[Foundation-l] Report to the Board of Trustees: May 2009

[Sue Gardner]

Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

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

PRIORITIES FOR JUNE

1. Finalize 2009-10 Annual Plan for WMF Board of Trustees Approval
2. Begin hiring the Strategy Development team
3. Conduct end of year staff performance evaluations and finalize
individual staff goals

REACH

In May, the Wikimedia Foundation sites held steady as the number four
most-popular sites in the world with 317,255,000 global unique
visitors, according to comScore Media Metrix.

2009-10 ANNUAL PLAN

During May, the main focus for the Wikimedia Foundation was the
development of the 2009-10 Annual Plan, with departments developing
their funding requests for 2009-10.  In addition to normal
departmental funding requests, three proposals for non-recurring
programmatic activities were developed:

* Sue Gardner developed a proposal for the Wikimedia Collaborative
Strategy Development project, in which the Wikimedia Board, staff,
chapters and individual volunteers will work with each other and
external experts and advisors, supported by non-profit strategy
development firm Bridgespan, in order to collaboratively develop a
five-year strategic road-map for the Wikimedia movement.  This project
began being discussed at the Board level six months earlier, and was
first discussed publicly at the Chapters Meeting in Berlin in April.

* Frank Schulenburg developed a proposal for the Public Outreach
Bookshelf Project, designed to create a core set of
awareness/engagement/training public outreach materials, in English,
to later be translated, localized and used by volunteers and partner
organizations such as schools.

* Jay Walsh developed a proposal for a communications campaign,
designed to increase public understanding of Wikipedia as a serious
educational endeavor, and of the Wikimedia Foundation as a charitable
organization.

The 2009-10 Annual Plan will continue to be developed throughout June,
while simultaneously staff develop their individual performance goals
for 2009-10.  The Plan will be delivered to the Board of Trustees for
approval in mid-June.

LICENSE MIGRATION

On May 21, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees passed a
resolution bringing about significant changes to the licensing of the
content of the Wikimedia Foundation projects. This resolution follows
a vote among the international Wikimedia community, during which 88%
of all voters who expressed an opinion supported the change.  It will
result in all of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects moving from the
GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) to the Creative Commons
Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) as their primary content
license.  This change means that all Wikimedia project content will be
more interoperable with existing CC-BY-SA content, and therefore
easier to re-use in multiple ways for multiple purposes. The Wikimedia
Foundation staff will now begin taking steps to ensure that correct,
updated licensing is in place for all Wikimedia project content.

A press release about this important change can be found here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Dual_license_vote_May_2009

TECHNOLOGY - DEVELOPMENT

The official Wikipedia iPhone client was beta-tested by a small set of users.

Erik Zachte submitted a new version of proof-of-concept Monthly Report
Card statistics with enhanced views and has been generally moving
forward on improvements to statistics generation. As the template
matures and the generation of these statistics is regularized, we will
develop a public version to accompany the Report to the Board.

Tim Starling continued preparing MediaWiki for a 1.15 quarterly
release, which is expected to be complete in June. Tim also completed
ongoing code reviews for the release and code updates on the live
site.

The Collection (PDF book) extension was tweaked in response to issues
with UI and save permissions, but continues to run.

TECHNOLOGY - CORE OPERATIONS AND OFFICE IT

Database dumps other than the English Wikipedia full-history dump were
all generated correctly and consistently, feeding Erik Zachte's
statistics jobs and other uses. Tomasz Finc continues to experiment
with Hadoop as infrastructure for the more scalable next-generation
dump system.

Brion Vibber, Ariel Glenn, and Daniel Phelps reviewed candidates and
conducted interviews for the newly created Head of Office IT Support
position. After  interviewing a variety of candidates, Steven Kent was
hired to fill the position.  Steve Kent comes to Wikimedia with more
than 20 years of IT systems management experience. He has been in
similar roles with several organization including; RR Donnelley,
Charrette LLC, Communicomp and CMP Media. Steve was most recently the
Director of Information Technology for Sandbox Studios located in San
Francisco. Steve will start in mid-June.

Search servers were upgraded with additional RAM, improving search
performance enough to enable advanced features such as spelling
correction for all wikis. Old wiki configuration change requests were
collected from Bugzilla and mostly completed.

The Ops team is experimenting with use of Puppet configuration-control
system on a few servers. Initial test rollout uses these to replace
more fragile data sharing such as NIS and LDAP for server-internal
use.

Wikimedia's phone system was transitioned to primarily use plain old
telephony (POTS) for calls, to improve call quality and reduce call
drop problems. At present call usage, this is the cheapest solution.
The phone system continues to run on the open source Asterisk PBX, and
can be switched to IP usage as a backup and for external users such as
the usability satellite office.

OTHER PROGRAM ACTIVITIES

On May 3, Sue Gardner spoke at a Wikipedia Academy in Tel Aviv,
organized by the Israeli chapter.  About 250 people attended, and
sessions covered the use of Wikipedia and wiki systems in schools,
Wikipedia's credibility and neutrality, and legal aspects of free
content and freedom of information. Almost all major Israeli
newspapers covered the event, and it was favourably discussed in many
local blogs, forums and bulletins.  The Wikimedia Foundation
congratulates the Israeli chapter for organizing a very successful
event.

Planning continued towards a Wikipedia Academy with the U.S. National
Institutes of Health,  with a strong emphasis on creating a scalable
event model with sustainable participation outcomes.

Jennifer Riggs has assumed responsibility for managing the Chapters
Funding Request Process, and is beginning to also develop planning
towards a Wikimedia Fellows and Interns Program.

Wikimedia participated in interviews with CNN (Atlanta, Georgia); the
Associated Press (Dublin, Ireland); Agence France Presse (Paris,
France); the Globe and Mail newspaper (Toronto, Canada); the
television program 60 Minutes, CBS (New York, NY); City TV (Edmonton,
Canada); the New York Times (New York); KCRW (Santa Monica,
California); Bloomberg News (San Francisco, California); PR Week (New
York); the San Francisco Daily Journal (San Francisco, California);
the St. Petersburg Times newspaper (St. Petersburg, Florida); Business
Week magazine (New York); ABCNews.com (New York); and the Wall Street
Journal (New York).

FUNDRAISING, GRANTS & PARTNERSHIPS

The Wikimedia Foundation received 1,126 donations in May totaling
approximately USD 137,604.  This included three large gifts which
total USD 82,500.  Year-to-date, the Foundation has raised USD
5,629,019 in fundraising related revenue, 41% above the annual goal of
USD 4,000,000.  When combined with unrestricted grants, the
Foundation's fundraising department has raised a year to date total of
USD 7,101,656, 43% above last year's total of $4,083,370.

Rand Montoya and Tomasz Finc are continuing to work with Four Kitchens
on improvements to the CiviCRM fundraising database and a new payment
gateway for the 2009-10 fundraiser, allowing direct giving via credit
card through the Wikimedia interface.  Rand has also started
development of a donor survey with the help of a volunteer, Jeff
Pilisuk, and has commissioned work on button designs for a potential
permanent donation button as part of the sidebar of all Wikimedia
projects.

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

After finalizing the Wikimedia Foundation's recent business deal with
Orange, Kul Wadhwa worked closely with the Orange team to insure the
proper implementation of Wikipedia content into Orange web and mobile
properties. Kul also negotiated and executed a licensing deal with
Palm to include Wikipedia as part of the Pre WebOS platform and
marketing campaign.

LEGAL

In May, Mike Godwin spoke at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
conference in Washington, D.C., and virtually attended a board meeting
of the U.S.-based Student Press Law Center,a non-profit organization
devoted to supporting student news media who face censorship. Mike and
Erik Moeller, following consultation with colleagues at the Mozilla
Corporation, began work crafting a plan to develop a set of policies
and practices enabling appropriate usage of the trademarks by the
chapters and community for activities in line with the Wikimedia
mission.

Mike released a second version of the draft new Chapters Agreement to
the chapters, and discussions about it began to take place.





-- 
Sue Gardner
Executive Director
Wikimedia Foundation

415 839 6885 office

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