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[Foundation-l] September Report to the Board of Trustees
Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Covering:September 2009 Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees MILESTONES FROM SEPTEMBER 1. Recruitment begins for Chief Technical Officer and Chief Development Officer 2. 2009 Fundraiser planning begins 3. Strategy project launches Call For Participation 4. Usability team expanded 5. Bookshelf project for public outreach resources launched KEY PRIORITIES FOR OCTOBER 1. Begin interviewing Chief Technical Officer candidates 2. Planning for 2009 Fundraiser continues (launches November) 3. Strategy Project task forces kick off 4. Semi-annual All Staff Meeting October 21-23 5. Office moves to 149 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco REPORT FOR SEPTEMBER KEY PROGRAM METRICS Reach of all Wikimedia Foundation sites: 326 million unique visitors (rank #5) +19.8% (1 year ago) / +6% (1 month ago) Source: comScore Media Metrics Pages served: 11.4 billion +11.7% (1 year ago) / +5.1% (1 month ago) Active number of editors (5+ edits/month): 94,565 +2.3% (1 year ago) / -2.5% (one month ago) Source: September 2009 Report Card http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2009_09_detailed.html KEY FINANCIAL METRICS Operating revenue year to date: USD 1.1MM vs. plan of USD 1.1MM Operating expenses year to date: USD 1.6MM vs plan of USD 2.6MM. Unrestricted cash on hand as of October 22 was USD 6.0MM. STRATEGIC PLANNING PROCESS September marked the formal launch of the strategy planning process. In mid-September, a Call for Participation from Jimmy Wales and Michael Snow appeared at the top of all Wikimedia sites, encouraging people to volunteer to participate in strategy development task forces, which will be responsible for digging deeper into the key questions facing Wikimedia. The key questions include how to grow readership and participation in geographies where Wikimedia projects are under-performing (e.g., China, India, the Arabic-speaking countries); how to make Wikimedia project material available to the five billion people who don't yet have access to the internet; how to convert readers into participants and improve the diversity and general health of the Wikimedia movement, and how to enable Wikimedia, as a social and political movement, to best shape and influence public perception and public policy, internationally. The Call for Participation resulted in almost 3,000 applications from a wide variety of people, including active project participants and readers from many projects and languages. A selection committee carefully reviewed all applications, and in October will begin to populate the task forces with the applicants who seem most appropriate. Almost 30% of applicants committed to volunteering over 10 hours a week, indicating a strong desire to help and engage in this process. Meanwhile, in September, overall engagement on the strategy wiki continued to grow. The strategy wiki now contains almost 6,000 pages of content in more than 50 languages. Over 600 people have contributed to the wiki. Also in September, the Bridgespan Group continued to add data and analysis to the strategy wiki in support of the task forces, and also conducted a number of in-depth interviews with Wikimedia Foundation Board members, Advisory Board members, staff, other supporters and experts. Thus far, interviewees have included Board members Ting Chen, Samuel Klein and Jimmy Wales, Advisory Board members Angela Beesley Starling, Ward Cunningham, Clay Shirky, Achal Prabhala, Florence Nibart-Devouard, Teemu Leinonen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Roger McNamee, Melissa Hagemann, Mitch Kapor, Neeru Khosla, Wayne Mackintosh and Ethan Zuckerman. Other interviews were conducted with Ed Chi, researcher at Palo Alto Research Center, Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University law professor and researcher, Rima Kupryte, from eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries), Andrew Lih, author of The Wikipedia Revolution, Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons, Misiek Piskorski, Harvard Business School professor and researcher, Jennifer Riggs, former Chief Program Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation, Joseph Reagle, researcher into open source communities, Matt Thompson, Online Community Manager at the Knight Foundation and Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States. The following staff have also been interviewed: Mike Godwin, General Counsel, Véronique Kessler, Chief Financial and Operating Officer, Rand Montoya, Head of Community Giving, Frank Schulenburg, Head of Public Outreach, Brion Vibber, Chief Technical Officer, Tim Starling, software developer, Kul Wadhwa, Head of Business Development, Jay Walsh, Head of Communications, Erik Zachte, Data Analyst, and Sue Gardner, Executive Director. All interview notes can be found here: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interviews
[Foundation-l] October- Report to the Board of Trustees
Report to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees Covering:October 2009 Prepared by: Sue Gardner, Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation Prepared for: Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees MILESTONES FROM OCTOBER 1. Work begins on Multimedia Usability Project 2. Strategic Planning Task Forces Launch 3. Office move to 149 New Montgomery Street 4. Technology Staff and All Staff Meetings KEY PRIORITIES FOR NOVEMBER 1. (Ongoing) Chief Development Officer and Chief Technical Officer recruitment 2. Kickoff of 2009 Annual Giving Campaign 3. Launch of Public Outreach Resources Bookshelf Project 4. Multimedia Workshop in Paris 5. First Board of Trustees meeting in new office THIS PAST MONTH KEY PROGRAM METRICS Reach of all Wikimedia Foundation sites: 345 million unique visitors (rank #5) +24.3% (1 year ago) / +5.7% (1 month ago) Source: comScore Media Metrics Pages served: 11.6 billion +8.8% (1 year ago) / +1.9% (1 month ago) Active number of editors (5+ edits/month): 97,132 +1.9% (1 year ago) / +3.4% (1 month ago) Source: October 2009 Report Card http://stats.wikimedia.org/reportcard/RC_2009_10_detailed.html KEY FINANCIAL METRICS Operating revenue year to date: USD 2.4MM vs. plan of USD 1.7MM [1] Operating expenses year to date: USD 2.2MM vs. plan of USD 3.5 million [2] Unrestricted cash on hand as of November 11: USD 5.4MM [1] Unanticipated early grant funding [2] Delays in some large purchases STRATEGIC PLANNING PROJECT With the preliminary exploration and research phase wrapped up, the Strategic Planning team spent October transitioning into a deep dive exploration of critical, strategic questions. In September, more than 3,000 people from inside and outside of the Wikimedia movement applied to participate in Wikimedia's strategic planning project. In October, the Task Force selection committee reviewed all 3,000 applications, and put together 14 task forces, each comprised of between four and eight members. Each of the Task Forces is exploring a specific topic, with the goal of eventually making two to four thoughtful recommendations aimed at the following areas: increasing reach and participation in China, India, and Arabic- speaking countries; stimulating development of smaller “local language” Wikipedias; increasing Wikimedia project readership among the five billion people who don't currently have internet access; improving quality; expanding into other content areas; increasing participation, particularly from high-potential under-represented groups; fostering a healthy, productive editing community; determining what organizational structures are required to support the Wikimedia movement and how they should intersect; ensuring financial sustainability; identifying the partnerships that are most critical to advancing Wikimedia's mission; identifying the ideal technology infrastructure, and ways to increase usability and foster technical innovation; and developing recommendations for strategically supporting high-priority advocacy. The task forces are expected to finalize their recommendations by January 12. Meanwhile, all discussions are happening publicly on the strategy wiki, and everyone is invited to participate. The strategy wiki increased from 600 editors in September to 780 in October: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page Other important strategy URLs: http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interviews http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Planning_Guiding_Summary http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fact_base TECHNOLOGY - CORE Hiring has begun for the Code Maintenance Engineer position on the core engineering team, responsible for reviewing, integrating and deploying code, and advancing the overall MediaWiki development architecture. LiquidThreads, a complete overhaul of MediaWiki's discussion functionality, has been made available through a dedicated Wikimedia Labs site. The big picture here is that traditional wiki discussion require complex and atypical user interaction that make them difficult for new users to understand, and their lack of internal structure makes it harder to search or display them systematically. Thanks to hard work by contract developer Andrew Garrett based on the initial code from David McCabe, LiquidThreads is now maturing to a point to become useful for specific discussion spaces in the Wikimedia universe: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/mediawikis-new-discussion-system-in-testing-on-wikimedia-labs/ Wikimedia set up a part-time contract with Siebrand Mazeland to support the further growth and development of translatewiki.net, a third party project used for the localization of MediaWiki and other open source projects. Thanks to translatewiki.net and its large community of volunteers, MediaWiki is one of the most actively localized software packages available:
[Foundation-l] [Announcement] Danese Cooper joins Wikimedia as CTO
Hi folks, I'm delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation's new Chief Technical Officer is Danese Cooper, an experienced technology manager and open-source evangelist. Danese will start with Wikimedia on February 4, 2010. As you know, we've been searching for a CTO since last fall, when Brion announced his decision to leave Wikimedia for StatusNet. We were looking for someone with plenty of leadership experience and a deep understanding of open source technology, who could lead our technical staff, evangelize on behalf of Mediawiki, and set up systems and processes to help our staff and Wikimedia technology volunteers work successfully together. Danese fits the bill on all counts: I'm very happy she'll be joining us. Danese has a wealth of experience in open source technology. Most recently, she developed open source strategy for the tech start-up REvolution Computing. Prior to that, she was Senior Director of Open Source Strategies at Intel from 2005 until 2009, and Chief Open Source Evangelist at Sun Microsystems from 1999 to 2005. In those roles, she led or supported major open source initiatives, including Sun's OpenOffice.org application suite, the Java platform, JXTA, NetBeans, GridEngine, OpenSolaris and Intel's Channel Software Operations and Moblin platform initiatives. Prior to working at Sun, she managed technology teams at Symantec and at Apple Computing for a total of nine years. Danese is a Board member at the Open Source Initiative, the non-profit organization that maintains the Open Source Definition and approves open source software licenses. She is also a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and serves on a Special Advisory Board for Mozilla. Danese has lived and traveled internationally, particularly in developing countries, and speaks several languages, including French and Moroccan Arabic. As CTO, Danese will be responsible for ensuring Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects run reliably and perform well from a technical standpoint. She will also be responsible for supporting the development of Wikimedia's open source software stack including MediaWiki, and for creating technical strategy and technical projects to drive increases in Wikimedia projects' reach, quality and participation. Her background as an evangelist will be particularly important, because the health of the Wikimedia volunteer developer community is critical to Wikimedia's ability to successfully serve people in multiple geographies and languages. All technical staff and contractors will report to Danese. Initially, Danese will focus on filling some key staffing gaps, and on leading the stabilization of Wikimedia's technology infrastructure: ensuring predictable and secure operations and backups, improving monitoring, APIs and database dumps, and establishing an additional US-based data centre to give us safe fail-over capability. She has an important job and lots to do: I ask you all to join me in welcoming and supporting her. Danese will begin her work February 3. Until June 30, Danese has a standing one day/week commitment to support the code review process of the SETI Institute. Finally, I want to thank the Walker Talent Group (www.walkertalentgroup.com) for its pro bono work helping recruit Danese, as well as Advisory Board member Roger McNamee for introducing Wikimedia to Walker. Their help is much appreciated. Sue Gardner Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation -- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation 415 839 6885 office Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announcement] Danese Cooper joins Wikimedia as CTO
Crossposting to wikitech. Welcome Danese! Sue Gardner wrote: Hi folks, I'm delighted to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation's new Chief Technical Officer is Danese Cooper, an experienced technology manager and open-source evangelist. Danese will start with Wikimedia on February 4, 2010. As you know, we've been searching for a CTO since last fall, when Brion announced his decision to leave Wikimedia for StatusNet. We were looking for someone with plenty of leadership experience and a deep understanding of open source technology, who could lead our technical staff, evangelize on behalf of Mediawiki, and set up systems and processes to help our staff and Wikimedia technology volunteers work successfully together. Danese fits the bill on all counts: I'm very happy she'll be joining us. Danese has a wealth of experience in open source technology. Most recently, she developed open source strategy for the tech start-up REvolution Computing. Prior to that, she was Senior Director of Open Source Strategies at Intel from 2005 until 2009, and Chief Open Source Evangelist at Sun Microsystems from 1999 to 2005. In those roles, she led or supported major open source initiatives, including Sun's OpenOffice.org application suite, the Java platform, JXTA, NetBeans, GridEngine, OpenSolaris and Intel's Channel Software Operations and Moblin platform initiatives. Prior to working at Sun, she managed technology teams at Symantec and at Apple Computing for a total of nine years. Danese is a Board member at the Open Source Initiative, the non-profit organization that maintains the Open Source Definition and approves open source software licenses. She is also a member of the Apache Software Foundation, and serves on a Special Advisory Board for Mozilla. Danese has lived and traveled internationally, particularly in developing countries, and speaks several languages, including French and Moroccan Arabic. As CTO, Danese will be responsible for ensuring Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects run reliably and perform well from a technical standpoint. She will also be responsible for supporting the development of Wikimedia's open source software stack including MediaWiki, and for creating technical strategy and technical projects to drive increases in Wikimedia projects' reach, quality and participation. Her background as an evangelist will be particularly important, because the health of the Wikimedia volunteer developer community is critical to Wikimedia's ability to successfully serve people in multiple geographies and languages. All technical staff and contractors will report to Danese. Initially, Danese will focus on filling some key staffing gaps, and on leading the stabilization of Wikimedia's technology infrastructure: ensuring predictable and secure operations and backups, improving monitoring, APIs and database dumps, and establishing an additional US-based data centre to give us safe fail-over capability. She has an important job and lots to do: I ask you all to join me in welcoming and supporting her. Danese will begin her work February 3. Until June 30, Danese has a standing one day/week commitment to support the code review process of the SETI Institute. Finally, I want to thank the Walker Talent Group (www.walkertalentgroup.com) for its pro bono work helping recruit Danese, as well as Advisory Board member Roger McNamee for introducing Wikimedia to Walker. Their help is much appreciated. Sue Gardner Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announcement] Danese Cooper joins Wikimedia as CTO
She has an important job and lots to do: I ask you all to join me in welcoming and supporting her. Welcome Danese. Impressive CV! ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Announcing: Britain Loves Wikipedia
Hi all, In case you haven't heard already, Britain Loves Wikipedia, a free photography scavenger hunt following on from Wiki Loves Art et al., will be taking place in 21 museums and archives across the UK throughout February, and is launching on Sunday at the Victoria and Albert Museum! Full details are now up on the WMUK blog, at: http://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2010/01/britain-loves-wikipedia/ and also the Britain Loves Wikipedia website at: http://www.britainloveswikipedia.org/ Thanks, Mike Peel Wikimedia UK PS: Apologies if you're not in the UK... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Announcement] Danese Cooper joins Wikimedia as CTO
On Thursday 28 Jan 2010 23:02:46 Bod Notbod wrote: She has an important job and lots to do: I ask you all to join me in welcoming and supporting her. Welcome Danese. Impressive CV! I second that - I wish Danese good luck in her new role. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- - Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ What does Zionism mean? - http://shlom.in/def-zionism Deletionists delete Wikipedia articles that they consider lame. Chuck Norris deletes deletionists whom he considers lame. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
