Board elections: Candidate responses
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Ad Huikeshoven (Dedalus)
| Candidate profile | |
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| Real name: | Ad Huikeshoven |
| Username: | Dedalus |
| Age: | 44 |
| Location: | The Hague, The Netherlands |
| Languages: | Dutch, English |
| Wikimedian since: | February 2005 |
| Active wikis: | Dutch Wikipedia English Wikipedia |
Candidate Statement:
Since January 2007 I do serve as a non-board member on the (board) Audit Committee to represent and assist the board in its general oversight of the organisation's accounting and financial reporting processes, audits of the financial statements, and internal control, and audit functions. The organization of WMF is still growing and needs to attract funds, grants and many, many contributions by small donors to cover the ever increasing cost of hosting the websites. The WMF therefore needs to build trust and credibility in, for example, presenting timely financial statements with an unqualified audit opinion to show donors' money is well spent. I graduated in Economics and Business Administration at the University Maastricht (Masters degree) and I am a professional auditor with a Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) designation. I have over ten years professional experience in oversight functions. I care for the long term continuity of the Foundation and its projects, and would be happy to bring my professional experience and experience as Audit Committee member from a community perspective to the full board.
Why do you want to be a board member?
Please see my candidacy statement. According to the rules of this election no amendments to the candidacy statement are allowed after May 22.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
Trust, credibility and reliability of the Foundation through timely and transparent (financial) reporting, a global network of chapters, and full support to WYSIWYG capability of editing projects.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
You are free to investigate my user contribution lists. If you've found a pattern, please tell me.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
The Foundation has steadily increased community involvement on all levels, including the Board. The recent addition of chapter appointed seats is an example. I don't see a reduction in representation. To the contrary, the Foundation is not a membership organization, and however, does allocate at least half it's seats to representatives of the communities.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
Graduated in Economics and Business Administration at the University Maastricht, Certified Internal Auditor designation from the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA), over ten years work experience in oversight functions. I'm a director of two privately held (small) investment vehicles.
I've been a secretary of a student association, I've been president of the local Go (Asian Board game) club. I've been on the board of the Dutch Go Association. Operating as a team is key, in my experience, for board effectiveness. Another key for non-profits is openness and transparancy. Not the last key is effective delegation to prevent overburdening the Board with issues that can perfectly well handled by volunteers in projects.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
Chapters are membership organizations. Anyone wishing to be member of Wikimedia, please join your local chapter, or, if no such chapter exist to date, help create one.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
Wikimania is supposed to be the annual conference of Wikimedia, that is nothing less than full support by the Foundation. The Board will be present and is used to organize a board meeting at Wikimania. And, of course, the organizing team will be held responsible to organize the event effectively to cover all cost by fees, sponsors and other income.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
Sue is doing a great job and I fully trust her.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
As stated in an answer to another question, for me acting as a team, and being a teamplayer is key to Board effectiveness. Any slight mistake I would like to discuss privately and confidentially with the Board or individual Board members.
Alex Bakharev
| Candidate profile | |
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| Real name: | Alexander S. Bakharev |
| Username: | Alex Bakharev |
| Age: | 44 |
| Location: | Melbourne, Victoria, Australia |
| Languages: | Russian, English |
| Wikimedian since: | June 2005 |
| Active wikis: | English Wikipedia Wikimedia Commons Russian Wikipedia |
Candidate Statement:
I was born and lived half of my life in Saint Petersburg, Russia. I worked for three years as a postdoc at the University of Illinois and now for almost twelve years in Melbourne, Australia, as a research scientist in an industrial company. I am a wikipedian since Jun 2005, an admin on en-wiki since February 2006 and the author of the AlexNewArtBot bot.
What worries me is that the development of Wikipedia appears to be slowing down, perhaps even stagnating. To counter this we have to solve a few problems on the WMF level:
- We do not retain our best editors, they feel frustrated with conflicts and under-appreciated.
- Low regard with which wikipedians tend to be held in society at large. We need to communicate how important the project we are working on and how wonderful are our volunteers to the wider community.
- Many Wikipedians are harassed and stalked for our work here. We need to have a special litigation fund for protection of Wikipedians as well as other possible forms of self-defence.
- WMF needs more money. I think we should be more proactive in seeking government grants and corporate sponsorship.
Why do you want to be a board member?
Well all I want is that the place on board reserved to community was filled by a committed loyal wikipedian who has invested a lot of his or her efforts into the project and whose ideas about the project I share. A few days before the deadline for submission there were none that in my opinion fit the description. Thus, I acted the wikiway - if you want a job to be done do it yourself.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
To counter slowing down and stagnation of the project.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
Take a look into User:Alex Bakharev some of my contributions to English wikipedia are mentioned there (more than 450 new articles, many on DYK level, 30+K edits on enwiki, more than 1K image uploads to commons, etc.). I am also daily patrolling the new articles related to the Russian history and are trying to mediate (sometimes in vain) contentious disputes over Eastern European issues. Realistically, the rate of my contribution will decrease if I elected, but I would still continue as I enjoy it greatly).
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
I have signed the petition. I think it is a bad idea to diminish the role of the community of editors, this is the major asset of the project. Besides while the budget of WMF is very small (in millions, mostly spent on the essential costs like hardware, bandwidth and salaries) the potential value of the project measured by the Internet impact is huge (in billions). Large venture capitalists will be (and probably are) trying to influence WMF, the only ones that could not be bought a millions of wikipedia editors. Another point is that while I admire the idea of creation of the local chapters (and participated in the meetings on the creation of Australian chapter) I do not think they should be directly given voice. All people involved in the chapter are active wikipedians and surely involved in the elections like this. No need for separate places for them. It is unclear who would decide which of the many local chapters will be represented. Who is more important Australian chapter or Argentinian? or maybe Austrian or Russian?
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
I do not have much of financial experience but I have some successful experience with applications for governmental grants. While I think the financial part of the WMF work is extremely important I think the need to have an input from the editors is important as well especially since there are special places on the board reserved for the specialists (including specialists in finances).
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
I think the main stakeholders for the project are the editors, they should have the main influence over the organization. I think creation of a special class of fee-paying editors (based only in USA, right?) that have stronger influence over the foundation is a right decision.
We are currently creating a network of local chapters that maybe fee-paying to cover the costs. Maybe we can see if there is any advantage in the formal membership on that level.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
I think Wikimania is an important event - it helps to reduce interpersonal tensions and to take important decisions that might otherwise needed months of email exchange. It is also a good publicity stunt. Foundation should support it by their human and organizational resources but should make it self-financed. There are two major problems with Wikimania: most editors (especially living overseas) could not afford to visit it; Wikimania could lead to "outing" users conscious about their anonymity. While the second problem is IMHO unsolvable, the first one can be fixed by placing the event there many wikipedians live. I do not think that Egypt was the best choice as the Wikimania-2008 location. Probably either USA or Europe not very far (less than 200km) from a major international airport would be a more convenient choice.
Another important events are the local meetups. I think there might be a place for some sort of events between the Wikimania and local meetups. I could imagine Australian, Japanese, Russian or North American annual local conference could cause a lot of interest. It might be a job for the local chapters but WMF help can be handy.
Wikimania and Wikimeetups are mostly praying to already converted. I think if we could ensure that major scientific, educational or internet-related events have a boot named Wikipedia or a "Wikipedia writing workshop" it would be great for promoting our project. WMF could help financially as well as by providing some administrative help.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
I do not have the whole information to answer the question yet. I would rather avoid to made a public evaluation of a full time work by a devoted project participants based on pieces of informations and rumors.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
I think our biggest collective failure is that we have not persuaded the society who important is this project. They still consider Wikipedia as something shameful and unimportant. One of results of this is that we do not collect enough resources (including money) to comfortably support our work. This is not a result of a single mistake of the board but it hurts.
Regarding mistakes I think that appointing a COO without criminal checks was not a very smart decision (though if you pay people peanuts you should be prepared to sometimes get a monkey). Allowing volunteers to get access to sensitive information (Checkusers, Arbcom members) without checking their identities and claimed credentials was not a right decision either. If such a requirement had been implemented before, we could have prevented the Essjay controversy.
Craig Spurrier (Cspurrier)
| Candidate profile | |
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| Real name: | Craig Spurrier |
| Username: | Cspurrier |
| Age: | 19 |
| Location: | Columbia, South Carolina, USA |
| Languages: | English, German, French |
| Wikimedian since: | September 2004 |
| Active wikis: | English Wikinews English Wikipedia |
Candidate Statement:
Overall, I believe the existing board has done a fairly good job. There are however several areas in which the board could improve.
The needs of the sister projects are often forgotten or ignored. I would like to see a greater attention paid to these projects. I believe the board could provide greatly increased support to them without harming Wikipedia.
Many users feel underrepresented and are concerned that Wikipedia is the only project the board cares about. As a board member, I would strive to make the community feel its voice is being heard, as well as ensure it is in fact being heard.
Other areas for improvement:
- We need to improve inter-project communication. There is a great deal of redundancy in work between the projects. Closer collaboration would allow us to best use our resources.
- WMF still has a problem with public image and media relations. More frequent press communications would help combat the extreme media reaction for common occurrences. Closer communications with the sister projects would also help prevent PR issues, like the recent negative media attention regarding Wikinews.
I am:
- a Steward
- a Bureaucrat, Checkuser, ArbCom member on English Wikinews
- an Admin on English Wikibooks
- a Wikinews Accredited Reporter
- an OTRS representative on Stewards, info-en, and Permissions queues
About me:
I have BA in Sociology. I work as a computer consultant, specializing in web application development.
Why do you want to be a board member?
I want to be a board member because I see a problem that needs to be fixed and I believe I can fix it. As I mentioned in my candidate statement and other questions, many users do not feel the board represents them. The sister projects, especially, often feel underrepresented. The board is perceived as to only care about Wikipedia, allowing the needs of the sister projects to go unmet. The board needs to be able to make the community feel its voice is being heard, as well as ensure it is in fact being heard.
The other major issue I hope to improve upon is the foundation's problem with public image and media relations We need to have more frequent press communications. Many of the public relation issues the foundation has faced has been because the press has interpreted common occurrences as major media events.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
I would like to see improved communications between the board and the community, especially the communities of the sister projects. The board needs to both to make sure that the voice of the community is heard, and also that the community feels its voice is being heard.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
The bulk of my contributions have been to the English language Wikinews. I have 60+ published articles (a full list can be found on my Wikinews user page) and over 9,000 edits there. I also create the Wikinews Print Edition. The print edition is a PDF version of the day's Wikinews articles and selected content from the other projects. I have produced it almost every day since May 2005. Though I am mostly a wikignome on the English Wikipedia, I have written a handful of articles. I also have a few dozen photos on commons and a lot of small contributions on the other English projects. I spoke at Wikimania 2007 and will likely again at 2008.
It would be completely unrealistic to say being elected to the board would have no effect on my contributions. I however take my commitments to the projects very seriously and will do everything I can to balance the new responsibilities of a board member with my existing commitments to the Wikimedia projects. If I am elected, the Wikinews Print Edition will continue to come out daily (or near daily), and I will continue to contribute to the projects. The goals of the Wikimedia Foundation are very important to me, so I will dedicate the time that is necessary to ensure that I can fulfill my responsibilities as a board member and continue to contribute to the projects.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
I strongly oppose having fewer community selected seats. The community is what makes the projects valuable. I believe the community should hold the majority of the board seats. The chapter seats while without a doubt are going to community members. The chapters however only represent a small subset of the community. I would prefer to see these seats be selected by the general community rather then the subset served by the chapters.
It is very important that the board have the advice of experts in making decisions. I do not however believe that it is necessary to appoint the experts to the board in order to provide this assistance. The direction of the Wikimedia Foundation should ultimately be determined by the community. A greater effort should also be made to recruit experts from within the community both for the board of trustees and the Advisory Board.
I am very disappointed with the way the board handled the restructuring. This proposal radically changed the governance of the foundation, but there was little consultation with the community before announcing that it would happen. The chapters vary so much in structure, representativeness and formality that it requires careful planing in order to fairly select people for the chapter seats. This careful planing does not appear to have been done. It feels a lot like the board just rushed into this without considering the practicalities of managing it or the way in which the community would react.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
I have a functional understanding of the basics of nonprofit accounting and tax law, though I have no formal training in these areas. I have been involved with non-profits for a while, though mostly in the role of providing volunteer IT services. I have assisted with the books for a department of a state agency, as well as assisting with basic accounting for other small organizations. Accounting is definitely not my strongest area, but I am confident that I will be able to understand the financial aspects of Wikimedia to the level required of a board member.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
The idea of a membership organization sounds wonderful, but the benefits of a true membership organization are fairly minimal, and it adds complexity and risks creating inequality. There is also no real fair way of determining who should be members.
Wikimedia can and should become more community driven, but this does not require the foundation to become an actual membership organization. Additional community seats and a board more in touch with the community would serve the ideals of a membership much better then actual membership ever could.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
Real life events are very important to creating a devoted and productive community. I attended and greatly enjoyed both Wikimania 2006 and 2007. Both events were excellent and well run. I look forward to attending Wikimaina 2008. There are a few small areas where additional support from the foundation could have helped, but overall it looks like the foundation's level of support in the past Wikimanias was adequate and should be continued into the future.
Wikimania is a valuable part of the community activities. There are however obvious issues that prevent many Wikimedians from attending. Regional conferences nicely supplement Wikimania. I believe the foundation should provide further support for regional conferences, particularly in areas where there are not chapters. I was a part of the Wikimania Atlanta bid team and the now canceled Conference of the Americas. The Conference of the Americas largely fell apart due to a lack of support from the Wikimedia Foundation. We were unable to find a nonprofit willing to take our donations. The foundation told us that they felt responsible for the final product if they were to handle our donations and they did not feel they had the resources to support both the COTA and Wikimania. I understand the foundation's position and reluctantly support the foundation's stance. The foundation lacked the resources to support it and it would have reflected poorly on Wikimedia if COTA was a disaster. The fact that this situation occurred though is incredible unfortunate. We need to develop a way to ensure the community can hold regional events in chapterless areas without putting the foundation at risk. An additional employee who could focus on real world outreach such as regional conferences, meet-ups, academic events, if funds allowed, I believe would be a good solution.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
There is so much that I am not privy to that it would be impossible to fairly attempt to evaluate the office performance without more information. My interactions with the staff have mostly left me with a positive impression of their work. Sue Gardner appears to be doing a good job. I have noticed a few areas which could be improved, but I see them mostly as growing pains that have already been resolved or will be resolved fairly soon.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
Users are feeling underrepresented and ignored, especially users on the sister projects. The board needs to ensure that the community feels its voice is being heard. There are a sizable number of users on the sister projects who do not like the board and strongly resent any board action towards their home project. I believe the board has made a big mistake in allowing communications between the board and the sister projects to get this bad.
Dan Rosenthal (Swatjester)
| Candidate profile | |
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| Real name: | Dan Rosenthal |
| Username: | Swatjester |
| Age: | 25 |
| Location: | Washington, DC, USA |
| Languages: | English, Spanish, Italian |
| Wikimedian since: | December 2005 |
| Active wikis: | Meta-Wiki English Wikipedia Wikimedia Commons OTRS Wiki |
Candidate Statement:
In my time with Wikimedia, I have served as a legal intern for the Wikimedia Foundation, an OTRS representative for the legal, press, and info-en queues, a member of the Communications Committee, a press contact for the United States, and most recently, the creator of the working group for the (still in development) DC chapter. In my capacity working as a representative for the Wikimedia Foundation, I've been interviewed by the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Congressional Quarterly, and other international media sources. I have served on the board of directors for the Iraq War Veterans Organization. I am a second year law student at American University Law School, on the student Senate, overseeing a budget of around half a million dollars annually.
My priorities:
- Working to bolster the Foundation's public image and media relations
- Working with members of the community to ensure that the community has a true voice on the board.
- Working at the board level to assist the fundraising capacity of the foundation.
- Ensuring that all members of the Wikimedia community, critics and supporters alike, are treated with respect and dignity.
Why do you want to be a board member?
I wanted to stop bitching about things, and start getting them done, and since the changes I feel must be made must occur at the board level, this is where I should be. I want to be a board member so that the community seats are TRULY community seats. I want to speak up on behalf of the community now, so there will be a community to speak for, later. And based on my experiences working with the staff and board of the Foundation, working on the Communications Committee, and working as a legal intern for the foundation, I believe that I am well suited for the position and have the credentials required. Experience with large budgets? Check. Experience with non profits? Check. Experience being on a board? Check. Experience with the people I'd be working with on THIS board? Check. A commitment and desire to ensure that Wikimedia is a better place for everybody it touches? Check. Oh, and I'd like to add, like my colleague Ray, I too have a high tolerance for boring meetings: During the law school semester, every Tuesday I attend a SBA Senate meeting, conducted under rules of parliamentary procedure, that typically runs from 10 PM (2200) until anywhere from 2-4 AM (0200 to 0400). Weekly. And I not only volunteered for it, I enjoy it.....
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
A measure that clearly and permanently secures the role of the community in the Foundation as one that is dignified, respected, and appreciated. If I can name another, it would be a cohesive review of the foundation's public image problems -- externally (with the mass media and people unfamiliar with the foundation) and internally (within the Wikimedia community, and news sources that ARE familiar with the foundation) and develop and implement a list of steps that can be taken to improve that image.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
I have submitted quite a few high resolution pictures to Commons, and continue to do so whenever I get the chance to go out and do more photography. I have written several Good Articles and DYK's for English Wikipedia, as well as recently a significant collaboration on a featured article. I tend to focus on U.S. Supreme Court Cases, and military history related topics for my article editing. Some of my photography under a free license on commons has been featured in the "Cresset" magazine, from Valparaiso University, and a commercial picture-geomap. In working on the board, my editing, article writing, and photography will not decrease, since I keep them at an easily maintainable rate.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
I am a signer of the community petition, and have been vocal on the mailing lists in terms of my concerns with the board restructuring. While I support and approve of the chapters getting a role in the board governance, and the establishing of clearly delineated seats for community members and "outsiders", I feel this move was conducted in a way that was to the detriment of the community. There was not enough consultation with members of the community or the advisory board before hand. The roles of the chapters in determining their seats were not defined. The issue of which seats constitute the community seats was not immediately answered. And the creation of a seat-for-life for Jimbo that serves no purpose other than to guarantee him a potential spot on the board and disappears if he does not stand for trusteeship, is something I have very mixed feelings about.
I believe the board should have approached this in a more thoughtful, more measured way, and delayed taking action if there were insufficient plans for how to properly implement the steps. As a trustee, one of my priorities would be to work closely with the chapters and community members to determine their role on the board: the chapters with regards to their two seats, and the community as a whole with regards to defining itself and its effect on the foundation.
With regard to the weight of expert outsiders vs. non-expert community members -- we certainly have members within our community that have the relevant legal, financial, or technical qualifications to sit on the board. We should only be bringing outsiders in when we cannot find an appropriate member from within the community. This means that we need to step up the job of enticing members of the community to volunteer their time (in any position). That said, I think it is irresponsible to put people on the board without at rudimentary understanding of financial, legal and technical qualifications. It should not be required that board members be experts in those fields (though that's obviously quite helpful) but they should at least be competent in more than one of them. One of the biggest risks to Wikimedia's future is losing the community's voice. I intend, as a trustee, to ensure that the community always has that voice, not just nominally, but an effective voice.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
I currently oversee a budget of around a half million dollars yearly, as a SBA Senator at my law school. This budget goes towards funding various competing student organizations, as well as publishing our four internationally recognized law reviews, student magazines, law briefs, etc. With regards to non-profit organizations, I am on the board of directors for the Iraq War Veterans Organization and Long War Veterans Organization. IWVO and its parent LWVO, are a national veterans advocacy non-profit with a very large membership. I helped develop the organization from the ground up, and it is now one of the national leaders in supporting Iraq veterans. I come from a family that has extensive experience with non-profits and financial experience. My mother, aunt, and god-mother are CPAs. My parents have served on the Board of Councilors for the Carter Center, as well as numerous other non-profits. As well, my legal studies are taking me into the relevant field as well; this Spring I will be taking "Federal Corporate Income Tax" and "Law of Non-Profit Organizations:Taxation of non-profits".
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
I think the issue bears revisiting, and in a broad sense I am in favor of the idea of a membership based Wikimedia, especially as far as attracting donations is concerned. The idea deserves further study. Potentially it can help solve other problems too, such as issues of governance and community voicing. It also creates a slew of other concerns that need to be reviewed. Either way, it's not a step that should be entered into lightly, but it is a step that I believe absolutely deserves to be revisited.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
Note: I was part of the Atlanta bid team, and COTA team. The foundation needs to be able to support regional meetings, such as COTA, and find a way to be more fiscally responsible with regards to expenses for Wikimania. Wikimanias should be hosted in countries easily accessible to the widest range of people. Tapei and Alexandria are not widely accessible; there is no reason that large numbers of Wikimedians should be excluded due to travel costs, when we could have just as easily hosted a conference in Tokyo, London, Paris, Geneva, Toronto, Atlanta, Moscow, etc. Buenos Aires is a step in that direction, but we can do better. Moreover, I do not agree with our hosting of projects in countries that do not support the basic freedoms that are fundamental to human rights. Wikimedians should never, ever, EVER have to hide their religion, sexual orientation, gender, or national origin, in order to attend a conference without fear of violence, harassment, or imprisonment. It is the duty of the foundation to ensure that Wikimedians do not suffer these things at a foundation-run event. Furthermore, I disapprove of the idea that things like security risks, quality of accomodations, and atmosphere of freedom are given equal weight to the distance from the last Wikikimania. I'm all for rotating as much as possible to make things cost effective for Wikimedians across the world, but it is fundamentally wrong to think that is worth as much weight in the bid process as ensuring that Wikimedians are staying in safe accomodations, will not be assaulted, will not be imprisoned, will not go bankrupt getting to the location, etc. What we should be doing is establishing some sort of rotation between major areas that satisfy very well the needs of Wikimedians in terms of cost effectiveness, reach, accommodations, price of event, and culture. I mentioned some such cities above. We should be rotating between these places, and to satisfy outreach in more remote locations like Taipei, Alexandria, Singapore, etc. we ought to be supporting local events. This is something the Foundation ought to be working closely with the chapters to develop.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
I do not believe that the majority of candidates here have full knowledge, or even close to full knowledge, of how the staff have done. To the extent that they do, they are viewing it through a particular lens, perhaps one that does not reflect the whole picture. I do not feel it is at all appropriate for a potential board member to pass judgment upon the office staff, without a full and complete briefing of all of their activities. I would not hesitate, as a board member, to offer criticism (or praise) as needed; however it is much more appropriate coming from a position where the criticizer (or praiser) knows what they are talking about, rather than commenting from a potentially distorted position.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
The board's biggest mistake today has been ongoing since it's inception: operating outside the role that the board was designed to play. The board should not be interfering in day to day operations. Instead of taking pro-active steps to hire adequate office staff to do just that, they decided to micromanage things; something the board was never supposed to do. Florence, who I admire very much, admitted this was a problem, but now we are at the point where board is able to step back into their role as guiders and trustees, instead of CEO's. I think we are there, or very close to there, but that does not mean that we should ignore the lessons: The board must stay within its assigned role in the WMF's operations. If the board finds itself not doing so, it must review what is causing this, and why, and how to fix it, and then proactively do so. Any board member who cannot do that should immediately resign. This I believe applies to all board members: from community seats, to appointed experts, to founders. Stay within your role on the board, and if you cannot do so, or cannot adequately serve your consituents or the foundation due to external constraitns, resign your position. If you find yourself or your public image to be detrimental to the foundation's public image, do the right thing and resign. If you find yourself out of touch with the community that you are supposed to be representing (applies equally to the appointed experts -- their community is their field of expertise), and you cannot or will not take action to fix it, you owe it to the WMF to resign.
Gregory Kohs (Thekohser)
| Candidate profile | |
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| Real name: | Gregory Kohs |
| Username: | Thekohser |
| Age: | 39 |
| Location: | Pennsylvania, USA |
| Languages: | English, German |
| Wikimedian since: | March 2005 |
| Active wikis: | Meta-Wiki |
Candidate Statement:
My candidacy is a referendum for three principles.
- Wikipedia is doing harm with its biographies of living people who have never had a biography about them published on paper. As a Board member, I would advocate new article deletion criteria mirroring Doc glasgow’s The BLP problem essay.
- Commercially-funded editing and other compensated support activity, when monitored for abuse, naturally and beneficially work in concert with open-source free content. The WMF Board should include all stakeholders, not just the non-paid volunteer community. Linux did not collapse with the commercial attention of Red Hat and IBM.
- The WMF Board and Staff leadership are crippling projects by failing to take due care and responsibility for them. The past 18 months have seen a series of scandals and public relations blunders. The WMF must halt the strategy of denying wrongdoing and framing critics as "disgruntled" "trolls", and instead return to a mission of achieving accuracy, excellence, and ethics in media.
These three issues now damage the Foundation and its projects on a daily basis.
Why do you want to be a board member?
I want to give the Wikimedia community an opportunity to use my candidacy as a referendum for my platform positions. There are serious problems within the Wikimedia Foundation -- problems worthy of criticism and constructive change. If voters want to recognize the severity of these problems, they can vote for me; if they'd rather frame critics as "disgruntled" "trolls", then there are 14 better candidates from which to choose. I'm nearly 40 years old. If by serving on the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, I can help give a deserving world a more ethical and accurate system of encyclopedias, dictionaries, news gathering resources, and more, then I can cancel my mid-life crisis.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
Challenge the Board to halt the current strategy of denying wrongdoing and framing critics as "disgruntled" "trolls", and instead return to a mission of achieving a respectable level of accuracy, excellence, and ethics in media. All other planks in my platform derive from this two-step objective. Excellent question, as it rather obviates all the others.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
About 60% of my total Wikimedia activity has been in Main space on English Wikipedia; about 30% in Talk and Wikipedia space; and the remaining 10% in spaces on other Wikimedia projects. Recently, I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the articles that I ever created (ab initio) for English Wikipedia, and then check User:Henrik's traffic tool to see how many people per month (February 2008) visit each article.
My volunteer work helped to assure at least some improvement in the user experience of tens of thousands of annual visitors to Wikipedia. And what did I get for it? Blocked from editing Wikipedia. Some articles I created, in order of creation date:
- Avia (not only my first article, but my first edit) - viewed 2,031 times in February
- Kohs - viewed 569 times
- Jacobson Stores - viewed 362 times
- Carolina Ardohain - viewed 5,116 times
- Russell Weigley - viewed 198 times
- Spiraling - viewed 285 times
- Kohs block - viewed 457 times
- Tom Brislin - viewed 223 times
- Czech Air Force - viewed 3,295 times
- Baywood Greens - viewed 122 times
- Resorts Atlantic City (the article that inspired me to conceive of MyWikiBiz.com) - viewed 955 times
- Nemours Foundation - viewed 340 times
- KidsHealth - viewed 213 times
- Omnibus (survey) - viewed 353 times
- Markov strategy - viewed 93 times
Of course, I've also made hundreds of smaller edits within existing articles. I also created about 10 articles released on my own website under GFDL terms, which were authored in exchange for payment to MyWikiBiz. These articles were then copied into Wikipedia by unpaid editors who found them to be suitable for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales issued these terms of business practice to me in August 2006, but he rescinded them in October of that year. I am not disclosing these specific articles, because every time I have (see the interesting case of Arch Coal, an unpaid "test" article, as an example), nothing but trouble has ensued.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
Once the Foundation Board has demonstrated that it adheres to a durable example of excellence and ethics in online media, then it probably has the authenticity to begin taking on more responsibility and relieving the volunteer community of those aspects of due care.
Frankly, though, I have not seen to date a resounding example of excellence and ethics nurtured at the Foundation Board level; therefore, I think it was premature for the Board to restructure in a way that assumes an authenticity of care it has not yet earned. I am also highly suspicious of the "Community founder" position. Isn't it ironic that the Wikipedia community is at odds with the so-called "sole founder's" interpretation of who actually founded Wikipedia? Constructing a Board seat on such a sandy foundation promises to be unstable in the future.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
I am currently serving on the Board of Directors (Chair of Development Committee) of the Church of the Loving Shepherd, an independent Christian church in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The church's annual budget is near $300,000.
Between 2000 and 2007, I was a Vice President at a marketing research firm with annual revenues near $20 million. Over those years, I grew and managed a research portfolio that rose from about $400,000 per annum to $1.7 million per annum, which included clients like AT&T, Comcast, SunTrust, Vanguard, IBM, and Merrill Lynch.
Between 1995 and 2004, I owned a Delaware S-Corporation called Facts On Call, Inc. (merely a side-business), which had annual revenues of about $4,000 per annum at its peak.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
Attorney Alex Roshuk provided a substantial number of pro bono hours helping Jimmy Wales in the earliest days of the Foundation, trying to assist in its becoming a membership organization. Things fell apart when Wales brought together his closest associates to run the Board, and with their selection of Brad Patrick as legal counsel and executive director the notion of the Wikimedia Foundation being a transparent, community-member influenced organization was snuffed out. I tend to agree with Roshuk's lament, found at FreeWikipedians.org.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
I suspect that the Foundation's selection of Alexandria, Egypt for Wikimania 2008 puts the conference practically out of reach for 99% of the contributors to Wikimedia projects. Therefore, I would hope that the Foundation will begin to consider future destinations that are a little less self-indulgent and a lot more practical for the vast majority of Wikimedia stakeholders. Much could be accomplished by serving up more "mini-conferences" in many locations across the globe.
Furthermore, in this day and age considering the fiscal and environmental costs of burning jet fuel and laundering hotel sheets, isn't it about time the Foundation started promoting more tele-conferencing opportunities? I take part in presentation-based "webinars" on just about a weekly basis. While they may not be 100% as effective as in-person gatherings, they still work quite well.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
The senior management's current strategy of denying wrongdoing and framing critics as "disgruntled" "trolls" is utterly disappointing. While this strategy predates Sue Gardner, I have observed that the strategy has become more emboldened during her tenure. The move to San Francisco felt disorganized and forced, and it introduced unnecessary new costs to what ought to be a leaner organization.
Gardner hired Erik Moeller straight from the Board of Directors, without announcing the new position, without conducting a competitive search for more suitable candidates for the Deputy Director role. In the past month, we've seen the folly of this procedural blunder; and it's alarming that it took place even in hindsight of the Carolyn Doran fiasco.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
Here's an honest answer. Wikipedia's co-founder is a former Chicago currency options analyst who then got into an Internet portal and web ring business that emphasized soft pornography. He lacks the credentials and authenticity to guide the construction of a reputable, reliable encyclopedia. The Board's biggest mistake over the past few years has been its failure to install an appropriate, experienced team of reference professionals to "replace" the existing Board and staff over time, including Wales. The world has deserved a better Wikimedia system of accuracy and excellence than has been mustered over seven years' time.
Harel Cain (Harel)
| Candidate profile | |
|---|---|
| Real name: | Harel Cain |
| Username: | Harel |
| Age: | 29 |
| Location: | Jerusalem, Israel |
| Languages: | Hebrew, English, German |
| Wikimedian since: | September 2004 |
| Active wikis: | Hebrew Wikipedia Wikimedia Israel |
Candidate Statement:
I'm a computer security engineer working towards a master's in math, and also a translator of books.
I joined the Hebrew Wikipedia more than 3.5 years ago, when it was in its infancy. Over time I got admin, checkuser and then bureaucrat status there. I watched the complex yet fascinating process of a small community evolving into something bigger and less manageable, with all related growing pains.
In August 2007 I gave a talk at Wikimania. There I also understood the global aspects of Wikimedia. I was one of the founders of the Israel chapter, and I'm on its control board.
I'm very excited about the ways Wikimedian activity can transcend the online world into the real world and how casual readers become active participants in growing communities.
If elected to the board, I intend to support:
- Activities by the board to foster the growth of local communities of editors the world over, even by allocating modest resources to this end.
- Efforts to reach out to demographic sectors chronically under-represented in WM project, by using novel means such as WM exhibitions.
- Stricter control by the board over key decisions made by WM employees, esp. hiring of new staff, which seems to be a soft spot.
- A much better liaison with the press, to try to abate some of the recurring uninformed media hype about the foundation.
- Strict opposition to paid ads on WM projects unless this is absolutely the last resort before WM goes bankrupt.
Why do you want to be a board member?
I want to become a board member because I feel I can be a fair representative of the quiet majority of devoted editors out there, because of the experience and trust I gathered in my home project over time, because I can bring to the board the perspective of the smaller-sized projects, and because for me personally I think it can be a rewarding and teaching experience. Wikimedia's projects are a phenomenal success by all standards -- no wonder then that people want to be involved and influence.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
To make sure that our projects remain a very popular and reliable free information source for all as well as a major pastime for thousands of editors who wish to enjoy their volunteering here, stay informed, make a change, not grow bored and feel part of this unique wonder of the digital age.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
I like your question, because it's really easy to dive into the whole drama of the foundation as a kind of bureaucratic state and forget what's at its core, free knowledge and information. My main activity has been on the Hebrew-language wikipedia. It was still very young when I joined it, so there were many gaping holes to close. My expertise in our local community has been with:
- German-related issues, mainly German literature, with an inclination towards German Jewish culture. I have written a few featured articles (Heinrich Heine, Richard Wagner), usually starting with the German-language article and expanding or modifying it based on my own knowledge.
- Consulting other writers in German matters, especially transliteration issues which are a recurring problem.
- Special "content-generating projects" such as writing competitions and quality offensives. I became somewhat of an expert in starting and running such projects on the Hebrew wikipedia. Writers need this change of atmosphere and the fun of working together in a concentrated effort on some topic.
- Some other special projects I initiated on he.wp were a reader satisfaction survey and a real-world poster exhibition about Wikipedia that was displayed in many different locations.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
I do not think that the restructuring is a very drastic step or necessarily a negative one. It may turn out to be a smart and natural move. My view on the subject is as follows:
- the foundation's primary asset are the thousands of community members for whom the foundation's projects are a hobby and a delight
- the foundation is a kind of "grassroots" movement, and this has always been one of its dominant characteristics, and should always remain so, with the community at the core of the foundation in all respects (this is why I signed the petition)
- the two "chapter seats" are representative of the community much like the directly elected community seats. Universal suffrage gives an advantage to the bigger communities. The chapter seats might balance this built-in advantage.
- the balance between expert seats and non-expert seats is quite right. For sure, a growing foundation needs experts in corporate governance. When applicable, it would best to appoint experts who are themselves wikimedians, or at least deeply familiar with the foundation before they begin their term.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
Admittedly, I do not have direct experience with organizational finances. I have a B.Sc. in mathematics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (summa cum laude) and I'm now at the final stages of a master's degree in math at the same institution. I read the financial press on a regular basis and believe I can understand and evaluate financial information.
I have worked in big organizations -- in the intelligence corps of the Israeli Defense Force, as an intern at Intel and now in a big global software company in Jerusalem. I believe this gave me a lot of insight into how these corporations are run, into staffing, into information exchange between management and workforce, and so on.
For the past year, ever since the founding of the Wikimedia Israel chapter, I have served on its control (audit) board. I believe I made a difference in this role. I warned the chapter's board against some dubious projects they wanted to be involved in, which indeed proved to be potential failures. I recommended in favor of focusing on a limited number of tangible, feasible projects and this approach proved itself, especially in the wandering poster exhibition which is now the chapter's biggest success to date.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
I think it's enough to base the chapters as membership organizations. Introducing membership into the foundation as well will foster the notion of those who are "more equal than others", and I don't see how the benefits can possibly balance that.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
Certainly Wikimania is the flagship annual event that any serious wikimedian should strive to attend. I don't see that changing. Sure, it's an expensive endeavor, and having it move around the globe means that some people will not be able to attend year after year. I think the foundation should seek local sponsors specifically for the event to help with the costs. I would not be surprised if in the future, Wikimania will become a biennial (or even quadrennial?!) event. Not many international organizations hold a big conference every year.
Having said that, with the community growing so rapidly all over the world, I think the foundation can have a role in boosting local or regional communities by allocating some resources towards others events, such as meet-ups, academic conventions, editing camps and the like. This should be done organizationally through the chapters, but in some cases financial backing by the foundation might be in order, if the local community is still young, or cannot afford it, or for any other special reason.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
I'm afraid I'm not in a position to make a very informed judgment. I got to see Sue in Taipei and she seemed very experienced and impressive. I was also impressed by the board at that time. We all know there have been too many scandals, some substantial, some a result of misinformed media, hypocrisy and schadenfreude. I'm an optimistic person and I tend to think our staff must surely be comprised of talented and devoted individuals. There have been accidents along the way, and if elected to the board, I hope to help make sure they don't recur.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
That's a catchy one. I think the softest spot has been with staffing issues, which eventually led, for a variety of reasons, to the foundation's problematic image in the media and elsewhere as a somewhat rotten and suspicious organization, not to be taken very seriously. For sure, this image problem has been made worse by some people with an overdose of schadenfreude, and by the tendency of media to make everything into a huge scandal. I think that will do -- both because I cannot point to a single point of failure, and because I don't want to paint myself as the grand opponent to the current board, which of course I am not.
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen (Cimon Avaro)
| Candidate profile | |
|---|---|
| Real name: | Jussi-Ville Heiskanen |
| Username: | Cimon Avaro |
| Age: | 42 |
| Location: | Helsinki, Finland |
| Languages: | Finnish, English |
| Wikimedian since: | April 2003 |
| Active wikis: | English Wikipedia Finnish Wikipedia |
Candidate Statement:
I've seen the development of Wikimedia including the rise of the Finnish wikipedia barren wasteland to a lively community. I know intimately how hand-me-down policies and features designed for English wikipedia impact a smaller project.
I study Library and Information Sciences in a Business School.
During the term under election now:
Let's shift focus from sustainability to being able to maintain content we can be proud of, and further improving it.
Our community & organizational parts are mature. It is time to support bolder technical innovation and allocating resources to it:
- Improved software that helps us maintain our quality.
- Make editing intuitive again.
- Support extensions that enable non-wikipedia projects flourish.
- Develop the interface localisation extension into a generalized translation tool.
We need the right mix of people on the Board, but the process of getting them on it must not distance them from our communities.
The problems we face are all of the "good sort", they come from us being so good, so useful, so well known, so active.
Why do you want to be a board member?
I want the board member to be one that the community has evaluated to be its best representative. That can not be acheived, if there is not a disparate selection of candidates for the community to make its wise choice. I want to give the community the chance to evaluate if I am the best canditate or not. If it follows that I am elected, I believe I can represent the community to the best of my ability, holding back nothing. That is all she wrote.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
That the Board of Trustees not fail to do its duty during my watch. Everything else is gravy. We *do* need the Foundation. So it is imperative the Board of Trustees not lose its way.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
I am a very *average* content creator. I hope you don't mind me putting it in those terms. I am not a stahanovian hero of any project, and I dabble in many, but yet, my contributions are not merely occasional. Though I did make some forays into the policy formation side of wikimedia in the early days, and still do my bit to keep watch on some minor sides of that, particularly on the Finnish wikipedia, with regard to deletions, my heart has always been with tinkering, wordsmithing, and adding knowledge. On the english wikipedia there is at least one legitimate article that likely would not be there, had I not begun it, so perhaps it is fitting I choose it as an example (it is btw on a subject completely unknown to Encyclopaedia Britannica). That article is on the Walhalla-orden a clandestine society where the first ideas of Finnish national independence were hatched, Another one that is largely my handwriting is the article on Finnish folk sayings on Wikiquote. I have avoided getting into controversy, and I can't think of very very very few edits, if any, I have done in the past, that I feel I could not have done while on the board of trustees. So no, in short, there should not be any expectation of board trusteeship significantly affecting my editing.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
The people who are "shocked, shocked" by the idea of Jimbo being given a permanent status within the board, are failing to consider (perhaps out of lack of perspective) the quite astonishing work he did in getting wikipedia successfully off the ground at all. Let no one mislead you. Wikipedia could quite easily have crashed and burned, had it not been for Jimbos patient and conciliatory work in the early days. That wikimedia has successfully transceded Jimbo is testament to the greatness of his achievement. Jimbo will never be just another wikimedian. That will never happen.
As to chapter elected seats; I have to say if I had been asked my view about them beforehand, I would have been highly sceptical, and I think I did say that. It smacks of particularism, and imbalance between the various interests at work improving wikimedia. If the chapters use their franchise wisely, I will swallow any criticism I might have about the purely theoretical structure of the franchise. The one justification for it I can get behind, is that chapters folks will be a bunch of wise people, more so than the average editor. If that is borne out in their decisions, I will have no reason to cry foul; but will openly admit that for purely practical reasons the choice was an acceptable one. Not ideal, but workable.
Likewise the members appointed by the board itself. The board will be wise, if it avoids making appointments that will draw criticism. The appointment of Stu West was notable in how unnotable it was; no significant flak was drawn, and hopefully all the other appointments will be as uncontroversial. I see little benefit in "drawing the devil on the wall" (the finnish term for borrowing trouble) about all the ways the board could botch things in their appointments, but admonish all current members, and promise personally if elected, to consider the responsibility of appointing board members as a very weighty one indeed, never to be taken lightly.
As for the "community petition", I found it remarkably vague, inflammatory, unuseful and very very premature. While the board really has to up its game in justifying the moves it makes, it is worth remembering that you can lead a horse to water, you can't force it to drink. Individual board members will always have the option to only act within the board, not representing their choices to the best of their ability towards the community. This is a feature, not a bug. But a wise board member will be forthcoming, because communication will enchance their influence, not reduce it, in the long run. I believe this with every fiber of my being.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
Well, the past semester, even though my chosen track is the Library and Information Sciences one, we have had only one course so far to do with that directly, the rest have been all about accounting, marketing, business correspondence and the like. At the outset I thought I struggled with the material, but as the semester draws to a close (this very week), I have slowly began to find my feet. In fact in a move that I found blush-inducingly flattering, my accounting instructor made an overture, attempting to entice me to switch tracks to Business Administration proper. I have to say I continue to find that prospect remote, and will with a fair degree of certitude stick with Library and Information Science. As for more general interest in economics, I have privately studied economic theory, though on a level that can only be charitably called pedestrian; I had a four year running subscription to The Economist, and regularly bought Fortune magazine for about a year, and continue to read The Economist at our schools library every week. In my youth, I have been active in many hobby related associations, though never in any capacity that even tangentially had to do with those associations finances.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
Some chapters will likely be membership based, so to some extent there is going to be that. The question then is should there be an overarching parallel foundation based membership, and whether membership in that would be automatic, if you are a member in any chapter. I am skeptical, but if someone has a suggestion that would work, I could be convinced otherwise. I don't however have a magic bullet answer myself.
There also remains a completely separate question of what to do about wikimedians who don't have a chapter they could join, or be represented by. This remains an espescially acute problem with the current board restructuring including twice as many trustees chosen by chapters as are chosen by the editorship in general. I really could see one or more chapters which are not geographically tightly local or national, but which would allow those who don't have a natural chapter fit be represented. I do acknowledge the difficulties of setting up such are formidable, whether it just be one large chapterless editor organisation, or for instance continent based chapterless umbrella-chapters, or even smaller units. But if choosing two trustees by chapters is going to be a permanent part of our operations, this needs to be considered seriously.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
I can well imagine that in the future a majority of wikimanias will be held in locations which already have regular experience of holding their own regional events. I don't think it is healthy for the foundation to put a spoon in every pot, and the matter of regional wikimedia related events is a very good example of a thing where foundation involvement is likely to not bring significant benefit, apart from the natural assistance of trademark usage permissions for such events. As for the main wikimania. I have attended it twice, and found both immesurably enriching experiences. There is so much that text cannot acheive with the best will in the world, that is as easy as snapping ones fingers, when one meets face to face. Last years meeting in Taiwan, I didn't have the finances to attend, and I fell back to relying on the streams provided through the internet. One interesting question that has not yet been addressed comprehinsively is the size of wikimania. Will we choose to actively limit it into a size where relatively speaking most everyone knows each other, or will we let it evolve into a mega-event with thousands or more participants. I confess my inclination would be to wimp out from taking a clear stance, and advocate us steering a middle course, avoid going very large very soon, but not try to keep wikimania extremely tight.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
Let me describe what I feel should be the relationship between the board and the staff.
The situation should be much like that between Moses and Aron in the bible. The Board in this analogy is Moses. It's job is to define the mission and define the "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots" for the staff. And it is for the staff to implement.
As in the bible, when the staff does something silly, like building a golden bull or maybe using the magical power of a rod to bring water out of the rock needlessly, when a spade would have done just as handily, it is the job of the board to rein the staff in.
To the degree that has not been the relationship so far (*if* it has not been that way), an adjustment needs to be made. If it has been that way, that is the way it should continue.
I note that Helsinki is somewhat remote from San Francisco.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
I wholeheartedly endorse what Ray has said below. Wikipedias greatest vulnerability remains entreeism. We are such a select group yet, and our treasure is of such great value, that our essential task has to be that control remains with forces who will guard our mission; be they of whatever persuasion otherwise. I would add that we have so far been remarkably joyfully lucky in the people who have served on the board. While they have had differing views on how to fulfill our mission best, I have absolutely zero doubt that all of their first principles above all others, were that mission itself; not anything beside it, of the political or ideological fray the "temporal" world contends with. Our mission is *eternal*.
Kurt M. Weber (Kmweber)
| Candidate profile | |
|---|---|
| Real name: | Kurt M. Weber |
| Username: | Kmweber |
| Age: | 23 |
| Location: | Princeton, Indiana, USA |
| Languages: | English, Latin |
| Wikimedian since: | May 2004 |
| Active wikis: | English Wikipedia |
Candidate Statement:
Though almost all of my activity has been on the English Wikipedia (with a spurt of activity on English Wikinews in November '05), I have been watching with increasing concern the influence the WMF Board has been exerting over all projects. In the last several months I have become more outspoken about it, to the dismay of many, and giving Mr. Wales a permanent seat on the board was the last straw. The WMF needs the community more than the community needs the Foundation, and I fear the Board has lost sight of that fact over the last couple of years, making itself increasingly independent of, and lording its position over, the various Wikimedia wiki communities.
I aim to reverse this trend. As a Board member, I would work towards limiting the role of the Foundation in the Communities to that absolutely necessary to protect the projects from legal liability and to maintain financial security and technical stability. I would also propose to make the Board of Trustees an entirely community-elected entity, eliminating all appointed and permanent seats.
The Board should be facilitating the communities, not controlling them. It's time to make that a reality.
Why do you want to be a board member?
I don't. Frankly, the only reason I agreed to run was because I don't actually expect to get elected. If the community believes I'm the man for the job, then I'll do the job--several have already indicated that they think precisely that. I'll do it because I care about the WMF projects; but personally I'd rather not.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
The recent restructuring of the makeup of the board. It was a big enough mistake that it made several think that I of all people would actually be a good board member.
Matthew Bisanz (MBisanz)
| Candidate profile | |
|---|---|
| Real name: | Matthew Bisanz |
| Username: | MBisanz |
| Age: | 22 |
| Location: | New York, USA |
| Languages: | English, Spanish, Latin |
| Wikimedian since: | July 2005 |
| Active wikis: | English Wikipedia Meta Wiki |
Candidate Statement:
A life long New Yorker, I am an active admin on en-wiki, a member of the Bot Approvals Group, and have assisted the MedCom, at their request, in formal mediation matters.
A recent MBA acct grad, I have worked part time in non-profit orgs, up to the board level, for nearly 3 years, and am preparing to sit for the CPA exam. I also hold a BBA in legal studies, acct & mgt.
I see several areas in which I feel I could contribute to the WMF. While Sec 230 may prevent the WMF from becoming more involved in the various communities at the control level I do believe there needs to be greater community involvement at the Foundation level.
Concepts such as Q & A with board members in various forums such as Skype, IRC, mailing lists & other relevant forums, should be pursued with vigor. Initiatives such as polling the communities for new projects & ideas on how to spread free culture are doable and should also be pursued.
Meta, as the central hub where all 700+ WMF wikis intersect, should have 10x the # of pages it currently has, as active users on all projects should be encouraged to express their views on the direction that WMF should take in its mission encourage the growth and creation of free content.
The way I intend to pursue this change is to encourage greater inter-project cooperation, through ideas such as cross-project searches or a reference search similar to the NYT. This would increase the image and activity of all projects positively.
Why do you want to be a board member?
Well I've used Wikimedia projects for several years, and become very active at en.wiki. I also have a background that makes me well suited to sit on a Foundation board, both from my experience in running non-profits, working for them, my background in non-profit tax law, and my skills in strategic planning. I feel I can combine my skills, my experience at en.wiki, the voice and thoughts of the community to work with the other members of the Board to further the goals of the Foundation and the projects it coordinates and hosts.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
My single most important goal would be promoting inter-language and inter-project collaboration to build the standing and content of all the WMF's projects. I see this as an imperative to continuing to grow the Foundation and fulfill its goal of spreading free content.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
Well, at en.wp, I've created 91 new articles from original creations and large page splits, as well as 94 redirect pages to ease navigation. I've got a DYK under my belt. By one of my primary areas of work has been keeping our image content. So far I've fixed 5,000+ images tagged for deletion for improper licensing rationales. So in that sense, I've help keep content that would have automatically been bot deleted. I've also uploaded a couple images to commons and performed basic copyedits/spelling corrections on about 4,000 articles. So my main contributions have been maintaining and improving existing content, while still creating (and intending to continue) new content.
I don't see my election decreasing my content contribution because of the strong staff the Board has put in place in San Fransisco. The Board should no longer be involved on a day to day basis with operations because we have an executive director for that. So while I would need to dedicate a great deal of time to Board activities, I expect and plan on maintaining my ~2,000 edits a month historical trend.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
I have followed the board restructuring issue and the community petition in response to it. While I applaud the extension of board seats to include the Chapter network, a vital part of the Wikimedia community, I am concerned with the reduction of community representation from the projects. Also, I recognize the importance of a Board adequately advised by relevant field experts, but I believe a similar end could have been achieved without reducing community involvement.
For instance, the Beta Alpha Psi Honor Fraternity has an international board of directors, advised by experts on an Advisory Forum (similar to our Advisory Board and assisted in its mission by a group of organizations who hold membership in the Associate group. In such a way, it is able to maintain its focus on financial information education, while still including relevant experts and supporting organizations in an official manner.
Another model I would have investigated is the German model, which includes boards consisting of employees and boards of management in making decisions. A board consisting of topical experts or of donors who have made restricted gifts under the donor advised funds provision of US tax law, who would advise the primary WMF board is something I would like to see further discussion on.
A final model would be that maintained by NYU, with a Board of Trustees who make decisions, and a Board of Life Trustees who attend all the meetings, but do not vote.
I am glad to see the Board is open to altering its governance structure, but I would prefer that it have asked the communities for ideas, before implementing a resolution. Having more individuals present ideas creates more outcomes to choose from and can lead to solutions a single individual has not thought of.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
So I have some experience in non-profits and in finance. For 2.5 years I worked as the part-time assistant to the grants manager at a $350 million/year university. We processed and managed ~80 grants totally $8 million. I primarily reviewed grant applications, prepared budgets, etc. For another year I was the gradaute clerk to the head of an office with 3 federal grants, this involved traditional purchase orders, check requests, etc. I interned at at Big 4 account firm as an accountant in non-profit taxation, and will soon be beginning a similar position full time.
I also have served as vice president of the Delta Pi chapter of the Beta Alpha Psi. We have a $30K annual budget support scholarship for various students. Further, I lead the effort that resulted in our chapter placing second in the regional Strategic Planning competition for expanding the national organization.
Additionally, I hold an MBA in accounting and a BBA in accounting, legal studies, and management. I have a firm grasp of US financial law and accounting regulations, as well as a detailed understanding of the challenges non-profits face in doing business in a global economy dominated by for-profit firms.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
I've always been interested in that change, and understand it dealt with issues of Florida law. Of course if such a change would result in more community involvement in Foundations matters I would approve of it. However, I would need to be satisfied that the community involvement would include ALL community members, not just those willing to verify their identity, use a credit card, etc. Further, as I understand it, the reasons for incorporating in Florida were more convenience with the size and location of the Foundation at the time. Since the Foundation has grown so much over these years and moved to California, I would also investigate the advantages of re-incorporating in another state, particularly if such actions permitted a way to implement a membership organization under broader terms than apparently Florida law permits.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
Interesting question phoebe. Personally, I've never been to Wikimania, because when it was near me, I wasn't involved in the project, and since then its been too remote for me to afford travel/time away from work.
However, I believe Wikimania is a vital part of the Foundation's mission of spread free-culture. It offers a unique setting for Wikimedians to engage in real-time, in-person discussion of the projects, their goals, the Foundation, and its goals. Additionally, it provides a unique place, even compared to Meta, where individuals from many projects and many countries are all in the same room. Lastly, it adds a human dimension to a project generally conducted 100% on the internet.
While it is nifty that this year's Wikimania is being held in Alexandria Egypt, the site of the original library of historical lore, for individuals outside the Middle East and Europe, it will be very costly to attend just in trans-oceanic airfare terms. In the same way, Wikimania's in Boston or Taiwan also incur large expenses to significant portions of the editing community.
My suggestion would be to place Wikimania on a rotating basis among major world regions, so that interested individuals can plan in advance when a mania will be in their region of the world. At the same time, I would support more Foundation+Chapter initiatives to hold regional and/or continental conferences dedicated to the projects. I believe the Germans have pioneered the Wiki Academies to introduce new individuals to the system, and I see no reason why that model couldn't be scaled up to a Wiki-mini-mania Europe or N. America, etc.
Further, I would support the continued expansion of the scholarship budget to increase the regional diversity at the manias by bringing in more individuals who otherwise would be unable to attend due to prohibitive financial costs.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
Having not had much opportunity to interface with the staff so far, I am of course reserving judgment. However, in my dealings with Mike Godwin and Cary Bass, I have only good things to say. Obviously the fact that the move occurred without noticeable hiccups at the Project level is a good thing. While Board members are prohibited from interfering in the day to day, I would seek to get to know the Foundation staff and understand the operations of Foundation to judge future resource needs and scalability issues. Also, I am rather pleased at the fundraising efforts that have secured several large grants for the Foundation and would seek to see how the Board can work with the fundraising staff to maximize our efforts.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
I feel the biggest mistake has been the lack of outreach by the Foundation to the communities to encourage the communities to participate in Foundation and Board affairs. While I will not go so far as to say a membership system or council would be the right way, I do think substantially more community input should occur in the decision making processes.
Paul Williams (Skenmy)
| Candidate profile | |
|---|---|
| Real name: | Paul Williams |
| Username: | Skenmy |
| Age: | 18 |
| Location: | Essex, England |
| Languages: | English |
| Wikimedian since: | August 2005 |
| Active wikis: | English Wikinews English Wikipedia Meta Wiki |
Candidate Statement:
I have a few aims that I wish to accomplish if elected to the Board:
- Encourage the learning of techniques and methods used to promote and popularise Wikipedia, and use these (wherever appropriate) to promote and popularise sister projects.
- Promote the inter-working of Wikipedia and its sister projects (transclusion of content, decentralisation from Wikipedia)
- Reinforce the use of Wikipedia and sister projects as verifiable and trustworthy sources (i.e. in academia)
I think that these issues are things that affect the Foundation now that it has reached maturity, and I would be honoured to be a part of the board that progresses the Foundation, and all of its’ projects, no matter how large or small, above and beyond what they are today.
I have long been an advocate of decentralisation from Wikipedia, removing content that is not encyclopædic, and focusing this content onto the smaller projects– many of which struggle under the weight of Wikipedia. This has long been a retaining factor on the growth of Wikimedia itself, as well as the growth of smaller projects, and I believe it is time for this to change.
Why do you want to be a board member?
For all the reasons stated in my candidacy statement. I want to increase the participation in Board-level actions by the smaller, sister projects of the English Wikipedia (this includes smaller language versions, too).
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
My primary concern is to ensure that all communities are represented fairly on the Board, not by the introduction of new members, but be ensuring that concerns are listened to. My primary goal is to decentralise content from Wikipedia and promote a much stronger (both community and technically) co-operation between all projects.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
My home project is at Wikinews, where I have (a relatively small) 1,750 edits in all namespaces at time of writing. I have approximately 30 published articles, and a variety of Spoken Wikinews articles. I also ran a bot for a short period that amassed 2853 edits on Wikinews. I have also contributed a variety of photos to Commons. It would be naive of me to say that my contributions will not be affected by my board position, however I hope to limit the impact it has to a minimum and continue contributing to the projects, especially my home project.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
I do not see the restructure as harmful or potentially limiting. I respect the communities for making it clear to the board that many were not comfortable or happy with the change. The restructure opens up a wider variety of input onto the board - from those in the Specialist seats, and those in the Chapter appointed seats. I see a large potential for a more diverse decision making process, that will have learnt from any previous mistakes and will now listen to the community rather than subvert it.
I do believe that the Chapters need to make the right decisions in deciding who to appoint to the two Chapter seats - and by that I do not believe it should be an autocratic decision or internal vote. Chapters, in my opinion, are there to serve the needs of the communities, and to that extent should solicit community votes to decide who should be appointed as chapter representatives. Of course, this is, ultimately, down to the chapters.
I see further potential for the expansion of the foundation with ideologies such as Advisory boards, which would not only improve the decision making process of the board, but also allow greater input from all areas of all communities - something which I am determined to implement if elected.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
I am currently in the examination process for an A-Level in Accounting (with a strongly British tone to it), aside from which I have no further financial or non-profit experience, currently.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
I believe that the membership "function" lies with the chapters. Members become members to get involved and contribute - and doing this on a local level is much more rewarding than on a global level, in my opinion. So, to answer your question, I do not believe that it would be appropriate to revisit the decision at this time, but I am not ruling out a possible future revisiting.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
I am a strong advocate of the Wikimania project, and I believe that it opens up a whole variety of opportunities that are otherwise inaccessible through our internet-based norm, such as live talks, brainstorming sessions, and general face-to-face meeting of the other people who make these great projects what they are. I am unaware of any changes to the way the Board handles Wikimania that need to be made, however I do have other views on the way Wikimania should be conducted.
Wikimania should be given a rotating schedule, whereby each year a continent is given the opportunity to host Wikimania in a country / city of their choosing. This a) allows for further planning and b) allows for people to plan ahead in order to attend. This, I believe, will increase participation, and make it a truly global event.
The Board should support in any way that it can other local events, however it would not be feasible for the Board to organise all these events as well. Much like the way Wikimania is handled, small teams of local people are the best way to organise and implement these events, coming to the Board for any advice and support they require - which I am sure the Board will be happy to provide.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
While I have not interacted with many staff members, those I have interacted with have been pleasant, understandable, and genuinely nice people to work with. I believe that they hold our values at heart and are trying to implement them into a business model - not an easy task. However, due to my lack of interaction or involvement, I am withholding any judgement until I am better informed.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
The boards' undoubted lack of solicitation of input from smaller communities has no doubt been the largest mistake made, and one I plan to counter. By not doing this, the Board has passed resolutions that do not take into consideration the unique needs of smaller communities, while focussing on the flagship Wikipedia.
Ray Saintonge (Eclecticology)
| Candidate profile | |
|---|---|
| Real name: | Ray Saintonge |
| Username: | Eclecticology |
| Age: | 65 |
| Location: | Richmond, British Columbia, Canada |
| Languages: | English, French |
| Wikimedian since: | February 2002 |
| Active wikis: | English Wikisource English Wikipedia English Wiktionary |
Candidate Statement:
I am a semi-retired tax consultant with experience in cross-border tax problems. I have recently been on the executive of the district Parents' Association in a high-performing school district with about 23,000 students. I must leave this because my son is graduating. My book collecting habits are manic, and I am a confessed clutterholic.
I was involved in the establishment of both Wiktionary and Wikisource, have attended all three Wikimanias, and am vocal on governance issues on the mailing lists, notably the foundation list.
I believe that the autonomy of each individual project should be respected in all but the most serious circumstances. If a project makes bad decisions, it needs to accept responsibility for its own problems, and not expect the Board's hand of God as a solution.
I support the principle of a grass-roots Wikicouncil that can set broad editorial policies, without binding individual projects.
I believe that everyone should have the opportunity to edit the projects that interest him without becoming discouraged by arcane technical requirements, keeping in mind the factors responsible for our growth.
I believe that community processes should be based on mutual respect, not discipline and punishment.
I believe that the chapters should lead the way to a more decentralized structure, where there is more encouragement for local fund-raising and spending.
Why do you want to be a board member?
I first considered running for the Board in 2006, but never got up the courage to file a candidacy. This year a trusted colleague who has called me a "Wikipedia dinosaur" suggested that I could be a credible candidate whom he found preferable to any who had presented themselves before that time. After a brief exchange he dispelled some of my concerns, and had to accept that I have the vision, knowledge, understanding and wikiexperience to do the job. An introverted fear of losing was not an option, so I ran.
Viewed more negatively, I have a masochistic tolerance for boring meetings. On December 31, 1964 I was at the conference in Regina which converted the Combined Universities Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament into the Student Union for Peace Action. That evening we were hammering out the by-laws for the new organization. At about 11:55, with some hint of annoyance in his voice, Dimitrios Roussopoulos, the chairman of the meeting called for a brief recess. Ten minutes later, in 1965, we recommitted ourselves to the task at hand. Anyone who would look back on that experience as a positive one must be suited for a Board seat.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
In the short term, and in the context of the need for confidentiality, I would like to see the Board develop a list of criteria for what topics must remain in camera so that any Board member can feel free to publicly and openly discuss anything that is not on that list.
In the long term, we need to have strategies for innovation and renewing our mission so that we can keep capturing the imagination of the passive public that uses our content without adding to it.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
A Board member can keep himself grounded by contributing to his chosen project(s). In the forseeable future I plan to continue my contributions to Wikisource. I have a large personal book collection with plenty that I would love to share. When the material is not particularly controversial it can be a relaxing experience.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
While I am sympathetic to much of what is said in that petition, I chose not to sign it. This is mostly because I have felt that my long standing support for a Wikicouncil would put me in a position where it would seem that Council and Board were in competition with each other. That such a petition, which at the moment has 125 signatures, including many from persons with a very high degree of commitment to Wikimedia and its projects, is a significant warning to the Board that traditional techniques of non-profit governance are open to question.
The proposal itself put the cat among the pigeons, it brought into focus much of what is wrong with current governance. To be specific:
- The principle that chapters should be represented is good, but this should not be a part of the official Board structure until the chapters have sought representation, and have provided a model for how that representation will be decided.
- Having all three community seats decided together in alternate years may very well obviate the need for annual elections, but we have experienced Erik's resignation during the first year of his two year term. If that were to happen again would we need to wait for more than a year before that vacancy is filled?
- While I don't mind reserving a few seats for expertise appointments, those needs need to be identified rather than speculated. All appointed seats should be linked to a specific expertise need. That need would not apply if an elected Trustee is willing and able to fulfill it.
- I have no problem with Jimbo holding a supernumerary seat. He is unique in the history of Wikipedia. If for any reason he chooses to no longer be on the Board that position would not be refilled.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
I am a university dropout who has worked as an independent personal tax consultant since 1974. Since 1978 I have dealt with both Canadian and US taxes, and the special problems encountered by individuals who must file in both countries. I spent 10 years on the Board of Directors of a local community society, including a year as treasurer, and more recently on I have been on the Board of a district parents' association including two years as vice-chair.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
The idea definitely merits revisiting, though that does not necessarily imply that membership would be based on paying dues. Ours is a large and complex organization that needs to acknowledge the importance of project, national and linguistic threads. It has no model that it can legitimately use as a template for its organization, yet if it could be put on the open market it could be worth several billion dollars.
The present situation where effective control is based in a small group with a tradition of corporate governance is open to abuse. The potential market value is the incentive for that abuse. Consider this future horror scenario when the operation has a market value of $10 billion: An offer of $10 million to each trustee to subvert the purposes of the organization would still only be be 1% of the market value. It might be enough to make the offer only to so many as can bring about quick changes to the by-laws ... Why waste money on a couple of dickish idealists? Somebody who puts this kind of scenario into operation is not going to warn everybody ahead of time. If you think you're incorruptible, take the time to lean back for a couple minutes and start imagining what $10 million would do for you when you are a college student that has survived for the last couple years on the brink of starvation in sub-standard housing. Exciting, isn't it?
What checks and balances do we have in place to prevent this? A membership organization may be one possibility; a chapter focused organization with a high proportion of decentralized governance may be another. I do know that once the nightmare has arrived it will be too late to wake up.
So yes, we should explore the membership option, along with a number of other possible governance options.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
I am a strong supporter of Wikimania, and the most important factor in deciding the site should be the ability of the local team to provide a strong event. Rotating the event among the continents is helpful for drawing Wikimedians that might not otherwise come. In Taipei I met a number of Australians for whom travel to Europe or North America was out of the question. Still, Wikimania should not go to a scheduled continent if no city there is capable of putting it together. While the concentration of members in Europe and North America may suggest more frequent Wikimanias on those two continents we cannot allow the people elsewhere to feel excluded. We want to make the fruits of our labours available to all countries and all languages without the usual condescension for which advanced civilizations have been noted. While some of our members may feel unwelcome or uncomfortable in a country with questionable human rights records, our presence there can be a valuable service for its residents, who have limited exposure to what is happening outside of their country.
More local and regional meetups absolutely need to be encouraged, but that kind of organization is not a central function of the WMF. Chapters and sub-chapters are more appropriate to that task. One thing that the WMF can do is send key staff or Board members to regional meetups to let these local groups know that they are appreciated as a part of something bigger.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
At this point the only valid basis that I have for evaluating staff performance is "Assume good faith." There have been a few public incidents in the past, but expressing an opinion on a specific situation cannot be fairly extrapolated into a general criticism of a staff member. Carrying on about the unfortunate incidents in Carolyn Doran's personal life does nothing to answer the question, "How did she perform in the duties for which she was hired?". I have no reason to be critical of any staff member.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
The biggest mistake was to make itself a corporation without membership. This leaves it more vulnerable to takeover by people with other agendas. I would have expanded the membership base, and planted poison pills.
Ryan Postlethwaite
| Candidate profile | |
|---|---|
| Real name: | Ryan Postlethwaite |
| Username: | Ryan Postlethwaite |
| Age: | 22 |
| Location: | Manchester, United Kingdom |
| Languages: | English, French, German |
| Wikimedian since: | October 2006 |
| Active wikis: | Meta-Wiki English Wikipedia |
Candidate Statement:
For all those that don’t know me, I’m Ryan. I’m currently studying an MSc in biomedical and forensic science and I also have a BSc in pharmacology. I’ve been here since October 2006 and an administrator on the English Wikipedia since March 2007. What I’ve found amazing since I’ve been here is the spirit that the community has shown and the willingness to spend huge amounts of time and effort, free of charge, to provide free content to millions of people around the world. What I think the board needs to recognise is that the community makes this project work. I don’t think this always comes across in their resolutions. We need to think long term – funding is okay for the time being, but the board needs to make sure they keep it coming in to make the projects sustainable for the years to come. So, what exactly do I hope to bring to the board?
- Bring in more community influence to the board. Firstly, by creating more community seats on the board, and secondly by asking the community for more input into foundation issues.
- Bring in long term, sustainable funding to the foundation so the projects status would be secured for many years, without the need for allowing advertising on our pages.
- Make more communication with the community. When there’s problems within the boardroom, they should be open with the community about them and open to suggestions.
Why do you want to be a board member?
To put it bluntly, I want to make a difference and believe I can. I’d like to secure the future of the foundation so all of our contributors who enjoy working on the projects can continue their hobby, and all the readers will have this tremendous online resource at their dispense. I’d also like to improve the communication between the board and the community and hopefully harmonise the whole jurisdiction.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
As a board member, I’d like to get long term financial support to enable the foundation, and projects, to continue for years ahead, meaning our content can only get better and better.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
With respect to content, I’ll happily admin that I’m no Giano. I’ve created a number of pages, Football refereeing in England is probably my favourite because it’s close to my heart. I have however written two featured portals on the English Wikipedia (Portal:England and Portal:Tennis) which I update each month. I’m proud of those portals because they get a good number of hits each month and help new contributors start editing. One thing I would say however is that there are many other valuable tasks that our editors to that aren’t direct content additions – without these tasks, the projects wouldn’t be as reliable as they are today.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
I’m personally fully against the resolution to limit the number of community endorsed people on the board. It’s paramount that the community is given a full voice and that means having a number of people elected by the projects that the board oversees. I respect that as the foundation grows, great expert input must be sort, but this shouldn’t be at the expense of the volunteers that make the project what it is today. I would put the reversal of the resolution as a key priority should I be elected. I would in fact like to propose more input from the individual projects; I’d like to see committees set up for each project (Wikipedia, Commons, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquotes, Wikinews, Wikisources) that would report back to the board every quarter to represent their individual community views. As far as external expertise is concerned, I think consultancy roles could work better rather than board places, and that’s certainly an idea I’d explore.
With regards to giving individual chapters a voice on the board, I have mixed feelings. On a positive, they’re still community members, and I approve anything that gives the community members a greater voice. The negative aspect comes from the fact that these users are not directly elected by the wider Wikimedia community – approval would be from a small subset of the community and I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing.
I think the community would be best served by the continuation of the Advisory Board, with more “experts” being placed on it, freeing up the board for more community input. I do however think it’s important that the board do recognise the opinion of the Advisory Board – they know the specifics in their field and their experience is invaluable to us.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
Unfortuntely, I have no prior experience in finance. I would therefore look at the opinions of the experts that the foundation take advice from and other board members when looking at financial structuring within the foundation. I would however like to explore how the foundation gains it’s funding, and hopefully take a lead role in securing funding from larger corporations/groups/charities so the foundation can have it’s future secured for years to come. With regards to non-profit organisations, I haven’t had any direct experience with them.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
I’m not sure I would support the formation of a membership organisation. It’s all good and well the board having people to be directly accountable to, but I think they already have the perfect people for this job – the contributors to the projects. I don’t like the idea of the board being accountable to the people that pay the most money.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
It’s extremely important that the board gives its full backing to Wikimania and helps with securing funding for the scholarships that available to some of the people that attend. We have people from many different backgrounds, and financial circumstances shouldn’t stand in the way of a hard working volunteer from attending Wikimania. I would like to see the foundation attending more independent fairs/events to spread the word of the projects and the need for funding. I think this could help to attract that big donors that the foundation needs and could have the advantage of giving us support from the wider community. It may be good for the board to create material for reuse by local chapters/groups of wikimedians who wish to use these at various meetups or events throughout the world – this could only help the foundation move forward and encourage the chapters to take a more active role in advertising the foundation.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
I’ve got to say, I have no real way of evaluating how Sue is doing because I have never been in direct contact with her. It would be unfair of me to comment not having a full picture. I would say however, she’s still in her early days with the foundation and it’s unfair to judge performance over such a short time frame.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
I don’t think their biggest mistake has been anything they’ve done per se. I think it’s more what they haven’t done. I’ve seen very little interaction with the contributors to the individual projects, and given that, I’m not confident they understand, or are in touch with, the needs of those communities. This means, I don’t think that they have always acted in the best interests of the readers and the contributors to the projects. To help with this, I’d like to work more closely with the communities and listen to their concerns.
Samuel Klein (Sj)
| Candidate profile | |
|---|---|
| Real name: | Samuel Klein |
| Username: | Sj |
| Age: | 30 |
| Location: | Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA |
| Languages: | English, German, Spanish, French |
| Wikimedian since: | January 2004 |
| Active wikis: | Meta-Wiki English Wikipedia Wikimedia Foundation Wiki |
Candidate Statement:
Wikimedia's projects have become a model of collaboration throughout the world. As the Foundation grows and faces new obstacles to bringing free knowledge to the world, it should itself be a model for open, scalable organizations. Even the greatest challenges in outreach, communication, and technology, can be overcome by helping match community members with needed solutions.
I have contributed to the projects for 4 years – as editor, translator, admin, steward, and conference organizer. I have talked about Wikimedia to classes, conferences, and the press. I started the Meta translators network and the Wikimedia Quarto, a multilingual newsletter I edited with Anthere in 2004-5. I helped run the first two Wikimanias, hosting Wikimania 2006 in Boston.
For the past two years, I have served as Director of Community Content for the One Laptop per Child non-profit, sharing knowledge and creative tools with children, teachers and educational initiatives in developing nations.
As Board member, I would
- Represent the community's perspectives to the Board, not my own. This means communicating frequently, holding open meetings, and helping people from every project and language to be involved.
- Encourage delegation of outreach and community development to chapters.
- Focus on the needs of our smaller projects, and on improving access to them.
- Pursue an endowment for long-term stability of the Foundation.
Why do you want to be a board member?
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
I have contributed most extensively to the English Wikipedia, and have been the third most active contributor to Meta, with another 7k edits -- including a large number of pages dedicated to translation, communication, long-term planning and outreach. I am an accredited Wikinews reporter, and have contributed technology articles there; along with original articles, photographs, and interviews for the Wikimedia Quarto while it was published. Other contributions include original Nahuatl texts to multilingual Wikisource, texts on the English Wikibooks, core terms for the Swahili Wikipedia while it was getting off the ground, and sections of the 2005 and 2006 wikimania wikis. I have cleared rights on the photographs and works of other groups for inclusion in the projects, including the Whole Earth Catalog and a catalog of name pronunciations from the Voice of America.
As a Board member, I expect my contributions would continue in all of these projects, with motivation to increase contribution on the smaller projects and in other languages to develop a better rounded understanding of individual projects.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
The Board should never again alter the Bylaws or change its own structure without public discussion. That this is possible under the current bylaws is a loophole that needs to be closed. Currently, a Board quorum can effect a change in the founding documents with no public notice and with only 10 days' notice to other Board members.
The loss of the community majority on the Board, so recently gained, was a real blow; it should be restored. While we currently have a representative Board, it has unwittingly taken the first steps towards a Board whose majority is unaccountable to the community. We could now end up with a biased Board majority that perpetuates itself -- being empowered to appoint the next year's majority, and at times to veto publicly chosen Board members, with no recourse for even a preponderance of community members to change matters.
Considering how completely the projects' contributors now depend on the Board's goodwill to sustain even the most basic processes, such as dump creation, feed provision, backups and server uptime, the community should have more direct input into Foundational deliberations, not less -- certainly until there are solutions to these long-term needs that are robust to fluctuations in alignment of the Board and the community.
The switch from annual community elections to biannual elections limits the regular refreshing of community values on the Board, and is emblematic of the hasty way in which the latest Bylaws change was effected.
As for the identification of "expert" seats on the Board, this is inferior to an active and explicit Advisory Board, of which more is expected and to which more responsibility is given. The Board is not currently utilizing much of the knowledge and interest of our extraordinary community to inform and address the problems and opportunities it faces, and this is the obvious first place to look as our new position as a bastion of free knowledge becomes clear.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
- A response has not yet been received for this question.
Steve Smith (Sarcasticidealist)
| Candidate profile | |
|---|---|
| Real name: | Steve Smith |
| Username: | Sarcasticidealist |
| Age: | 26 |
| Location: | Edmonton, Alberta, Canada |
| Languages: | English, French |
| Wikimedian since: | February 2007 |
| Active wikis: | English Wikipedia Meta-Wiki Wikimedia Commons |
Candidate Statement:
I am
- an administrator at English Wikipedia and a member of the OTRS team,
- the business manager of a non-profit with revenues in excess of half a million dollars,
- a former director of three different non-profits, one statutory corporation, and one for-profit corporation,
- occasionally called upon by these organizations to give presentations on corporate governance, and
- starting law school in September 2008.
I can verify all of the above upon request. If elected, I would
- advocate for the Foundation-imposed creation of committees in our largest projects, such committees to be
- empowered to make project-specific policy,
- elected to finite terms by the community and recallable by same,
- overrulable by community consensus,
- authorized to alter their own makeup, and
- no threat to the Foundation’s Section 230 immunity as a nonpublisher;
- ensure that the current more rapid growth of expenses than of revenues is merely a symptom of a rapidly growing organization;
- critically examine the proposed license migration;
- support the new board structure, except the chapter Trustees ( I would need to learn more to offer an opinion about them);
- oppose the use of paid advertising on any Wikimedia project.
Why do you want to be a board member?
My primary motivation in running are the problems that the communities not only are not solving, but are utterly incapable of solving. Foremost among these is that benignly neglectful savagery of living persons. Besides that, I have a strong interest in questions of corporate governance, and a great desire to make sure that the new board structure is used in ways to further sound governance. Finally, I have some concerns about the possibility of a license migration away from the GFDL, and I want to make sure that these concerns are properly addressed before the Board goes ahead with it.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
My single most important goal (though by no means the only one) is to see the Foundation step in and impose a governance solution on its largest projects, albeit one that retains the concept of community self-government.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
The vast majority of my content contributions have been on the English Wikipedia, although I've uploaded some images to the Commons and made some minor edits at the French Wikipedia as an IP. I've generated a bunch of new articles and brought many others up from stubs to well-cited B class articles. I only have one Good Article (an English Wikipedia designation for well-written and well-cited articles that aren't of featured article calibre) under my belt so far, but I have another one that's been awaiting review for quite some time and a few more that are likely ready to pass, but which I've held off submitting until I get a better handle on the process. I haven't yet written a featured article, though I'm working on my first (about former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau) off-wiki; I hope to have it ready for peer review sometime in early June.
I don't think my election to the board would appreciably affect my content contributions. When I was made an admin, I was concerned that I might start hanging around exclusively in the Wikipedia space and stop contributing content, but that hasn't happened. Indeed, whenever wiki-politics are feeling especially frustrating or stupid, I go on mainspace sprees that remind me of why I got involved in the first place.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
Reduction of the proportion of community reps: I strongly support this, because the Foundation does not belong to the community, and should not be primarily accountable to the community. Community members are major stakeholders in the Foundation's activities, but so are our readers, our subjects, our donors, and the broader public. Although it's not feasible for all of these groups to elect their own directors, it's important to get people on the Board whose perspective on the Foundation and its projects isn't that of contributor. I would actually like to see us aim big with these positions, getting people who not only have great expertise but also PR value and fundraising connections; the board needs more people with Wikipedia articles and not Wikipedia accounts.
Chapter reps: I can't pass final judgment on these until I see a process for how they're appointed and on what basis they're going to be selected. I would be strongly opposed to them becoming de facto unelected community reps, for the reasons above.
Community founder: If the intent of this position is to give Jimbo a de facto lifetime seat on the board, I oppose it.
Petition: I didn't sign it because it wasn't clear to me exactly what it was asking for. If it was only expressing frustration at the lack of communication, I endorse it (I have found communication from the board to the community to be lacking in general; for example, when the Foundation communications committee created that awful "Wikipedia is not Wikia" template and dropped it on Wikipedia articles about Wikia and Wikimedia, I contacted one of the community reps on the board to ask whether the committee was acting with the authority of the board, but did not receive a response). On the other hand, if the petition is intended to demand parity of community representation with other representation, I can't support it for the reasons above.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
I have
- taken senior-level university courses in accounting (both financial and managerial), organizational analysis, and business law.
- participated in a workshop put on by the Government of Alberta on the governance of non-profits.
- spent the last three years as the business manager of a non-profit with an annual budget in excess of half a million dollars.
- sat on the boards of directors of three different societies (incorporated under the Societies Act of Alberta) each with a budget in excess of a hundred thousand dollars per year and on the board of one for-profit corporation incorporated under the Canada Corporations Act.
- served as Vice President (Operations and Finance) of the Students' Union, University of Alberta (a statutory corporation with an annual budget in excess of nine million dollars) and then served two years on its de facto board of directors where, among other things, I chaired committees to re-design the organization's budget process and re-evaluate its relationship with various autonomous groups that received money collected under the Students' Union's powers of taxation. During my time there, one observer of student politics called me “one of the University of Alberta’s highest-profile student politicians by virtue of the fact that he actually does stuff.” Here are links to some of the on-campus media coverage of my time in that position: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]
- been called upon to give presentations to boards of directors on subjects ranging from policy development to chairing meetings, and been brought in to chair contentious general/membership meetings of a variety of different groups.
- assisted a non-profit with which I had no previous involvement (with a budget of more than a hundred thousand dollars per year) with the preparation of their books for auditing for the last four years.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
As I said in my answer to an earlier question, I don't believe that the Foundation should be accountable primarily towards its volunteers - that leaves out too many people with legitimate interests in the Foundation's activities. As far as I can tell, the initial plan for a membership-based Foundation (here are the earliest bylaws I could find on the subject) contemplated membership (or, at least, suffraged membership) on the basis of contributions to Wikimedia projects only, so I would reject that corporate model. It may be that a membership-based organization with more classes of members to better-represent the various stakeholders in Wikimedia projects would be beneficial, but I don't see it as a compelling need.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
Bearing in mind that the primary purpose of the Foundation is to facilitate the generation of content by the community, I think an event that only a tiny fraction of one percent of contributors will be attending has to rank some distance down on the priority list. That's not to say that I oppose Wikimania - I don't, and I hope to attend one someday. If the Foundation has the resources - financial, staff, or other - to spare, I think Wikimania's a reasonable use of these. Same goes for any national or larger regional gatherings (although you'd hope to see chapters taking a more active role in these). Wikimania, in my view, falls under the heading of "nice to have, but not core to the Foundation's objects". Beyond that, my limited experience in this department leaves me unable to offer any great insight.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
I'm afraid that, as that's a very difficult thing to evaluate from my vantage point, I have to cop-out on this one. I'm a regular reader of a variety of sites that discuss staff performance - most of it from an unfavourable perspective - so I wouldn't be going in blind, but I'm certainly not going to take office with preconceived notions of how staff members are doing their jobs without bothering to check things out for myself.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
I think the major ongoing failure of the Board has been to remain fundamentally insular. Most of its members have been drawn, one way or another, from the community (broadly defined). The board restructuring was a step in the right direction, at least insofar as the reduction of the community-elected Trustees goes, but I have some concern that, given the past record of insular behaviour, these new expert seats may be filled by non-outsiders.
Ting Chen (Wing)
| Candidate profile | |
|---|---|
| Real name: | Ting Chen |
| Username: | Wing |
| Age: | 40 |
| Location: | Mainz, Germany |
| Languages: | Chinese, German, English |
| Wikimedian since: | January 2003 |
| Active wikis: | Chinese Wikipedia German Wikipedia English Wikipedia |
Candidate Statement:
I was born in Shanghai, grew up in Harbin of northeast China, and moved to Germany at age of 20. Now I live in Mainz and work at IBM as a programmer.
I began participating in Wikipedia five years ago and have edited and translated lots of articles between DE, EN, and ZH, so I know well how the three Wikipedia projects grew over the years, their history and current status, and their character, strengths, and weaknesses. As an active administrator and bureaucrat at ZH.WP, I am also devoted to daily cleanup work and community interactions. I also helped organizing Wikimania 2007 Taipei.
I strongly believe and hold that Wikimedia and its projects should remain open, neutral, simple, and diverse.
If elected to the Board, I will:
- Support development of the MediaWiki software for enhanced usability.
- Support measures to attract and retain new editors.
- Facilitate communications among Wikimedia communities of different projects and locations.
- Advocate for lingual, cultural and other diversities in the Wikimedia community.
- Promote collaborations between Wikimedia and universities or other nonprofit/public institutions of education and research (e.g., libraries).
Why do you want to be a board member?
The main reason why I decided to candidate is that the WikiMedia-projects are international projects with a lot of very diverse communities. It is always important to remind ourself of this point. But most communities outside of Europe and North America are not adequately represented in the foundation and the board. They are thus also less interested in the foundation politics, which also influences them. Indeed the WikiMania hold last year in Taipei had mostly promoted our local community there and in the region. I want to give the board a face and a voice for these communities. I want to encourage members of these communities to be more interested in foundation affairs and politics. I want the board to get a more direct link to these communities.
On her opening speech on WikiMania in Taipei, Florence called the chinese community to get more involved in the foundation politics. Since then we discussed this topic for quite a long time. My favorite candidate would be Kj, who was one of the leading organiser of the event and who is surely the most charismatic member of the community who is also well known in the international community. But she declined a candidacy quite early. When early this year also Theodoranian declined because he must prepare his exam I decided to run for the election.
Name one thing that you'd like to accomplish as a board member.
My first goal is to represent the community: As a community member to control the foundation and take part in the policy making of the board.
What, in terms of pure content, have you contributed to Wikimedia in the past, and how would this be affected by your being appointed to the board?
I am one of the most productive contributers on the zh-wp. I wrote a lot of articles or improved them from stub. I cannot tell you how many articles I have improved or have created because I don't do statistics of that sort. You can check my contributions here. I am also one of the guys on zh-wp who do the most image license check and copyvio check. Until bots get more reliable, I also do a lot of interwiki links, but still sometimes I correct manually false interwiki checks nowaday. I also contribute on the de-wp. Here mostly doing small error corrections and translation of excellent articles from zh-wp. Here is the reference to my contributions there. I also work on commons for translations. On the 2005 WikiMania in Frankfurt in Germany I took part of a panel and introduced the chinese Wikipedia community. I helped organise the 2007 WikiMania in Taipei. And I would be a speaker on this years WikiMania in Alexandia.
What is your opinion on the recent restructuring of the board and the petition created in response?
First of all, I think the community is the most important part of all WikiMedia-projects. Nupedia was the Wikipedia without community, and Nupedia died. Without the community there is no Wikipedia, nor any other projects. Second I am against the idea of the 'Specific expertise' seats. If the board think it is lacking of certain specific expertise, it can build a committee and sought help from experts through this way, but these experts don't need to be a member of the board. These seats are undemocratic and they are the best way to open doors for nepotism. The core spirit of all WikiMedia-project is its openness and its neutrality. Until now, the community is its best guarantee of this core spirit. Appointed Experts can have their own interests. And they can later appoint peoples that represent their interests and oppinions, and the community would have no way to control and change that. Also, organisations can buy or set presure on members to get people of their interest appointed as member. But the community cannot be baught or pressured, even by the mightiest organisations. WikiMedia is an organisation of the community, without the community all projects die. So I advocate and when ever possible vote for a board with only members from the community and from the chapters.
I want to say one thing about the chapters here. Chapters are local organisations of community members. WikiMedia is an international organisation, but its root is everywhere, in all the countries of the world, even in countries like China. The chapters are our link to the organisations and authorities there, so they have a very important function. That is why in my opinion they deserve representation on the board.
In your candidate submission statements some of you have described past financial experience. Please elaborate on past work, and volunteer experience/positions you have had in non-profit organizations. How do you feel you can apply these past experiences and skills to a Board position with the Wikimedia Foundation?
I had a classical engineer's education and as such, finantial skills was not on the plan. Though my professor always said, it is the responsibility of an engineer to make sure that his project is always affordable. I work in a big international computer company now and I am a first tier worker. That is, I work directly with our customers and very often on site in their company. I have no financial responsibility in my company or in our projects but I am aware that every decision and suggestion I make have financial consequences. I have always handled in the best interest of my company and of our customer. Every year I must do an excercise on financial integrity.
Years ago as a student I was member of a local (Braunschweig, Germany) chess club and as such actively took part on the administration work of the club.
Whenever possible and necessary I would support fund raising efforts of the WMF, and I would put an eye on the financial integrity and transparency of the WMF, but financy issue is not my main interest.
Do you believe the Wikimedia Foundation should revisit the decision whether to be a membership organization (ie, with dues-paying members), as specified by the original 2003 bylaws but never implemented? Why or why not?
My answer on this question is a premature no, and you are welcome to convince me I am wrong.
I confess I understand that there could be much benefits for a membership organization, and from the view of a european or american citizen it is almost compelling to change the foundation into such an organization.
But the WikiMedia projects are not first-world-only projects. For people from some country it could be difficult or even impossible to be a member. I see the danger that with a membership organization we would foster a two class community with contributers who are members and can vote on foundation policy (and maybe elect board member or candidate for the board) and people who are not members and cannot. I am uneasy about such an idea.
I think a membership in the chapters are far more better. The chapters are organised according to the local law, where the member live.
But as I said at the beginning. This is a premature opinion of mine and you are welcome to convince me that my concern are not relevant.
How do you think the Foundation can or should best support Wikimania in the future? What about other events?
Hello Phoebe :-) What many people don't know, is that also the WikiMania events are mainly a local and as such a grassroot initiative. From the beginning of candidate to the finalizing report to WMF, the local organisational team make a great part of the work. I am happy to be able to take part in the organisation of the last year's event, though a very small part compare to the local volunteers.
The most important thing that WMF can provide to the local team is experience and assets. A framework, which can be used by the local team, beginning with formular for registration to a responsible contact person with the local team would be very nice.
As of regional and local meetings. I think also here the local grassroot and the chapters play a very important role. In the chinese community we have seasonal meetings of Wikipedians in Taipei, Hongkong, Macao and Beijing, long before the chapters in Taipei and Hongkong are established. And the Hongkong community also managed to organise a chinese conference two years ago. The same is also in Germany. There are many local meetings that are simply organised by the Wikipedians without the help of the foundation or the german chapter. Also from the talk of Harel I heard this is the same in Israel for the hebrew community. They began to meet by themselves, began to organise events and later that structure developped to the chapter.
So, I think local initialive is important, is vital, and I don't think that WMF should interfere into such initiatives.
How do you feel Sue Gardner and the rest of the staff members have done over the last year in building the office, and moving to San Francisco?
While working on WikiMania 2007 in Taipei I got a glimpse on the work of the foundation staff. I found the coorperation not optimal, not professional and often tedious. I would like to take a close eye on this. Before that I would restrain myself to give a final opinion.
What do you believe has been the Board's biggest mistake to date? Why do you believe this? and what would you have done differently?
I consider the last board restructure a big, if not even the biggest, failure of the board. The reason for this opinion I have already stated in [the restructuring question above]. I consider this definitively as a move in the wrong direction.
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