[Foundation-l] Report to the Board April 2009

[Sue Gardner]

Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

Covering:		April 2009
Prepared by:		Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: 	Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

MILESTONES FROM APRIL
1.Berlin Board and Chapters meeting
1.Licensing update vote launched
2.Chief Program Officer hired

KEY PRIORITIES FOR MAY
1.Further development of 2009-10 Annual Plan and staff goals
2.Israeli Wikipedia Academy
3.Begin hiring for Strategy Plan project
4.Implement license update

In April, the Wikimedia Foundation sites held steady as the number
four most-popular sites in the world, with 320,043,000 global unique
visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix.

CHAPTERS MEETING,  BOARD MEETING, & MEDIAWIKI DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE

Many Wikimedia Foundation staff attended the All Chapters meeting,
Board meeting, and MediaWiki developers conference in Berlin in early
April.

The following people gave workshops: Frank Schulenburg gave a workshop
on public outreach; Rand Montoya gave a workshop on fundraising; Erik
Moeller gave a workshop on the Chapters Funding Request process, and
Mike Godwin gave a workshop on trademarks.

Sue Gardner and James Owen attended the Board of Trustees meeting,
which was held concurrent with the All Chapters meeting.  Key agenda
items at the Board of Trustees meeting included a recap of the
2009-2010 Annual Plan development process and solicitation of Board
member feedback; a discussion of Biographies of Living People,
approval to proceed with the Strategic Planning project, and a
discussion of trademark policy and practices.  During the closing
session of the All Chapters meeting, the Board and Sue announced the
Strategy project, and participated in a general discussion about it.

Concurrent with the All Chapters and Board of Trustees meetings,
Wikimedia Germany developer Daniel Kinzler organized a conference for
MediaWiki developers.  It was attended by Wikimedia Foundation
technical staff Brion Vibber, Tomasz Finc, Mark Bergsma, Tim Starling,
Trevor Parscal and Arash Boostani.  Many volunteer developers from
Europe and elsewhere also attended.  Among the many productive
discussions, the most notable was a decision to integrate maps from
OpenStreetMap, a free and open mapping project, in Wikimedia projects.
A project to set up a map tile server mirror locally in our Amsterdam
hosting cluster is underway, and development is ongoing on a
functional inline map display widget.

The Wikimedia Foundation congratulates Wikimedia Germany on
successfully organizing a very useful and productive conference.

TECHNOLOGY

Fred Vassard began improvements to operations infrastructure such as
spam filtering, logging, and status monitoring as well as
investigating commercial monitoring options.

After discussion with Manuel Schneider from the OpenZim project, the
OpenZim format was identified as a likely target for future offline
distributions such as DVD and USB stick versions of Wikipedia.  Tomasz
Finc will explore integration of OpenZim into the dump process, once
the primary issues around database dump reliability are fully
addressed.

The Wikimedia Foundation officially opted out of the “Phorm”
traffic-scanning targeted-advertising system which is being rolled out
by some ISPs in the UK. This may be a largely symbolic measure: it is
intended to demonstrates the Wikimedia Foundation's commitment to
Internet freedom and privacy for the Wikimedia Foundation's users.

In April, the team began soliciting more active testing for the new
mobile gateway at m.wikipedia.org, which is targeted for a full public
release later this year.

Other areas of department focus:

* Tim Starling is preparing an upcoming MediaWiki 1.15 release, which
addresses some low-level data storage and installer/upgrade issues.
* FlaggedRevisions and the new AbuseFilter extension have continued to
see maintenance development from contract developers Aaron and Andrew.
* Kul Wadhwa and Tomasz began assessing a lead on sponsorship of
development time and hardware for improved reliability of database
dump generation. In the meantime Tomasz will coordinate with external
partners on partial or complete Commons/Wikimedia file mirroring.
* Summer of Code student applications were received and four projects accepted.

The focus of the usability team in April was to review and analyze the
findings from the usability study.  After the team completed its
initial analysis, Naoko Komura released the study's methodology and
findings to the public project site. (usability.wikimedia.org) The
team began to brainstorm solutions to problem areas revealed during
the initial data collection, and conducted an environmental scan of
available extensions and tools potentially related to usability.

OTHER PROGRAM ACTIVITIES

On April 12, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a community vote on
whether to adopt Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike as the
primary license for all eligible GFDL-licensed content. The vote will
be concluded in May. (For this purpose, a new MediaWiki software
extension, SecurePoll, was developed, which will be refined further as
a general-purpose extension for secure elections and polls.) The vote
was administered by Software in the Public Interest (SPI), a
non-profit organization which aims to help develop and distribute open
hardware and software. SPI also administers the Wikimedia Foundation's
Board of Trustees elections process.

On April 13, the Wikimedia Foundation welcomed Jennifer Riggs as its
first-ever Chief Program Officer, and Jennifer began orienting herself
to the work and culture of the Foundation.  Jennifer comes to
Wikimedia from the American Red Cross Bay Area chapter, where, as
Manager of Volunteer Resources, she managed the work of more than a
thousand volunteers.  Prior to the Red Cross, she worked at the
California School-Age Consortium and with the Peace Corps.  Jennifer's
orientation will include numerous informal discussions with Wikimedia
volunteers as well as Advisory Board members.

Cary Bass and Sara Crouse worked with Wikimedia volunteers to launch
the Wikimania scholarship application process.

The Wikimedia Foundation participated in interviews with KNX/CBS 1070
Radio (Los Angeles, California); National Public Radio (Seattle,
Washington); VEJA Magazine (Sao Paulo, Brazil); the Wall Street
Journal (San Francisco, California); Les Echos (Paris, France); Gazeta
Wyborcza (Warsaw, Poland); Cinco Dias (Madrid, Spain); Creativity
Magazine (New York, New York); Symbol Report (Frederick, Maryland);
Telephony (Chicago, Illinois); the Associated Press (New York, New
York); MediaPost (New York, New York); and the Times newspaper
(London, United Kingdom).

FUNDRAISING, GRANTS, & PARTNERSHIPS

During April, the Wikimedia Foundation received 922 donations, with a
combined total value of USD 78,453.   Year-to-date, the Wikimedia
Foundation has raised USD 5,491415 in donations from individuals, 37%
above the full-year target of USD 4,000,000.

Rebecca Handler organized a trip for herself and Sue Gardner to
cultivate current and prospective donors in New York City in mid-May.

Rand Montoya continued planning for the Annual Giving Campaign as well
as longer term community giving activities, and began work with Four
Kitchens on upgrades to the open source CiviCRM donations database,
including improved reporting functionality based on best practices in
fundraising.

FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION

Work continued on the 2009-10 Annual Plan, including planning by all
departments. Following Board review and approval of the 2008-09 Form
990 Tax Return, Veronique Kessler filed the return and posted a public
copy of the return and an FAQ to the Wikimedia Foundation website
(http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Form_2007_Questions_and_Answers).
  Veronique also began researching the implications of the Wikimedia
Foundation beginning to offer grants to individuals and  chapter
organizations, and Veronique and Jennifer began creating draft
procedures related to approving grants.

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

After several months of negotiations, Business Development executed
its first major strategic partnership with a Fortune 500 company. This
is a mission-friendly three-year deal with Orange (France Telecom) to
integrate Wikipedia content and marks into Orange's web and mobile
properties.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Orange_and_Wikimedia_announce_partnership_April_2009

Future developments may include improving mobile functionality, new
applications, expansion to IPTV and other platforms.

LEGAL

At the April Board meeting, Sue presented a position paper outlining
recommendations for the handling and development of the Foundation's
commercially valuable trademarks. The paper was developed by Mike
Godwin with co-authors John Slafsky and Nathan Ferguson of the law
firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati. Following its review, the Board
requested that Mike take appropriate steps to register and protect the
Wikimedia marks, and also develop a strategy, policies and practices,
to allow uses by the chapters and community for activities in line
with the Wikimedia mission.  Following the Board meeting, Mike
distributed a first-draft policy to the chapters, and began collecting
feedback.







-- 
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation

415 839 6885 office

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