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

[Sue Gardner]

The December report will follow, before Wednesday.

Thanks,
Sue

***********************************************

Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

Covering:		November 2008
Prepared by:		Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: 	Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

MY CURRENT PRIORITIES

1. 2008-09 annual fundraising campaign
2. India Wikimedia awareness trip
3. All Staff meeting
4. Development of grant proposals
5. Bits and pieces: normal fundraising activities, Wikimania
postmortem, NomCom, etc.

THIS PAST MONTH

LICENSING

The GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 was released, which will allow
the Wikimedia community to make content under GFDL available under
CC-BY-SA if it so chooses.  A first community discussion was started
to discuss the parameters of the migration process.

ALL STAFF MEETING

In November, the Wikimedia Foundation held its second All Staff
meeting of 2008, in San Francisco.  Staff gave presentations on their
work, and staged un-conference-style workshops on topics such as
fundraising and messaging in a time of economic turmoil; common
objections presented by donors and how to counter them;  as well as
discussions about how to prioritize support of Wikipedia relative to
the other projects, and how to make decisions across departments.
Also, new staff members were photographed by Lane Hartwell.

FUNDRAISING

The annual campaign for the fiscal year 2008-09  launched November 4,
2008, drawing significant energy and attention from all departments.
A new donation module was implemented, including completely new
designs, and a new back-end based on the open-source CiviCRM database.
 Agreements have been developed with interested chapters to highlight
these chapters during the fundraiser; in return, they will invest 50%
of their fundraising revenue in program activities agreed upon with
the Wikimedia Foundation. The preference is for activities with an
international impact, such as multi-chapter events and local
infrastructure and software development support.

A lot of effort has been invested in creating high quality sitenotice
designs, and on implementing real-time tracking to measure performance
of different fundraising messages.

Other changes to this year's fundraiser include radio PSAs that are
also available for download, and a "share your story" module that will
be used for future communications purposes. We're also now
automatically thanking all donors, and ask them for permission for
future e-mail contact. The press release for the annual campaign is
here: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/2008-9_Annual_Giving_Campain_Launch

In the month of November we received 46,209 donations smaller than USD
10,000, totaling approximately USD 1.3M. We also received major gifts
totaling approximately USD 295,000.

TECHNOLOGY

Thanks to a generous equipment donation by Sun Microsystems, we were
able to increase the file size limitation for uploads from 20 to 100
megabytes, which we hope will encourage people to upload more video
and very large image and sound files.

The FlaggedRevs extension for edit patrolling and flagging was
enabled in five additional Wikipedia language editions: Alemannic,
Classical Chinese, Esperanto, Polish, and Hungarian, and on the
English Wikibooks.

An instance of LimeSurvey was set up at survey.wikimedia.org for
miscellaneous survey uses.

Erik  Zachte has begun working on a prototype for a monthly report
card to track key metrics, and on some detailed analysis of server
logs on a sample.  This work will be iterative in coming months.

OUTREACH AND PROGRAMS

The Wikimedia Foundation has commissioned long-time Wikipedia editor
and author of  “Wikipedia: The Missing Manual,”  to write an
Educators' Guide to Wikipedia.  It will be developed at
howto.pediapress.com.

Various “how to edit Wikipedia” educational videos were shot and put
into post-production, in Hamburg.

A second Wikipedia online course for senior citizens was launched in
Düsseldorf, Germany.  A Wikipedia Academy was held in Lund, Sweden,
and Frank Schulenburg delivered a lecture on Wikipedia at the
University of Cologne.

Planning for Wikimania 2009 scholarships has begun.

COMMUNICATIONS

There was only one press release sent out in November: on November 5,
the Wikimedia Foundation officially launched its fifth annual giving
campaign, with the goal of raising USD 6 million to fund the
Foundation's 2008-09 operating costs.

In November, we participated in media interviews with entertainment
news website E-Online; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's
flagship radio program Ideas; Linguamón (House of Languages: a
consortium involving the Government of Catalonia, the UNESCO Centre of
Catalonia and the Universal Forum of Cultures Foundation); Wired
Magazine; technology recruiting site Valt.com; the Associated Press;
the San Francisco Business Times; and the New York Times.

FINANCE AND ADMINISTRATION

In November, the Wikimedia Foundation released its audited financial
statements to the public, several months earlier than the prior year's
audit. This was the first Wikimedia audit to be conducted with KPMG,
an internationally-recognized accounting and audit firm.

Regular monthly financial reporting is now fully in place at the staff
level, with Wikimedia Foundation staff receiving regular financial
statements including actual-to-plan comparisons by the 20th day of the
next month.


IN COMING WEEKS

Sue and Jimmy in India attending Free Software, Free Society
conference plus outreach and media activities (Dec. 8 – 15)
Board Meeting in San Francisco January 9 – 11, 2009
Sue and Jimmy attending World Economic Forum conference in Davos,
Switzerland (Jan. 28 – Feb. 1). Sue is planning to meet with the Swiss
chapter after the conference.