellence in
engineering*
The Wikimedia Foundation is pleased to announce that Damon Sicore will be
joining the Foundation in the newly created role of Vice President of
Engineering. Damon brings nearly two decades of engineering and product
experience to Wikimedia, the non-profit organization responsible for
Wikipedia -- the world’s fifth most visited website, serving half a billion
readers every month.
Damon will manage the Foundation’s engineering team dedicated to ensuring
the development, scale, and reliability of Wikimedia’s technical
architecture. Before joining Wikimedia he spent six years at Mozilla
Corporation, three of them as Vice President of Engineering, where he led a
team of more than 600 open source software engineers, technical leads,
managers, and directors in developing Mozilla Firefox, the Mozilla open
source platform, Firefox for Android and Firefox OS. Under his leadership
Mozilla delivered some of their most significant browser releases and
launched Mozilla’s entry into mobile with Firefox OS.
“Damon has extensive experience with high-scale, open source technologies
and an intrinsic understanding of our mission and values,” said Wikimedia
Foundation Executive Director, Lila Tretikov. “He brings organizational and
scaling skills necessary to improve and innovate for our communities of
contributors and the next generation of knowledge seekers.”
Most recently, Damon led engineering at Edmodo, an emerging platform for
sharing educational content for teachers and students, where he oversaw and
grew the company’s web, platform, and mobile engineering, security, IT
operations, support, and QA efforts.
"The Wikimedia projects are front and center in the fight for free
knowledge, and that’s why I am here,” said Damon Sicore. “I'm looking
forward to challenging us to ensure our software is up to the task. We need
to move fast and produce the high quality software and services our users
will love. It's what the world expects and deserves from us.”
Damon joins the Wikimedia Foundation as part of planned growth of the
organization’s technical capacity, first announced in November 2012. Erik
Moeller, who has filled the role of Vice President of Product and
Engineering since 2011, will continue to focus on product in the role of
Vice President of Product and Strategy.
About the Wikimedia Foundation
https://wikimediafoundation.orghttps://blog.wikimedia.org/
The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Across its 287 language versions,
Wikipedia contains more than 32 million articles. Every month, roughly
80,000 active volunteers contribute to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia
projects. According to comScore Media Metrix, the projects operated by the
Wikimedia Foundation receive 413 million unique visitors per month on
desktop alone, making them the fifth-most popular web property worldwide
(July 2014). Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation
is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations
and grants.
Wikimedia Foundation Press Contact:
Katherine Maher
+1 415-839-6885 ext 6633katherine[image: @]wikimedia.org
(To be unsubscribed from this press release distribution list, please reply with 'UNSUBSCRIBE' in the subject line)
Dear all,
We are excited to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation now has a Vice
President of Engineering. Damon Sicore will be filling this vital role.
Please join us in welcoming him to the team.
The VPE role will be crucial to further developing and maintaining the
technology that supports the very core of the Wikimedia movement, and
ensuring the development, scale, and stability of the MediaWiki
architecture.
Damon joins us as part of planned growth of our product and engineering
teams, first announced in November 2012. As we have grown, we need
dedicated focus on product and engineering as separate departments, to
ensure development of best practices like performance engineering,
continuous delivery, A/B testing, software re-architecture, UI/UX work, and
user research. Erik Moeller, who filled the role of VP for both product and
engineering since 2011, led in the creation of this new role and was
essential to the search process. From today onward, Erik will focus on his
role as VP of Product and Strategy and Deputy Director of the WMF, while
Damon will take over leadership of the Engineering team; both will report
to me as part of the c-level team.
Damon has a unique track record of managing large platform rollouts using
distributed teams like ours, while understanding the essential role of
community contributions and working in a transparent, open source
environment. These skills and experiences will be invaluable in his work
here at the Foundation. It’s unusual to find someone who understands us so
well, and so I want to thank the many people from across the organization,
especially in the engineering, product, and human resources teams, who have
been involved in making this search successful.
We are very happy to have Damon on board. His proven track record of
managing large platform rollouts using distributed teams like ours, while
understanding the essential role of community contributions and working in
a transparent, open source environment, is unique and invaluable as part of
our movement.
We’ll be sending around a copy of the press release shortly. You’ll also be
be able to meet Damon, and ask him questions, this Thursday at our monthly
Metrics Meeting
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings>.
Please join us there!
Please join me in welcoming Damon.
Lila
Hi all!
The new bulletin from Wikimedia Italia (#85) is available. Summary:
- Archeowiki: the big final event
<http://wiki.wikimedia.it/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_news/numero_85/en&acti…>
- Macchianera Awards
<http://wiki.wikimedia.it/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_news/numero_85/en&acti…>
- Events
<http://wiki.wikimedia.it/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_news/numero_85/en&acti…>
- News from OpenStreetMap
<http://wiki.wikimedia.it/w/index.php?title=Wikimedia_news/numero_85/en&acti…>
A link has been added to meta, at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Italia…
; more-or-less raw text of the bulletin follows below.
ciao, .mau.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
= Wikimedia News n. 85, September 18th 2014 =
<div style="max-width: 800px"> <!-- oppure width: 80% -->
<center>
[[File:loghiOSMit.png|thumb|500px|center| OpenStreetMap Italy Logo, di
Aury88 [CC-BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons]]
<br />
<font size="5">OSMit in Matera</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>The national gathering of OpenStreetMap supporters
(OSMit14) will be held in Matera from ''October the 3rd to the 5th 2014'''-
Mapping places in an open format, allowing the contribution by everyone to
complete the maps is their core goal.
Why having OSMit14 in Matera? Because '''Matera is candidated to European
Capital of Culture''' for 2019. The open mapping was a key element in
involving the city and its citizens in a voluntary mobilization that had a
big impact on the access to candidacy “semi-finals“, in 2013. '''Open
Future''' has become Matera 2019 motto.
80 to 100 mappers and supporters from all over Italy will be in OSMit14, to
share experiences of open mapping in both Italy and Europe. All information
about registration and attendance are available on the website
http://conf.openstreetmap.it</p>
<br />
<br />
<center>
[[File:BEIC.jpg|thumb|400px|center| Logo ''Biblioteca Europea di
Informazione e Cultura'']]
<BR>
<font size="5">Wikipedian in residence at Fondazione BEIC</font>
</center>
<p align=justify>The '''[http://www.beic.it/it Biblioteca Europea di
Informazione e Cultura (BEIC)]''' (European Library of Information and
Culture) was born in Milan with ''the goal of offering to the community a
state of the art structure for universal access to information and
knowledge in all their forms, thanks to an on-line repository of
bibliographic resources and documents from Milan metropolitan area using
the most advanced digital techniques'' (translating from their website).
This statement shows how BEIC and Wikimedia Italia share a purpose that
pushed towards an agreement: our association will be a bridge between the
Library and Wikipedia community. To this goal, the Board identified a
member, known as [[Utente:Nemo|Nemo]], that will act as consultant, as
experienced with the "Wikipedian in residence". In four months (September
15th - January 15th), the wikipedian will teach to and help BEIC employees
in mastering Wikipedia and understanding its philosophy and the inner
working of Wikimedia projects.
Both parties hope that this partnership, even if limited at the beginning,
will strengthen and grow.</p>
<br style="clear: both" />
== Archeowiki: the big final event ==
[[File:AW_logo.jpg|thumb|200px|left| Logo Archeowiki]]
<br>
<p align=justify>After two years of training volunteers, meetings at
schools, senior centres and with disabled youngs, the '''[
http://www.archeowiki.it/ Archeowiki - New ''archaeologists'' in Lombardia.
Real and virtual trails]''' project ends. Wikimedia Italia, along with its
project partners, organizes a closing event aimed to students that in the
past year participated in the ectivities. The event will be held '''Friday
September 26th''', from 10AM to 2PM, at '''La Fabbrica del Vapore''' in
Milano. Thanks to the support of a group of volunteers, the classes will be
involved in a big archaeological and wikipedian game.</p>
<br style="clear: both">
== Macchianera Awards ==
[[File:Macchianera.jpg|thumb|150px|left| Macchianera Award]]
<br>
<br>
<p align=justify>Saturday September 13th the '''Macchianera Italian Awards
2014''', the best in the Web reqards, have been assigned at "Festa della
Rete" ("Net party") in Rimini. Italian Wikipedia received the prize for
'''best educational website'''; the award was collected by two members of
Wikimedia Italia: DracoRoboter and Kaspo, as representatives of all the
contributors. Wikipedia is for everyone and so is the award! In this [
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qZbK1CrknE&t=32m40s video] the award
ceremony, with a funny moment.</p>
<br style="clear: both">
== Events ==
[[File:Il Pertini, Cinisello Balsamo Italia.jpg|thumb|200px|left|"Il
Pertini" library in Cinisello B.mo, by Giulio.fortunio (Own work)
[CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons]]
<br>
* '''September 29-30th and October 1st, Paris''': the board members of
Wikimedia Italy and some volunteers will be at the [
http://www.eagle-network.eu/about/events/eagle2014/ EAGLE 2014
International Conference on Information Technologies for Epigraphy and
Digital Cultural Heritage in the Ancient World]. Specifically, Andrea Zanni
(''President''), Luca Martinelli (''Secretary''), Lorenzo Losa, Pietro
Liuzzo and Pietro De Nicolao for the '''EAGLE MediaWiki''' project; while
Cristian Consonni (''Treasurer'') and some representatives of partner
associations will share the '''Archeowiki''' experience. Attendance is
free, but due to the limited number of seat [
http://www.eagle-network.eu/about/events/eagle2014/registration/
registration] is required.
* '''October 15th and 22th, Cinisello (MI)''': [
http://wiki.wikimedia.it/wiki/Utente:Laurentius Laurentius] will host two
meetings at the [
http://www.comune.cinisello-balsamo.mi.it/spip.php?rubrique107 Il Pertini
library], presenting Wikipedia and the projects to the audience, in the
context of a partnership being defined.
* '''WLM events''': an always up-to-date '''calendar'' about all the
photographic tours and the meetings is available on [
http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/ Wiki Loves Monuments website].
<br style="clear: both">
== News from OpenStreetMap ==
[[File:OSM.png|thumb|250px|left| Visualization fo the first 200 places for
Points of Interest density in Europe (by [
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/baditaflorin/diary/23729 baditaflorin])]]
<br>
* In the past days the transparency portal about the Expo 2015 was
launched, from where it is possible to check the status of contacts and
download their data. The background maps are from one of the OpenStreetMap
renderings (OpenCycleMap).
* OSM is used as background in the webgis of MiBACT: [
http://sitap.beniculturali.it/ the SITAP]
* While wandering for Wiki Loves Monuments, please check if the Wikipedia
article about the monument contains its coordinates: if missing, take them
from OpenStreetMap!
<br style="clear: both">