[Wikimedia Announcements] Report to the Board (February and March)

[Erik Moeller]

Please find below the Wikimedia Foundation reports for February and
March. We're still working through the backlog on these -- apologies
for the delay.

All best,
Erik


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: James Owen <jowen at wikimedia.org>
Date: 2010/8/29
Subject: [Foundation-l] Report to the Board (February and March)
To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org


FEBRUARY
Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Covering: February 2010
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

MILESTONES FROM FEBRUARY
Wikimedia Foundation receives $2 million grant from Google
Conducted Interviews and engaged candidates for the Chief Development
Officer position.
Beta roll-out of new features and updates to the usability initative

KEY PRIORITIES FOR MARCH
Finalize the Stanton Public Policy Grant
Bi-annual all-staff meeting.
Begin the business planning phase of the strategy process.

THIS PAST MONTH
KEY PROGRAM METRICS
Reach of all Wikimedia Foundation sites:
345 million unique visitors (rank #5)
+14.8% (1 year ago) / -5.3% (1 month ago)
Source: comScore Media Metrics
Pages served:
11.1 billion
+5.8% (1 year ago) / +0.0% (1 month ago)
Active number of editors (5+ edits/month): 101,730
-1.5% (1 year ago) / -4.6% (1 month ago)
Source: February 2010 Report Card
<http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2010_02_detailed.html>

KEY FINANCIAL METRICS
Operating revenue year to date: USD 14.1MM vs. plan of USD 8.8MM
Operating expenses year to date: USD 5.5MM vs. plan of USD 6.2MM
Unrestricted cash on hand as of March 24: USD 5.2MM while unrestricted
CDs and US Treasuries were USD 8.3MM

STRATEGIC PLANNING PROJECT
Following the Board's endorsement of the Wikimedia Foundation's high-
level strategic priorities moving forward, the strategic planning
process has shifted into two parallel processes. The first is the
Foundation's business planning process, led by The Bridgespan Group.
The goal is to develop a five-year action plan for the Wikimedia
Foundation and a more granular one-year business plan for 2010-2011.
This process will run through May.

The second is to complete the larger, movement-wide strategic planning
process. Late in January, a Strategy Task Force formed, which started
discussing and evaluating the recommendations and feedback from the
Phase 2 Task Force process. That Task Force will continue to work in
March to articulate and propose a set of movement-wide goals.

The sign of a good open process is that certain surprising things
emerge. The team was surprised by the success of the Call for
Proposals process in Phase 1, and are looking for ways to use those
proposals as a way to activate the volunteer community. They were also
surprised by the success of the Task Force process and people's desire
to apply the processes of the strategy project beyond its original
scope. Three new Task Forces have formed (BLPs, NASA, and Analytics),
and the
team is looking forward to seeing others form as well.

GOOGLE GRANT AND VISIT
In February, the Wikimedia Foundation received a $2 million (USD)
grant from the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation.
This is the Wikimedia Foundation's first grant from Google. The funds
will support core operational costs of the Wikimedia Foundation,
including investments in technical infrastructure to support rapidly-
increasing global traffic and capacity demands. The funds will also be
used to support the organization's efforts to make Wikipedia easier to
use and more accessible.

Several Wikimedia Foundation staff members met with Google product and
engineering managers in Mountain View to discuss possible
opportunities to work together, ranging from infrastructure and open
source technologies to public outreach programs. Google has designated
a liaison contact for all future Wikimedia Foundation inquiries.

TECHNOLOGY – CORE
As noted in the previous report, Danese Cooper joined the Wikimedia
Foundation as CTO, succeeding Brion Vibber. Erik Moeller and the
Wikimedia Foundation technology team organized several orientation and
transition meetings.
The process for decommissioning old, out-of-warranty Wikimedia
Foundation servers and donating them to non-profit organizations
continued in February:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/02/server-decommissioning-donations/

A follow-up meeting took place between Wikimedia and Microsoft
Research India regarding MSRI's efforts to develop wiki language
collaboration tools.

Wikimedia's BugZilla server was updated to version 3.4.5 with REST APIs:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/02/wikimedia-bugzilla-upgraded-to-version-3-4-5-with-rest-apis/
A bug that caused 1.3 million Wikipedia article revisions from 2005 to
appear as blank pages was resolved.

TECHNOLOGY - USABILITY
The usability beta was enhanced on February 4 with the following
features:
Improvement in precision of navigable table of contents
Enhanced dialogs for links, tables, and search and replace
Language-specific icons for Bold and Italics
This release introduced an HTML iFrame element as a new technological
foundation for richer editing features. Despite extensive cross-
browser testing, the release introduced problems in editing such as
extra line breaks, and the iFrame deployment and features dependent on
it were rolled back for the time being.
Babaco Release page, http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Releases/Babaco
Blog: Deployment of Babaco Enhancements,
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/01/babaco-enhancments/
Browser Compatibility Matrix for features in Babaco,
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Releases/Babaco/Compatibility_Matrix
Blog: Iframe bugs, http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/02/iframe-bugs/

In February, design refinements and development of template collapsing
and expansion features continued and staging in the usability sandbox
started. The objective of template collapsing is to hide complex wiki
syntax from the editor, which is important because, we observed that
templates are an intimidating factors for new users..
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Citron_Designs#Templates
http://prototype.wikimedia.org/sandbox.6/San_Francisco

Based on the evaluation of proposals submitted by usability study
firms, gotomedia was commissioned to conduct the last round of the
usability study. The focus of the study is to evaluate the template
collapsing and expansion features, and overall improvements in
usability for the last twelve months.
gotomedia: http://www.gotomedia.com/

February ended with a total of 571,579 users having tried the Beta.
Approximately 59,100 additional users tried the Beta in February. This
number is down slightly, even considering the fact that February is a
shorter month.
The cumulative retention rate across all projects held steady at 79.8%
as of February 28.
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/
Beta_Feedback_Survey#Update:_February_28.2C_2010

Regression tests across all supported browsers, interaction automation
suites were set up using the opensource quality assurance software,
Selenium. This test automation system will be used by the user
experience team to increase the efficiency of software testing and
release cycles. The plan is to open up this automation system to the
wider MediaWiki developers community.
Selenium, http://seleniumhq.org/

MULTIMEDIA USABILITY PROJECT
Development of the new upload interface continued in February and
preparations for setting up the system infrastructure for prototype
system started. Product specification for a temporary staging area for
incomplete uploads has started.
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:NewUpload
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:Incomplete_uploads

A call for proposals for the first study of the multimedia usability
initiative was initiated. Four usability study firms submitted
proposals. A usability study firm in San Francisco, gotomedia, was
chosen based on quality, cost, and references. The study is scheduled
to be conducted in March 2010.
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:UX_study,_March_2010/CfP
Guillaume Paumier and Neil Kandalgaonkar appeared on IRC office hours
on February 4. They received lots of interesting questions, including
technical questions, from the participants.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours/Office_hours_2010-02-04

OTHER PROGRAM ACTIVITIES
During February, Frank Schulenburg and Pete Forsyth embarked on
writing a grant proposal for the second phase of the Public Policy
Initiative. The Initiative's overarching goal is to develop a model
for how to systematically improve articles of a specific topic area by
encouraging and enabling subject-matter experts to contribute to
Wikipedia. For this purpose, the Wikimedia Foundation will reach out
to faculty members at select universities and encourage them to use
Wikipedia as a teaching tool during the fall semester 2010 and the
spring semester 2011. Over these two phases of the project, the
Wikimedia Foundation will pilot in-classroom and didactic usage and
improvement of Wikipedia in an experimental manner. Ongoing and
systematic metrics development and evaluation will measure the
project's success in terms of article improvement and educational
experience.

Pete and Frank continued to strenghten the Wikimedia Foundation's ties
to universities by giving a presentation at the John F. Kennedy School
of Government at Harvard University. Under the title "Wikipedia – the
encyclopedia that works only in practice, not in theory" they gave
students and faculty at Harvard an introduction into the internal
mechanisms of Wikipedia and answered the diverse questions of the
audience. The presentation was part of a new lecture series called
"Digital Workshops for Students" at the Kennedy School's Joan
Shorenstein Center.
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/students/digital_workshops.html

The Public Outreach Team did preliminary/exploratory work toward
developing opportunities for collaboration and education among the
community. Pete explored a possible partnership with Ontier, a
producer of screen casting software; and had discussions with Howie
Fung of the User Experience team about the dynamics that surround
editor departure. Frank launched a chapters events calendar on the
Outreach Wiki; and the Public Outreach department had preliminary
discussions with Eugene Kim and Cary Bass about establishing a
Compassionate Communications training program for community members.

Also in February, Frank hired Rod Dunican as a Education Programs
Manager. Rod is a senior learning professional with more than twenty-
five years of experience in corporate training, consulting, coaching,
and project management, working in the areas of organizational
development, operations, marketing, eLearning and instructor-led
training programs. He will be the Project Manager for the second phase
of the Public Policy Initiative.

Cary Bass worked on organizing the Wikimania Scholarships committee
for Wikimania 2010 in Gdańsk. He also a acted as a staff coordinator
for the very first meetup of San Francisco Wikipedia volunteers in the
new office. Furthermore, Cary organized the relaunch and rebranding of
the Living Persons Task Force on the English Wikipedia and selected,
appointed and installed the current ombudsmen commission.

COMMUNICATIONS
A busy, though short month for Wikimedia communications. The Google
grant announcement mid-month delivered the highest amount of coverage
- resulting in more coverage than the closing of this year's annual
campaign. Other coverage through the month focussed on general
Wikipedia topical issues and interviews with Jimmy Wales.

* Announcements
Wikimedia Foundation announces $2 million grant from Google
17 February 2010, Donation will support capacity investments in
Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Foundation_announces_$2_million_grant_from_Google
Telefónica and Wikimedia Foundation Partner to Advance Learning and
Increase Access to Free Knowledge
1 February 2010, Strategic partnership will improve access to
Wikimedia educational and informational content in Latin America and
Europe.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Telefonica_and_Wikimedia_partner_February_2010
* Blog posts
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/02/
* Media contact
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#February_2010
* Major coverage through February

1. Wikimedia and Telefonica partner to expand access to Wikipedia
(February 1)
Considerably less coverage of the Telefonica/WMF partnership than
previous major telco partnerships. Most media outlets copied press
release verbatim or offered neutral perspective on the details.
http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/News/News-Item/Telefónica-Wikimedia-Foundation-Form-Partnership-60911.ht
m
http://www.finchannel.com/Main_News/Tech/57337_Telefónica_and_Wikimedia_Foundation_partner_to_advance_learning_and_increase_access_to_free_knowledg
/

2. $2 million Google grant for Wikimedia Foundation (February 16-17)
Heavy coverage of Google's grant/gift to Wikimedia Foundation later in
February, in major blogs and mainstream media around the world.
Prompted by an advance tweet from Jimmy, news spread quickly on blogs
with mainstream coverage following the formal press release on
February 17. Mostly positive coverage, with many bloggers highlighting
the positive intentions of Google (most coverage focussed on Google
rather than Wikimedia or Wikipedia).
http://mashable.com/2010/02/16/google-wikipedia-donation/
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/16/google-donates-2-million-to-wikimedia-foundation/
http://license.icopyright.net/user/viewContent.act?tag=3.5721%3Ficx_id=D9DU5MF00
http://news.google.com/news/more?pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&cf=all&ncl=dfpdnb404BjCScMC_C50XN2mj1b6M
Other worthwhile reads
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/02/10/more-video-coming-wikipedias-way
http://media.www.mcgilltribune.com/media/storage/paper234/news/2010/02/02/News/Mcgill.Student.Group.Organizes.To.Raise.Funding.For.Wikipedia-3862444.shtml
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Students-at-McGill-U-Band/21033/
http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/02/why-wikipedia-beats-wikinews-as-a-collaborative-journalism-project/
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/companies_on_wikipedia_apple_bt_nokia.php

* Communications campaign update
The Fenton communications team continued work on the three key
communications products associated with part two of the campaign: the
wikimedia story presentation, a leave-behind printed product, and a
story video. The team held a consultation with Sue Gardner in late
February to break down the basic pieces or 'acts' of a Wikimedia
presentation, and submitted an initial creative brief framing up a
collective voice for the communications products.

Fenton and SeaChange strategies also conducted survey design work with
Wikimedia Foundation staff for the first qualitative, on-line focus
groups of Wikimedia donors. This data will be combined with broader
survey results to form a draft, compound demographic analysis of our
donors - culminating in an donor audience tool to determine next steps
for strategic outreach with donors.

During Februay, the Wikimedia Foundation participated in interviews
with SWISS Magazine (Basel, Switzerland); Televisió de Catalunya
(Barcelona, Spain); NHK (Tokyo, Japan); KCBS (San Francisco,
California, USA); DataCenterDynamics (San Francisco, California, USA);
Wall Street Journal (New York, New York, USA); Associated Press (San
Francisco, California, USA);UN Special Magazine; Wall Street Journal
(New York, New York, USA); Denver Post (Denver, Colorado, USA); Parade
Magazine (New York, New York, USA); Media Bistro (New York, New York,
USA); Cell magazine (New York, New York, USA); BBC 2 (London, United
Kingdom).

FUNDRAISING, GRANTS, & PARTNERSHIPS
The Wikimedia Foundation received 3,450 donations in February,
totaling approximately USD 2,108,885. Year-to-date, the Foundation has
raised USD 11,259,228 in individual donations, 50% above its annual
goal of USD 7,500,000. In February, the Foundation also raised USD
500,000 of restricted and unrestricted grants, brining the total
fundraising related revenue for the year to USD 13,309,228, 43% above
the goal of USD 9,297,000.

The Community Giving team continued to wind down the 2009-10 Annual
Fundraiser. The team entered in the final gifts from Dexia,
Moneybookers, Citibank, and various other accounts in order to
complete the transaction record for the fundraiser. They also
processed refunds for suspected and real fraudulent credit card
transactions. The Community Giving team began the 2010 Fundraising
Survey project in conjunction with SeaChange to better access our
donors and messaging.

In the area of major gifts, the month of February was packed with
donor stewardship meetings, both to thank recent donors and explore
new partnerships. In addition, Rebecca Handler planned and led a three-
hour stewardship workshop for the board, and met with Jimmy Wales to
discuss his Davos trip and our upcoming trip to New York City. Jan-
Bart attended a donor meeting and was on message and a wonderful
ambassador for the Foundation. Rebecca helped Anya prepare for the
World Affairs Council, which ended up being a successful sold-out
program on February 22nd.

LEGAL
In February, the Legal Department won an important domain-name
decision through a Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy
(UDRP) proceeding and blocked a commercial entity from using the
domain name "softwarewikipedia.com". The decision was tweeted to
general approval in the community. Mike increased demand letters and
other actions against trademark infringers, domain-name squatters, and
other unauthorized users of Wikipedia marks. This action is in line
both with the Foundation's efforts to build positive branding of the
Wikimedia projects in the public interest world and with our business
partnerships that center on co-branding.

MARCH

Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
Covering: March 2010
Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

KEY PROGRAM METRICS
Reach of all Wikimedia Foundation sites:
371 million unique visitors (rank #5)
+13.3% (1 year ago) / +7.4% (1 month ago)
Source: comScore Media Metrics
Pages served:
11.7 billion
+0.3% (1 year ago) / +0.0% (1 month ago)
Active number of editors (5+ edits/month): 100,950
~+1% (1 year ago) / -0.76% (1 month ago)
Source: March 2010 Report Card
<http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2010_03_detailed.html>

KEY FINANCIAL METRICS
Operating revenue year to date: USD 14.3MM vs. plan of USD 9.0MM
Operating expenses year to date: USD 6.3MM vs. plan of USD 7.1MM
Unrestricted cash on hand as of April 28: USD 12.8MM while
unrestricted CDs and US Treasuries were USD 8.7MM

STRATEGIC PLANNING PROJECT
The working groups have finished most of their preliminary planning
with the help of The Bridgespan Group. The strategy team will spend
April and May finalizing and integrating that work into a cohesive
plan. The Strategy Task Force has made progress toward drafting a
movement-wide set of goals and priorities. A draft for comments should
be completed by the end of April. There have also been a number of
substantive conversations about the scope of content across different
Wikimedia projects, which has resulted in a new Task Force.

TECHNOLOGY – CORE
Operations
Wikimedia sites suffered from a global outage on March 24, that lasted
up to several hours for some users, due to a DNS corruption problem in
the standard fail-over procedure to divert traffic from Amsterdam to
Tampa. The tech team have reduced the Foundation's DNS update interval
from standard 30 minutes to 5 minutes, and will be reviewing enhancing
notification / escalation procedures to keep communications better
informed of status during outages.

The entire Tech Team came together in San Francisco for its twice-
annual Tech Meeting, and discussed both plans and issues. The plan for
Operations has been further developed in the Tech Strategy Work Group.

The Amsterdam network has been extended for the upcoming server
capacity expansion. This new network equipment will also be used to
migrate to a much more fault tolerant network topology.

Preparations were made for the caching servers expansion in Amsterdam,
and new servers were ordered. The team expects to complete the
expansion by the end of April.

External Storage (i.e. wiki revisions data) was re-compressed into a
more efficient format: from 1.9 TB to about 140 GB, a saving of 93% on
our storage servers.

Rob Halsell made progress on research and experimentation with Ubuntu
Cloud for the development server cluster.

Mobile
The technology team released a new version of the Wikimedia Mobile App
to the iTunes store which is awaiting Apple acceptance. The team is
also on the verge of deploying a new version of the Mobile Server and
migrating m.stats to stats.wikimedia.

Analytics
A planning group on analytics begun assessing different options for
web analytics and other analytics requirements across the whole
Wikimedia Foundation. Privacy issues were a key part of the discussion
to-date, and both open source and proprietary solutions have been
considered. The group expects to reach a better sense of decision
tradeoffs (features/cost/privacy/timing/risks etc.) by May.

TECHNOLOGY - USABILITY
The usability beta was updated on March 17, to decouple the HTML
iFrame, which introduces considerable additional complexity, from the
features for inserting links, tables and, search & replace. Dialog
features were enabled for over 500,000 beta users.[1] The main
features for Citron, such as template collapsing, inline expansion and
the dialog for templates were enabled for the usability study. (Citron
features are not available for wider audience due to iFrame
dependency.) [1] Usability Update: Introducing Dialogs,
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/25/usability-update-introducing-dialogs/

The third round of the usability study was conducted in March in
partnership with gotomedia[2]. Ten people participated at Fleischman
Field Research in San Francisco and eight other participants were
surveyed remotely using web conference technology. The objective of
the study was to evaluate the new features such as template handling
features (collapsing, inline expansion, and pop-up) and side-by-side
preview tab and overall evaluation of the Stanton Wikipedia usability
project. The findings from the study and videos will be published in
early May. [2] gotomedia, http://www.gotomedia.com/

The usability team is preparing to offer the usability beta as default
user interface and interaction to all Wikimedia projects. The beta has
been tried out by over 600,000 users since August 2009, and an average
of 80% of users continue using it. The plan is to roll out to Commons
on April 5, and evaluate the responses and system capacity and
continue on to Wikipedia and the rest of Wikimedia projects towards
end of the month. The announcements were made though WMF blog and tech
blogs. [3][4][5]
[3] http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/25/wikimedia-gets-ready-for-some-big-changes/
[4] http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/the-change-in-interface-is-coming/
[5] http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/the-power-of-translators/
March ended with a total of 635,942 users having tried the Beta. [6]
[6] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/
Beta_Feedback_Survey#Update:_March_31.2C_2010

MULTIMEDIA USABILITY PROJECT
Development of the new upload interface continued and the prototype
was staged in a lab environment. The two types of user flow are
staged, 1) “my own work” and 2) “found on Internet.” The user
flow which requires author's permission will be staged later time.
Once the prototype is finalized, it will be used for the usability
study and be opened up for the community for feedback.

Assets uploaded but missing mandatory information, such as author or
copyright status, require flags or some protection, so that assets are
not distributed without permission from authors or without confirming
the appropriate copyright status. A feature for incomplete uploads
that supports graceful handling of this interim status is under active
discussion.[7]
[7] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:Incomplete_uploads

The usability study was postponed from March 30 and 31 to early May,
in order to incorporate feedback and avoid conflicting schedule with
conferences in the second half of April. Ten study participants were
recruited and screened for the usability study through the banner on
Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. The usability study will be conducted
in partnership with gotomedia.

OTHER PROGRAM ACTIVITIES
During March, Rod Dunican, Pete Forsyth and Frank Schulenburg
finalized the grant proposal for the second phase of the Public Policy
Initiative. They started to outline a Wikipedia Campus Ambassador
training and certification program as a key deliverable of the
Initiative. Wikipedia Campus Ambassadors will serve as trainers,
working directly with classroom instructors to teach the basics of
Wikipedia editing. Furthermore, Campus Ambassadors will help to start
Wikipedia student groups, facilitate the exchange of ideas regarding
Wikipedia as a learning tool, and plan social events. The grant
proposal outlines the establishment of this Campus Ambassador Program
and includes a high-level program view of the Ambassador training
sessions.

Frank Schulenburg also participated in a video conference with the
winners of Google's Kiswahili Challenge in Nairobi/Kenya. The
participants of the Challenge discussed with Frank, Erik Möller, Naoko
Komuara and Samuel Klein Wikipedia's upcoming new usability features,
Wikimedia's outreach resources and opportunities for the contest
participants to get more involved in the Wikimedia movement.

As part of the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic planning process,
Frank Schulenburg embarked on planning the outreach department's
priorities for the fiscal year 2010/2011. Together with the members of
the Program Team Workgroup, he worked on a mission statement for the
Program Team, the Team's core processes, and the potential
implications for the future structure and activities of the Program
Team.

Rod Dunican, Wikimedia's new Education Program Manager, started to
discuss a potential meeting – "Using Wikipedia as a Learning Tool in
the Classroom" – with librarians and professors. He reached out to
instructors who are currently using Wikipedia as a teaching tool and
have first-hand knowledge of the pitfalls and successes that the
Public Policy Initiative may experience. Rod investigated their
interest in sharing their experiences with WMF and helping the
Wikimedia Foundation to develop sample lesson plans and other
instructional materials for universities.

Pete Forsyth continued his communication with schools who participated
in phase one of the Public Policy Initiative. He secured verbal
commitments from professors for the second phase of the Initiative.

Pete worked with contacts at Harvard's Taubman Center --who wish to
dedicate 18 public policy case studies under a Creative Commons
license for use in the Public Policy Initiative-- to clarify licensing
issues and seek consensus on how to move forward. He also met with the
Internet Archive, American Field Service, and BunchBall, and explored
Yahoo Answers and the Open Directory Project, in ongoing efforts to
stay abreast of current thinking about online communities and
volunteerism, and to maintain a network in that arena.

Pete also began to coordinate the setup of a Contact Relationship
Management database for the program team. Together with members of
Wikimedia's tech team he set up a CiviCRM installation for testing
purposes and started to get trained.
Furthermore, Pete started to plan a meeting with members of the German
Mentoring Team, to be held in April in Berlin. The meeting will aim at
sharing best practices and discussing the necessary steps for building
sustainable Mentoring Programs in other Wikipedia language versions.

Cary Bass worked with the User Experience team to plan and develop the
roll-out of Vector onto the Wikimedia projects; including advanced
planning for the development of the Wikipedia 2.0 logo for extended
languages. With Sara Crouse, he organized the Wikimania 2010
scholarship team. In conjunction with Austin Hair, Cary updated 2009's
scholarship application and database, submitted the call for
applications and worked with making phase one application review work
efficiently for scholarship team.

Cary coordinated the board certification of the results of the Steward
election.

On March 26 and 27, Erik Zachte attended the Critical Point of View
conference (CPOV) in Amsterdam. (Mark, Jose and Hay also attended one
day.) The CPOV conference brings together researchers and Wikipedians
from around the world to share and build insights into the complex and
messy reality of Wikipedia: What are the new processes for determining
the threshold of knowledge and how do they actually play out? What are
the new relations that emerge between this knowledge reference and
external institutions such as schools and governments? How is agency
distributed within the Wikipedia platform? The conference was staged
by the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures (INC) and the
Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). It's the second
event staged by those two organizations: the first was 'WikiWars,' in
Bangalore, India in January 2010. In September 2010 there will be a
third even in Leipzig, Germany. Erik reported back that the conference
was very well organized, with pictures and talk summaries later put
online at networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/. About 100 people attended.

COMMUNICATIONS
March was a quiet month for media coverage and communications
operations. Major media interest focussed on Wikipedia downtime in
late March. Jay Walsh spent much of March focussing on strategy/
business plan support, support and planning for vector roll-out, and
design strategy planning.
* Blog posts
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/
(Blog traffic peaked later in March, on both techblog and Wikimedia
blog with global interest in brief WP downtime.)
* Media contact
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_room/Media_Contact#March_2010

* Major coverage through January
1. Suspected gunman had Wikipedia connections (March 5)
Some neutral-tone coverage through the US about a gunman who open-
fired on the Pentagon in March, who allegedly had connections to
Wikipedia, as well as many other online properties.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/gunman-outlined-theories-online/

2. Wikipedia as a trusted news source (March 15)
Moka Pantages garnered a few tech headlines and considerable micro-
blogging mentions during a SXSW presentation in Austin focussing on
digital journalism.  The claim that Wikipedia should be trusted as a
news source was backed up by bloggers and supported by reporters
attending the social media gathering.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_wikipedia_should_be_trusted_or_how_to_consume.php

3. "Get Video on Wikipedia!" (March 18)
The campaign to get video on Wikipedia, led by Kaltura and the HTML5
open video alliance received headlines in mid-March.  The news
focussed on major advances in open video and HTML5 and how these
improvements stood to increase the quality and quantity of video on
Wikipedia. Coverage was largely positive.
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Wikipedia-Pushes-for-Users-to/22035/
http://mashable.com/2010/03/18/video-wikipedia/
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/03/18/open-source-video-company-kaltura-joins-with-wikimedia-to-promote-html5-video/

4. Wikipedia down (March 24)
A one-hour plus downtime for Foundation web properties in late-March
resulted in a deluge of tech blogger and micro-blogger coverage. Most
coverage was short and neutral in tone, and quickly updated once the
site resumed service.  Major media combined the news with the
similarly but unrelated timing of a youtube.com site outage.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=7795&tag=content;col1
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361778,00.asp
http://mashable.com/2010/03/24/wikipedia-is-down/

5. Wikipedia readies for User Interface overhaul (March 26)
Largely positive coverage of the blog post from the Wikipedia
Usability team announcing the details of the forthcoming vector roll-
out on Wikimedia Foundation properties. Coverage on almost all major
tech blogs, as well as main stream media.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/29/new-wikipedia-layout-2010_n_517007.html
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/are_you_ready_for_the_new_easier_wikipedia.php
http://mashable.com/2010/03/26/wikipedias-redesign-is-coming-soon/
http://digital.venturebeat.com/2010/03/26/wikipedia-prepares-for-user-interface-lift/
Other worthwhile reads
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/03/23/urnidgns852573C400693880482576EF001C04F2.DTL
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2010/03/23/25575/
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/from_haiti_to_the_oscars_wikim.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/digital_giants/8564348.stm
http://opensource.com/business/10/3/wikimedia-foundation-doing-strategic-planning-open-source-way
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100311/you-ask-jimmy-wales-answers-a-crowd-sourced-interview-with-mr-wikipedia/
http://www.nrcu.gov.ua/index.php?id=148&listid=113390
During March, the Wikimedia Foundation participated in interviews with
the Wall Street Journal (New York, New York, USA); the Associated
Press (San Francisco, California, USA); National Public Radio
(Washington, District of Columbia, USA); PR Week (London, United
Kingdom); the National Post (Toronto, Canada); ABC News (New York, New
York, USA); CNBC (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, USA); Together
Magazine (Brussels, Belgium); Daily Princetonian (Princeton, New
Jersey, USA); Streaming Media (Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA); Radio
Netherlands (Hilversum, Netherlands).

* Communications campaign update
Fenton's communications work through March focussed on refining
concepts for the executive presentation kit, as well as presenting
refined concepts for an accompanying video. Wikimedia fundraiser
research focussed on evaluating pre-existing donor research ideas and
refining ideas for the upcoming donor survey.

FUNDRAISING, GRANTS, & PARTNERSHIPS
The Wikimedia Foundation received 1,968 donations in March, totaling
approximately USD 99,095. Year-to-date, the Foundation has raised USD
11,358,323 in individual donations, 53% above its annual goal of USD
7,500,000. Including revenue from restricted and unrestricted gifts
the Wikimedia Foundation has raised USD 13,408,323, 45% above the goal
of USD 9,297,000.

In March, the Community Gifts began planning for the 2010 Annual
Fundraiser. The team began compiling reports of the make up on the
Foundation's donors and the effects of various donor cultivation and
stewardship efforts. The fundraising department plans to use the
reports to fuel planning and upcoming budgets.

In addition, the Community gifts team continued working the 2010
Fundraising Survey (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2010/Survey
) with intents to understand the Foundation's donors, how they
perceive the foundation’s work, and what kinds of interactions would
be most valuable in maintaining long-term philanthropic relationships.
The survey will launch in May after translation efforts are completed.

With the assistance of the Technology team Community giving posted and
boarded activity recruiting for two staff positions to support the
2010 Fundraising efforts. These positions should mitigate peak demand
for engineering to support Fundraising without diverting resources
from other technology functions.

Major gifts activities in March including working with Bridgespan on
the fundraising business plan, mapping out and event for the end of
2010, developing fundraising communications for Jimmy Wales and
preparing for April donor meetings in New York. In addition, Rebecca
conducted prospect/donor meetings with over ten individuals.

LEGAL
The legal team began a pro-bono relationship with the Perkins Coie law
firm, which may be able to provide significant litigation work for the
Foundation.

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Business Development focused its attention on mobile and offline areas
and its development in the strategic plan. In March Kul and Tomasz
attended Mobile World Congress and spoke at the event about user data,
trust, and the worldwide growth of content on mobile devices. Kul is
directing developments in mobile apps with existing partners Orange
and Telefonica, and is working toward a system to engage with many
more partners in geographic regions such as Eastern Europe, the Middle
East, and throughout Asia. Kul is also working with various partners
to test several initiatives to bring Wikipedia in offline forms/
devices in markets. Currently the focus on offline Wikipedia has been
on market research and product development with market and
distributions tests soon to come.

FINANCE & ADMINISTRATION
In March Veronique and KPMG worked to finalize the 2008 Form 990 Tax
Return. The return was approved by the Audit Committee on March 24.
The Board of Trustees will be presented with the final Form 990 during
their April meeting in Berlin, Germany.

To facilitate the rapid growth of Foundation staff as outlined in the
preliminary version of the Strategy Plan, the administration team
visited a vacant office space on the 6th floor of 149 New Montgomery
Street, in San Francisco. After their visit the administrative team
began negotiating a lease and hope to obtain the 6th floor to
facilitate the Foundation's projected growth. With the current growth
rates the Foundation will likely require the extra floor by early 2011.

Bill Gong, the Foundation's accountant, began working with vendors to
find an updated accounting system for the Foundation. Currently the
organization has been using Quickbooks, but with the rapid growth of
the organization this software is no longer a practical solution. The
accounting team hopes to find a system that will be compatible with
the open-source fundraising software CiviCRM.

VISITORS AND GUESTS
In March, the following people visited the Wikimedia Foundation
offices for meetings and talks: Jesse Ansubel of the Sloan Foundation;
Melissa Hagemann, Advisory Board member and Senior Program Manager
with the Open Society Institute; a delegation from the Chinese State
Department; New York Times journalist Jenny 8 Lee; former IDEO
engineer and founder of BunchBall, Rajat Paharia; User: Erdrokan from
Switzerland; a delegation from intercultural learning and student
exchange non-profit AFS Intecultural Programs; User:Elonka; Bishakha
Datta; Meghan Murphy of the X Prize Foundation; Megan Smith of Google,
and Thomas Dalton of Wikimedia UK.

STAFF ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES
No changes were made during March.

STAFF ACTIVITIES
The bi-annual All Staff meeting was held on March 4th and 5th. Sue
opened this year with an overview of the goals and targets coming out
of the Strategic Plan for the next 5 years including a focus in on the
2010-2011 fiscal year. Bridgespan attended the meetings and helped
facilitate as we broke into groups by department to determine the
necessary positions and logistics that would get us from here to there
with an emphasis on the next fiscal year.




James Owen
Executive Assistant & Board Liaison
Wikimedia Foundation
Office +1.415.839.6885 x 604
Mobile +1.415.509.5444
Fax +1.415.882.0495
Email- jowen at wikimedia.org
Website- www.wikimediafoundation.org

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-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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