***Resending this note because the earlier version seemed to have really broken formatting. Hope this is better.***

Hello folks,

I’m delighted to tell you that the Wikimedia Foundation has a new Chief Talent and Culture Officer, Gayle Karen Young.

Recapping: the purpose of the CTCO role is to have a person on staff dedicated to continually strengthening and improving all our practices related to people --such as recruitment, on-boarding, skills development, organizational design, goal-setting, compensation and performance assessment-- with the overall goal of ensuring that the Wikimedia Foundation’s work culture is healthy and high-performance.

I created the role because I believe that for organizations to be effective, it's critical that they have good talent and culture practices. Most non-profits skimp on funding HR because they want to be cautious with donors’ money, and they think investing in people is a bit of a luxury. I disagree. At the Wikimedia Foundation, half our spending is on salaries -- in other words, on people. So it seems to me that recruiting great people and creating the conditions in which they can flourish, is an excellent investment. That’s why the Wikimedia Foundation has a CTCO.

Back to Gayle. A few months ago, Cyn Skyberg told Wikimedia she’d be leaving us. I then hired Lisa Grossman of m|Oppenheim to find us a successor for Cyn. Lisa spoke with hundreds of candidates, and brought six to be interviewed by me, Erik and Garfield Byrd. Our finalist candidates then spoke with Cyn, Barry, Geoff and Zack, and worked on projects for us which involved interviewing Aaron Schulz, Alolita Sharma, Asher Feldman, Brandon Harris, CT Woo, Dana Isokawa, Howie Fung, Jay Walsh, Kul Wadhwa, Leslie Harms, Melanie Brown, Rob Lanphier, Steven Walling and Tomasz Finc. They were also interviewed by Jan-Bart de Vreede, the vice-chair of the Board and the chair of the Board’s HR committee.

It was an extensive search! And I am really happy about the outcome.

Gayle Karen Young is a seasoned HR consultant and organizational psychologist with expertise in leadership development, change management, facilitation, group dynamics, and Agile team effectiveness training. She has worked with a wide variety of non-profit and for-profit organizations across industries including tech, hospitality, restaurants, airlines, healthcare, and education. She is the board president of Spark, a non-profit organization that engages young people in global women’s human rights issues. Gayle is also a facilitator for the Stanford Graduate School of Business for their Interpersonal Dynamics course and their Women in Management program. She mentors for the Thiel Foundation’s 20 Under 20 Fellowship program, and generally supports futurist causes because she likes audacious ideas and grand challenges. She has designed and facilitated conferences for the Singularity Summit, BIL (TED’s un-conference sibling), and the Seasteading Institute.  She has a BA in psychology from the University of San Francisco, and an MA in organizational psychology from Alliant International University.

I think Gayle will be a really great culture fit for the Wikimedia movement. She's an iconoclastic geek who goes to ComicCon, but unlike most geeks she is warm and people-centred: when she was a kid, she wanted to grow up to be Deanna Troi from Star Trek. She’s insatiably curious and reads widely. She was born in the Philippines and travels annually with Spark, most recently to China and Cambodia. You can read more about Gayle here on her userpage on the English Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GayleKaren, and you can see some of the work she’s done for us here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GayleKaren/WMF_Recruiting_Strategy_Project.

I want to thank everyone who was involved in this long and elaborate hiring process, and I want to especially thank Cyn. As the Wikimedia Foundation's first CTCO Cyn had the unenviable task of breaking lots of new ground – she leaves us in much better shape than she found us, and I’m grateful to her for everything she's done for us.

Gayle will start work January 3. She’s a foundation-l subscriber, so I believe she will see any replies to this e-mail. I'm on holiday for the next three days, so if there are any replies to this note that need a response from me, you'll hear from me Friday.

Thanks, Sue

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Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation

415 839 6885 office 415 816 9967 cell

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