[Foundation-l] Candidacy to the board of WMF

[Kat Walsh]

Florence,

Thank you for everything.

Your commitment to doing the right thing by and for the Wikimedia
communities, to the values of the projects, to treating others with
fairness, kindness, and respect, to integrity, to sharing what you
know and what you love, and your many hours of holding things
together, have made Wikimedia a better place.  You've helped take us
from an organization held together with duct tape and hope to one held
together with a real structure, operations, international presence...
*and* duct tape and hope. I will be sorry to see you leave the board,
and hope that everyone you work with in the future appreciates the
heart and the energy you put in to what you do.

Cheers and many thanks,
Kat

On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 8:44 PM, Florence Devouard <anthere at anthere.org> wrote:
>
>
> Dear community members,
>
>
>
> Though it was a (very) difficult decision to make, I have decided not to
> be a candidate to the coming elections of the board of trustees of
> Wikimedia  Foundation as a community representative.
>
> After four years on the board, and over one year and a half as its
> chair, I observe that the organization has matured a lot.
>
> In 2004 the Wikimedia Foundation was a tiny organization (total expenses
> 23 000 dollars) set up and led by Jimmy, running three servers from
> remote Florida and hosting projects with frequent denial of services due
> to unsufficient technical support, Wikimedia has now grown into a six
> million dollars organization, operating over 300 servers, led by an
> accountable board, with a new office in San Francisco and a staff of 15.
> Operations are now guided by a brand new mission statement, with defined
> values, procedures, policies, and charters. Fully independently audited,
> the Wikimedia Foundation receive the  financial support of thousand of
> small donors, as well as support from commercial companies and major
> foundations.
>
> Wikimania, our annual conference was first held in 2005, one year after
> I joined the board. Wikimania then travelled from Frankfurt to Boston,
> Taipei, and Egypt, with the great honor of being hosted by the New
> Library of Alexandria this year.
>
> In the past four years, new projects were started (eg, Wikimedia
> Commons, Wikinews). Wikipedia rose from rank 500 in october 2004 to rank
> 8 in october 2007 of most popular websites in the world. As of April
> 2008, Wikipedia attracts 683 million visitors annually, reading over 10
> millions articles in 253 languages. Other projects are thriving and made
> available in more and more languages every year (eg, Wikibooks,
> Wiktionary etc…). All Wikimedia projects are now freely available
> worldwide on the internet with an excellent quality of service.
>
> Those are fantastic, tremendous achievements!
>
> I am proud I was part of it.
>
> Of course, all this was not my own doing, but was made possible by the
> dedication of all board members, of previous and current staff members,
> contractors, and most of all, of community volunteers. Good job, everyone!
>
> I want to thank the 2004 voters, who elected me to participate at the
> organization level, and the 2005 voters, who confirmed me on the board
> for two additional years. My nomination as chair in 2006 and renewal in
> 2007 was probably more a stroke of luck :-) I was given the difficult
> task to help Wikimedia to mature from a Founder-led group to a mature
> organization with a dual board/executive set-up, various policies and
> procedures, as well as controls to prevent or limit damages. In short, I
> had a position of interim chair :-) The 2007 board trusted me to
> stabilize the transition to the new Executive Director. Twenty months
> later, I consider the job done. The disappearance of the previously
> recurring question "but what if Jimbo is hit by a bus this morning ?" is
> in itself a sufficient sign :-) The organization is more solid than it
> has ever been.
>
> I would like to offer a special "thank you" note to Jan-Bart, the
> vice-chair, for the highly valuable work on the board. Jan-Bart is one
> of these "outsiders", that some think should not be on the board. I
> could not disagree more. Outsiders may share our values deeply, bring
> expertise that does not exist within the active community, and provide
> an external view sometimes very refreshing on our in-house debates.
>
>
>
>
> Building an organization that could accompany the exponential growth of
> the Wikimedia projects was, as you can imagine, quite a challenge, and
> did not always go without tensions. I read with much attention the
> community petition started after the board reorganization announcement.
> It would be a serious misconception to imagine that board members always
> fully agree on what is decided by the board as a whole. Board members
> can (and do) disagree. Sometimes, no decision is made because there are
> irreconcilable factions. But often, they agree to a compromise, so that
> a needed collective decision can be made. Directions are not set in
> stone and it will be the responsibility of the next board to deal with
> the future. Various trends are showing up right now, as pointed out in
> the petition or by various emails to this list.
>
> After the decision over reorganization of the board, I was placed in a
> rather impossible situation. New blood is highly necessary to the board,
> but the unique position opened to an elected community representative
> places me in direct competition with these new, "third" generation
> leaders currently being candidates. If three positions had been opened,
> it would have been an entirely different matter, but this one position
> truly deserves to go to a brand new member, with fresh energy and ideas.
> I wish the candidates all the best of luck. The new board member can
> count on my support to welcome him or her after the elections, during
> our roughly 2 weeks of overlapping presence on the board.
>
> Though I will reduce my participation, I will certainly not quit the
> projects. My heart is dedicated to them and to our love of knowledge. I
> intend to keep on "thinking global", even if I act more "local". Since
> my first days on the projects (February 2002), my focus has been on
> transparency, volunteer involvement, decentralization, bottom-up
> decision making, and love for cultural and linguistic diversity. I will
> stay available to share my time and energy with those who are, with
> pride but modesty, supporting our projects as well as their values. An
> organization is at the service of a cause, and the primary interest and
> focus of its members should not be the organization itself, but its
> mission and, even more important, the vision behind the mission and the
> values shared between all members. Our vision should be our credo, day
> after day: bringing knowledge to every single human being on Earth.
>
>
>
> Love
>
> Anthere / Florence Devouard
>
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