Dear Wikimedians,

At the Wikimedia Foundation, our mission is to empower, support and engage people around the world to share in free knowledge. One of our top priorities for the WMF in 2015 is improving organizational effectiveness in service of this mission. This means we need to strengthen WMF's ability to set and deliver on commitments, improve organizational discipline around decision making, and mature internal processes and systems.  

To ensure we can execute on our vision, mission, forthcoming strategy and our Call to Action, we have hired for a new position within our C-level team. Terry Gilbey will be joining us as interim Chief Operating Officer, responsible for building rigor and discipline around our operational processes. Terry’s role will help WMF stabilize our core operations so we will be ready and able to adapt and innovate in our changing environment. It will also help me find more time to focus on our products and communities.

Terry comes from managing his own consulting firm and has been in a consulting role at WMF working on a number of projects such as goal-setting, financials, and budgeting. He has first-hand experience working with the WMF leadership team, and we are all excited to work more closely with him. Previously, Terry was the Executive Director of Enterprise Operations at Kaiser Permanente, a nationwide healthcare organization, and served in various management roles at IBM Global Services.

Terry is originally from England and has lived in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Central America. He currently lives in the South Bay, but also spends a lot of time in Panama on a rural farm. He spends his spare time pursuing unusual hobbies, such as bull riding, surfing, and more recently, supporting a women’s flat track roller derby team. He also rides motorcycles, does metal work, and has an avid interest in sustainability. An early adopter of Tor, Terry believes strongly in the right to privacy and the free and open access to knowledge as an equalizer.

With the COO position, we will be organizing our HR and Finance teams to report to Terry. Garfield will continue as the CFO for the organization, a member of the C-level team, and Treasurer of the Board. His roles and responsibilities will remain unchanged, reporting to Terry. Terry and Garfield will manage all financial and business planning activities and are already making progress together. We’ll introduce Terry properly with a short Q&A at the April metrics meeting.

It is with sadness that I report to you that Gayle Karen Young, Chief Talent and Culture Officer has decided move onto her next adventure. Gayle let me know she has been looking to move on some time ago, and she felt this was the right moment in time. In her three and a half years within the Foundation, she has made a tremendous impact creating a HR department that is fundamentally about caring for the people in the organization and offering services that allow people to do their best work, which has supported our mission to help our communities thrive and curate knowledge. While we will miss her wisdom and warmth, we thank her for her leadership and celebrate her future adventures. HR will report directly to Terry at this time.

Our purpose is to help Wikimedians around the world make the sum of all knowledge available to everyone. We believe these changes, effective immediately, will help us focus on our continued service to our community and readers, and progress toward this mission.

Please join me in welcoming Terry as the newest member of our leadership team and wishing Gayle well.  We have much exciting work in 2015, and I’m looking forward to all the great things we will accomplish as we work together to support our vision.

~~~~Lila