[Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees: October 2008

Sun Dec 14 20:57:37 UTC 2008

Sue Gardner wrote:
> Hey folks,
> 
> Here is the RTTB for October. November will follow soon :-)
> 
> Enjoy!
> Sue
> 
> 
> Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
> 
> Covering:          October 2008
> Prepared by:    Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
> Prepared for:   Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
> 
> MY CURRENT PRIORITIES
> 
> 1. Planning for Bangalore and Davos trips
> 2. Finalization of staff goals and performance check-ins
> 3. Planning for development of the strategic plan
> 4. Ongoing major donor solicitation and stewardship, foundation proposal
> follow-up
> 5. Bits and pieces (all-staff meeting, CPO recruitment, Wikimania 2008
> postmortem, office space revamp, Board Nominating Committee, etc.)
> 
> THIS PAST MONTH
> 
> BOARD MEETING
> 
> The Board met the first weekend of October at the WMF offices in San
> Francisco, with all Board members in attendance.  During the meeting, the
> Board reviewed and approved the Gift Policy and Privacy Policy. As always,
> these are posted at:
> 
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Policies
> 
> Treasurer Stuart West presented an update on the audit, informing the Board
> that the audit is progressing much more quickly than last year, and that the
> Board will receive the financial statements within a few weeks.  Vice-Chair
> Jan-Bart de Vreede made a presentation on Open Standards and a discussion
> was held about file formats.
> 
> Discussions were also held about Advisory Board and Board development, and
> the formation of sub-national chapters. Erik Moeller gave updates and
> answered questions regarding Wikimedia's technology priorities, and the
> online fundraiser.  Minutes from the July meeting were approved.
> 
> The minutes of the October meeting will be approved and published following
> the next board meeting, in January.
> 
> FUNDRAISING AND GRANTS
> 
> Extensive work was done by all departments on fine-tuning the various
> components of the Annual Campaign in preparation for the  launch the first
> week of November:
> 
> * Further testing and development of the CiviCRM donor database, including
> e-mail capabilities – for the first time, we've got automated e-mail thank
> yous set up for all donors
> * Development of campaign management tools for sitenotice deployment, such
> as scheduling and weighting of different sitenotices
> * Lining up external support by design and PR firms; producing the first
> sitenotices; developing audio PSAs
> * Identifying core messages that need to be translated and coordinating
> volunteer translations
> * Streamlining and documenting all fundraising related procedures, such as
> donor thank-yous
> * Developing a fundraising agreement between WMF and the chapters which want
> to participate in the online fundraiser
> * Investigating historical PayPal data that hasn't been imported into the
> database
> * Inviting past $1000+ donors to make leadership gifts prior to the
> beginning of the 2008 fundraiser.
> 
> For the first time, the online fundraiser is led and coordinated by a
> dedicated staff member, Rand Montoya.
> 
> We followed up on leads from the Funders' Briefings in September, including
> people who could not attend the briefings.
> 
> There were 935 donations made in the month of October for a total of USD
> 65,503.32
> 
> OUTREACH
> 
> Frank Schulenburg worked with the Argentinian chapter to finalize plans for
> the first Wikipedia Academy in Buenos Aires, to be held in early November.
>  Frank also spoke at the FSCONS conference in Gothenburg, Sweden and
> supported Wikimedia Germany's Zedler Medal article writing award as well as
> the Quadriga Award ceremony.
> 
> Frank also participated in a dedicated meeting/conference where the current
> state of Wikimedia was discussed among Wikipedians and
> academics:http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Siggen
> 
> Sue spoke at conferences in Florida and Germany, and met with the Knight
> Foundation in Florida.
> 
> SOS Children UK, in coordination with the Wikimedia Foundation, released a
> complete 2008/9 revision of the Wikipedia Selection for Schools, which is
> perhaps the most successful "checked content" project derived from the
> English Wikipedia.http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/2008-9_Selection_for_Schools
> 
> TECHNOLOGY
> 
> We welcomed two additions to the technical staff: Trevor Parscal, who will
> work as a software developer, and Ariel Glenn, who will do development work
> but also help with technical support for the San Francisco office.
> 
> Thanks to a volunteer, Robert Stojnic, and the deployment of new search
> servers, we've enabled new search features, limited to the English Wikipedia
> for now:http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-October/040022.html
> 
> We've also enabled the PediaPress technology on all Wikibooks wikis. It
> allows wiki-to-PDF export, wiki-to-ODT export, and print-on-demand delivery
> of collections of pages. Pending further review, usability and scalability
> improvements, we hope to deploy it on Wikipedia and our other projects soon.
> This work is funded in part by the Open Society Institute and the
> Commonwealth of
> Learning:http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/textbook-l/2008-October/001367.html
> 
> Brion has led development of a code review tool, which was deployed and has
> seen rapid adoption, localization and improvement. The tool allows MediaWiki
> developers to add comments and tags to code changes through a web-based
> interface: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki
> 
> Thanks to new dedicated hardware, the database dumps were restarted for all
> languages. The English Wikipedia full-history dump continues to be
> prohibitively slow; we're exploring solutions for this. Dump status is
> visible here: http://download.wikipedia.org/  Concise summary:
> http://www.infodisiac.com/cgi-bin/WikimediaDownload.pl
> 
> We continued consolidation of our infrastructure to Ubuntu, and this process
> received some media attention, including a widely quoted Computer World
> story:
> http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9116787&
> 
> Erik and Michael Dale attended the Open Media Conference at Yale
> University:
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-November/047009.html
> 
> Rob has led the process of consolidating and tracking our domain name
> registrations. We also continued our build-out of infrastructure in a new
> data-center in Tampa, and we started to gradually phase in new Sun storage
> equipment for media uploads.
> 
> RESEARCH
> 
> During the week of October 20, the first Wikimedia Foundation Reader &
> Contributor Survey was launched in 20 languages. Its goal is to collect data
> about the demographic make-up of the Wikipedia community and audience, its
> motivations, interests, and beliefs. 4000 completed responses had already
> been received by October 24.
> 
> Erik Zachte's statistics server has been delivered and deployed, and Erik
>  has started compiling some interesting reports for us. He has implemented
> the first report on pageviews, based on Domas' pageview data:
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm Related blog entry:
> http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/10/wikimedia-page-view-stats-i/
> 
> Erik has also taken a first stab at quantifying volunteer contributions made
> during the fiscal year 2007-2008:
> http://infodisiac.com/blog/2008/10/quantifying-volunteer-contribution/
> This data is important to put organizational spending in relation to our
> global ability to achieve impact together.
> 
> COMMUNICATIONS
> 
> The Wikimedia Foundation's first-ever Annual Report was finalized with the
> audited financial information, published on the Wikimedia Foundation
> website, and e-mailed to all past donors:
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report  The report is a summary
> of key activities of WMF in the fiscal year 2007-2008, an explanation of our
> projects (including a two-page
> "anatomy of a Wikipedia article"), an overview of our spending and the
> 2008-2009 budget, a brief look at the program activities of chapters around
> the world, and a recognition of our supporters.
> 
> In the month of October, we participated in media interviews with Computer
> World, a website of news and product coverage for information technology
> managers and The Republican, a website providing coverage of the Western
> Maryland town of Oakland, as well as of Garrett County.
> 
> GRANTS AND PARTNERSHIPS
> 
> Work continues on several grant proposals, including a major grant proposal
> related to usability improvements. Sara compiled a spreadsheet of our
> foundation prospects and rated them according to various criteria. She has
> also started to consolidate all reporting requirements attached to current
> grants so we can keep full track of our obligations.
> 
> Sara attended the Craigslist Non-Profit Bootcamp in San Mateo, where she
> networked with individuals from other like-minded organizations.
> 
> FINANCE AND ADMIN
> 
> The audited financial statements for the fiscal year 2007-2008 were
> finalized and approved by the Board. A summary was included in the Annual
> Report, and the full statements will be posted in November.
> 
> Work began on the 990 tax returns and continued on transitioning bank
> accounts from Suntrust to Citibank.
> 
> On October 20, we welcomed Daniel Phelps as the new Office Manager.
> 
> LEGAL
> 
> Policies and agreements were reviewed and an audit resolution was drafted in
> preparation for the Board meeting.   Work was done to follow up on
> state-by-state registrations.
> 
> Negotiations continued with the Free Software Foundation regarding the
> wording of the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3.
> 
> BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
> 
> Work continued on two major leads and many smaller ones. In addition, some
> older relationships were investigated or tied off. Some commercial trademark
> uses were also investigated.
> 
> Kul has started building a sponsorship platform for events such as Wikimania
> and Wikipedia Academies.
> 
> IN COMING WEEKS
> 
> Sue attending Free Software, Free Society conference in India (Dec. 8 – 15)
> Board Meeting, January 8 – 10, 2009
> Sue attending World Affairs Conference in Davos (Jan. 28 – Feb. 1)

Thank you Sue.

A question. When the chapters and the Foundation held their meeting in 
netherlands in spring, there was an agreement from the WMF side that a 
practical proposition regarding business agreements made by chapters 
would be presented to chapters by WMF business development team.

I am not aware we received anything practical which could clarify what 
chapters may or may not do, as well as clear procedures for future 
partnerships. Maybe I missed the email entirely. If not, can you update 
us on when we can expect clarification ? Could this happen before the 
next WMF-chapters meeting ?

Thanks

Ant