Cross-posting; important information.
Best
Bishakha
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Jan-Bart de Vreede" <jdevreede(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: May 1, 2014 11:47 PM
Subject: [Wikimedia Announcements] Please welcome Lila Tretikov, the
Wikimedia Foundation's new ED
To: <wikimediaannounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Dear fellow community members,
On behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees I am delighted to
announce that the new Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation will
be Lila Tretikov. Lila is a widely respected Bay Area technology leader,
most recently with SugarCRM.
As many of you know, about a year ago Sue Gardner announced she planned to
step down as our ED. As we launched the search for her successor, we spent
some time working through the most critical requirements for the role. We
decided the new ED should be someone with a product/engineering background,
ideally in an open-source or other online community context. We wanted
someone experienced with organisations that were growing, who'd managed
staff and budgets comparable to ours, and who had experience creating
continuous delivery of technology improvements in an agile context. We
wanted a person who is oriented towards collaboration, transparency and
openness, with some experience with complex stakeholder environments, and
with an international orientation. We knew we needed someone with courage
and strong personal integrity, who wouldn't be intimidated by attempts to
censor the projects.
Lila is precisely what we set out to find.
Lila was born in the Soviet Union and moved to the United States alone, as
a teenager. She's been working for technology companies, primarily in open
source, in the Bay Area for the past 15 years. In 1999 she started her
career at Sun Microsystems. Shortly afterwards she founded GrokDigital, a
technology and design company. She spent three years as senior director of
development at Telespree, a company that provides cloud-based wireless data
services for mobile carriers. For the past eight years, she was at
SugarCRM, where she held positions of increasing responsibility as the
organization grew, including being in charge of internal IT, marketing,
customer support and professional services, engineering, and product
development. She has a stellar reputation as a leader who is highly
skilled, collaborative, open, passionate and curious.
We think Lila will be a terrific fit for the ED role. The Transition Team
(Phoebe, Alice, Kat, Sue, Erik, Geoff, Gayle and I) voted unanimously to
recommend her to the Board, and the Board voted unanimously to accept the
recommendation. She strikes all of us as smart, brave and unpretentious,
and we believe she has the skills the WMF needs.
Lila is going to spend the next few weeks in learning-and-listening mode,
and will take over the ED position from Sue at the end of the month. Her
first priority will be to immerse herself in deepening her understanding of
the Wikimedia projects.
I want to close this announcement by saying a heartfelt and deeply
appreciative thanks to Sue, who has been the Executive Director of the
Wikimedia Foundation for the past seven years. When the Board and I hired
Sue in 2007, we were just a chaotic little non-profit in small-town
Florida, with a tiny staff and not much money. Over the past seven years,
Sue's leadership has built the Foundation into an effective, well-funded
and well-managed organisation, with integrity and a clear sense of purpose,
and her steady and committed presence throughout the search process was
integral in helping us come to this excellent result. We will be forever
grateful for her leadership and vision, and I hope we can continue to rely
on her support in the months and years ahead.
In June Sue will move into a new role as a special advisor to me and Lila.
She'll also take a well-earned holiday, and maybe even a bit of a
wiki-break, before beginning to think about what she's going to do next.
Many of us will get a chance to see her in London, at Wikimania, in August.
The Wikimedia Foundation is delighted to have reached such a successful
outcome to the search. My thanks to Lisa Grossman of m/Oppenheim for
helping us with it, and I ask you to please join me in extending a warm
welcome to Lila Tretikov, our new ED.
Jan-Bart de Vreede
Chair
Wikimedia Board of Trustees
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