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Ahead of our scheduled WMF Board meeting in early February, I’ve been thinking through a really hard and thorny movement-wide issue. Last time I was dealing with a similarly hard issue, I put some rough notes/questions up here and asked for your thoughts and help thinking through the issue. I’d like to try another Request for Comments with a related but bigger issue.

Let me set this up as a thought experiment. Imagine that we can all go back to the beginning of our movement. Imagine that we have a clean slate and can start fresh. But also imagine that we have the benefit of the past 10 years of experience, and with it all the lessons we’ve learned about ourselves and our strengths and weaknesses as a community.

Let’s say our objective is to define the basic structure of a movement that will most effectively help our community pursue our vision over the next 100, 200 or even 500 years. Long-term impact is the primary objective.

If we could start over, how would we organize our movement?   Continue reading “RfC: Geography and Wikimedia”

Last week in preparation for our Board meeting at Wikimania I did a post on fundraising, financial controls, and chapters which triggered a lot of really thoughtful discussion. We’ve now wrapped up our Board meeting and have spent much time discussing the topic both among the Board and also with many community members here in Haifa. Given how incredibly important this topic is, we decided as a Board to capture our thoughts in a letter to the community. It’s up on meta, our Board Secretary Phoebe just emailed to a few lists, and below is the text. I’m happy to talk about the issues raised either in person at Wikimania through Sunday or on meta or here in blog comments.
Continue reading “Board letter on fundraising”

Our new Board Secretary, Phoebe Ayers, is jumping right into her new role and both emailed and posted the first of a new series of regular board updates.  Text is pasted below:

Wikimedia Board of Trustees — activity report May-June 2011

Resolutions and votes

Controversial content

• Controversial content resolution — this resolution was passed in May after a year-long process of discussion and research. It reaffirms the Board’s position on censorship, calls for continued community involvement in image review and asks for the creation of a personal image filter feature which would allow readers to not choose whether to view certain classes of images. Continue reading “Board report for May-June 2011”

I’ve been getting ready for the board meeting and Wikimania and have been struggling with a particularly thorny issue and thought I would use a blog post to start a conversation I hope to continue in Haifa.

Many groups have discussed this issue over the past few years, including the Audit Committee (which I chair), our independent auditors KPMG, the Movement Roles group, the Chapters who have been working closely on the fundraising agreement with the Foundation and Barry Newstead’s development team, and the Board (e.g. see our resolution on the importance of transparency in use of donor funds). But progress has been difficult because this is a hard issue. Continue reading “Fundraising, chapters, and movement priorities”

Erik Zachte is at it again, with a blog post announcing his fascinating new visualization of all the global edits to Wikipedia in a single day (Valentine’s Day, a romantic choice).  It’s an incredible tool and worth a look — I just spent 30 minutes wandering around its different views, zooming in on different regions, and drinking it in.  See below for my favorite screenshot so far, which shows the locations from which all the edits to Wikipedia were made that day.

This reminds me of one of my favorite visualizations, a video with OpenStreetMap edits over a single year.