[Foundation-l] Report to the Board 2008 04 30 (April)

[Sue Gardner]

Here it is :-)

Weeks of: April 1 to April 30, 2008
Prepared by: Sue Gardner
Prepared for: Wikimedia Board of Trustees

MY CURRENT PRIORITIES

1. Beginning preparations for 2008-09 budget and planning for 2008-09 
goals;
2. Finalization of major donor strategy and development of "community 
gifts" strategy;
3. Recruitment of fundraising staff;
4. Launch of preliminary foundation investigations;
5. Bits and pieces (further establishment of new SF headquarters, 
development of potential partnerships, etc.)

RECENT WEEKS

BOARD MEETING

The Board met in the San Francisco office from April 5-7. Florence and 
other Board members have reported about the key outcomes of this meeting 
on the foundation-l mailing list:

Initial report by Florence:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-April/041168.html
New Board Treasurer, Stu West, announcement by Florence:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-April/041768.html
Volunteer council decision explanation by Michael:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-April/041917.html
Restructuring announcement by Jan-Bart:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2008-April/041936.html

Thanks to Mike for his support during the meeting and after it, drafting 
amendments to the bylaws and creating other materials for the board. 
Thanks also to Wikimedia's administrative staff for creating an 
enjoyable and productive environment for the board to do its work.

FUNDRAISING

We received the first USD 1 million of the USD 3 million/three years 
grant by the Sloan Foundation. We'll be updating Sloan regularly on our 
progress, in addition to a report at the end of each funding period.

We've made initial contact with additional foundations, including the 
MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the 
Hewlett Foundation. These conversations are still in the early, 
exploratory stages. We're also meeting with leaders & thinkers from 
like-minded non-profit organizations to share experiences. For example, 
we met with Creative Commons to discuss their fundraising efforts and 
technology and with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to discuss 
fundraising.

We've built a standard pipeline of donor prospect review and “move 
management” which we go through every week, thanking people for past 
gifts and reaching out to new prospects. We're getting the first small 
responses to these efforts. We are also exploring fundraising potentials 
in the Arab world, in connection with Wikimania.

We've announced three job openings related to fundraising: a Head of 
Major Gifts, a Head of Community Giving, and a Development Specialist. 
In addition to normal job ad posting, we've reached out to a number of 
people to help us surface candidates for these roles. The jobs are 
posted here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings. They are 
set to expire May 31.

We also developed a boilerplate fundraising “messaging platform” - 
basically, a standard pitch to potential donors, that can be adapted and 
used as required.

We continue the process of registering as a charity with each state in 
the United States. (The law is unclear on whether this is a requirement 
for 501(c)3s in order to fundraise online, but it is recommended as a 
general good practice.) We also continued explorations of the status of 
our ability -in conjunction with the chapters- to offer 
tax-deductibility outside the United States. We have developed a list of 
the top-10 countries that have donated to Wikimedia in the past, with 
the goal of developing tax-deductibility in priority countries where we 
do not currently offer it. In order of total financial contribution, and 
not including contributions made directly to the chapters, those 
countries are: the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, 
Canada, France, Italy, Switzerland, Australia, Spain, Austria, the 
Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

COMMUNICATIONS

In April, we issued one press release, announcing Stuart West as the 
Foundation's new treasurer: 
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Stuart_West.

We also participated in media interviews including with the Canadian 
Broadcasting Corporation, the Globe and Mail, the major Korean daily 
newspaper, Bloomberg, the BBC, Wired magazine, the Economist, Canadian 
Business magazine, CNN, Slashdot, Pakistan's internet magazine SPIDER, 
the San Francisco Chronicle, El Mundo, the Washington Post, El Pais, KGO 
TV, the LA Times, and the Daily Telegraph (UK).

TECHNOLOGY

[At this time, the monthly report only covers work done by paid staff, 
and a lot of technology work is done by volunteers. A good way to track 
key technical changes is to read the Wikipedia Signpost's weekly 
“B.R.I.O.N.” report: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost ]

Single User Login implementation is going forward. At this point, the 
SUL system is still restricted to admins. Users of the secure gateway 
now only have to login once to use the wikis they have accounts on. The 
intention is to deploy this "login once" functionality within domain 
names like wikipedia.org, and hopefully also across domains.

We've done further testing and provided additional feedback to 
PediaPress on the PDF server implementation. We've discussed the long 
term development strategy for the project and set preliminary timelines 
for deployment.

The FlaggedRevs ("stable version") extension is almost ready to go for 
the German Wikipedia and is expected to go live in May.

Mark has negotiated additional peering agreements in Amsterdam, reducing 
our hosting costs there.

Rob has completed an upgrade of our open source VoIP phone system which 
offers a number of critical features, including conference rooms and 
directory services. He also visited the San Francisco office and offered 
staff training in the upgraded phone system, and how to use the file 
server, MediaWiki and the mailing lists.

FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION

We finalized arrangements with our new audit firm, KPMG, and began 
preliminary conversations regarding internal control procedures and 
testing in advance of the 07-08 audit. Véronique and Mary Lou have now 
begun some self-testing of amounts on the financial statements to get a 
handle on the state of backup documentation.

The audit committee met for the first time with Véronique, with Stu and 
with KPMG.

Véronique began planning for the 08-09 budget. The 08-09 fiscal year 
begins July 1, 2008.

Personnel files have been set up for all staff. Vacation balances for 
all staff in the United States have been finalized. A policy covering 
office absences, working from home, sick and vacation time was developed 
and released. A policy covering purchasing and payment procedures is in 
development, as is a performance appraisal system. New letterhead and 
envelope templates have been created.

Cary arranged for an intern to provide office help. User:Sfmammamia, a 
regular enwiki user, has been helping us out every Thursday afternoon in 
the San Francisco office since the end of March. She's been sending out 
thank you letters for donors as well as filing and copying for various 
departments in the office.

OTHER

Wikimania planning continues. Mike released an Alexandria Security FAQ 
to foundation-l, developed with the help of Delphine, Kul, and the local 
team in Alexandria, and a country profile of Egypt, prepared for 
attendees by Clayton Associates.

Discussions are ongoing with the Free Software Foundation about the GFDL 
1.3, and we put new project creation on hold until April 30 due to the 
implications of the proposed license. We hope the new license can be 
released next month.

Development of the Wikimedia Reader/Contributor survey continued, with 
lots of internal reworking of the survey-in-progress before a round of 
feedback from community members.

Sue and Erik spoke about the Wikimedia Foundation at Rockefeller 
University in New York.

While the board was in town, we hosted a small meet-up in the San 
Francisco office, with a dozen Wikimedia community members attending. 
Wikimedians continue to drop by the office on an ongoing basis, probably 
two or three each week.

We were also visited by representatives of the UK San Francisco consul 
and representatives from the UK office for governmental change and 
technology. They are Wikipedia fans :-)

IN COMING WEEKS

Delphine will visit Alexandria in May to work with the local planning 
team and with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina team.

The chapters meeting will take place in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, from 
May 22-25. Sue, Erik, Delphine and Kul will attend from the Foundation, 
as well as representatives from the chapters, and Florence, Jan-Bart and 
Frieda from the Board of Trustees.

PediaPress will be test-deployed.

FlaggedRevs will be deployed on the German Wikipedia and possibly also 
English Wikipedia.

We expect to be announcing the hiring of new software developers, and 
new fundraising staff, within the next month or so.

We are planning to have an all-staff meeting in San Francisco on June 26 
and 27. Its purpose will be to deliver people's 08-09 budgets, and to 
develop 08-09 goals. It will be the first time that all non-San 
Francisco-based employees (Delphine, Mark, Tim and Rob) have a chance to 
meet with their new San Francisco colleagues.

-- 


Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation

Your donations keep Wikipedia running! Support the Wikimedia Foundation 
today: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate

-- 


Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation

Your donations keep Wikipedia running! Support the Wikimedia Foundation
today: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate