Hi Chris and Lodewijk,
I was asked to follow up here on the questions from October about
country-by-country fundraising data.
We make fundraising decisions, including decisions about what information
we release, based in part on our internal legal assessments in the country.
We don't go into our legal assessments publicly, as it may make it
difficult to keep legal risks and costs low.
We strive to be as open about our fundraising activities as we can.
Compared to nonprofit industry standards, we release more information than
other non-profits tend to, including continent-level breakdowns of
donations, information about revenue channels and testing, and reports from
our fundraising research:
- https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2015-2016_Fundraising_Report
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_
Reader_Survey_November_2015.pdf
I’m sorry that we can’t give more satisfying answers to your questions, but
in this case we have determined that publishing the requested information
would not be in the best interest of the Wikimedia movement or Foundation.
--
Stephen LaPorte
Senior Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
*NOTICE: As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal and ethical
reasons, I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community
members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more
on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.*
Hi everyone,
The voting has started on the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey, and all
Wikimedia contributors are invited to come and vote on the projects that
WMF's Community Tech team will work on next year:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_Survey
There are 267 proposals this year, on a wide range of subjects that I'm
pretty sure you have an opinion about.
You've got two weeks to vote, from now through December 12th. You can vote
for as many proposals as you like, by adding a {{support}} tag under the
proposals that you think are worthwhile.
Once the voting's over, we'll have a ranked list of projects for the
Community Tech team to work on, as well as other developers and volunteers
who want to build features and make changes that the core contributors
really want.
This is an opportunity for you to help set the agenda for a WMF product
team, so I hope everybody comes and participates!
Danny Horn
WMF Product Manager
Community Tech
Dear all
The Wikispeech project is looking for an official logo. You can submit
designs until the 4th of December and vote on which are you favourite logo
until the 11th.
The Wikispeech project aims to create an open source text-to-speech tool to
make Wikimedia's projects more accessible. You can find out more about the
project, submit new logo designs and vote on existing logo designs here.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikispeech
Many thanks
John
Hello everyone,
Today, I have some good news of both local and regional importance to
share. On 23 November, Estonian Research Council[1] handed out this
year’s *Popularization
of Science Awards*. The awards are given out by Estonian Research Council
and Estonian Academy of Sciences with the support of Estonian Ministry of
Education and Research to recognize the efforts of groups and individuals
who have successfully worked towards popularizing science and the work of
scientists and making it accessible to the general public. This year, *second
prize in the Popularization of Science and Technology Using Audiovisual and
Electronic Media* category was awarded to the *European Science Photo
Competition*[2] held on Wikimedia Commons in November 2015. The award was
received by *Ivo Kruusamägi*[3], initiator and organizer of the
competition, as well as a prolific Wikipedian and a member and volunteer of
Wikimedia Estonia.
The 2015 European competition was inspired by Estonian Science Photo
Competition[4], first held on Wikipedia in 2011. WMEE can't thank Ivo
enough for his hard work; hopefully, only the sky is the limit for the
Science Photo Competition.
Sincerely,
Tanel Pern
WMEE
[1] http://www.etag.ee/en/
[2]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:European_Science_Photo_Competiti…
[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kruusam%C3%A4gi
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiproject:Estonian_Science_Photo_…
Congratulations for WMAU!
2016-11-19 6:32 GMT+07:00 Gnangarra <gnangarra(a)wikimedia.org.au>:
> Following the AGM of Wikimedia Australia we wish to announce the committee
> for 2016-17 and reports
>
> President: Gideon Digby(unchanged)
> Vice President: Pru Mitchell(unchanged)
> Secretary:Tom Hogarth
> Treasurer: Robert Myers
> General members: Caddie Brain
>
> Departed: Andrew Owens, Steve Crossin, Charles Gregory
>
> 2016 Annual report: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/
> Reports/Wikimedia_Australia/2016/Annual_Report
> 2015-16 Financial report : https://wikimedia.org.au/
> wiki/File:Wikimedia_Australia_Inc._-_Balance_Sheet_2015-16.pdf
>
> --
> Gideon Digby
> President - Wikimedia Australia
> M: 0434 986 852
> gnangarra(a)wikimedia.org.au
> http://wikimedia.org.au
>
> Wikimedia Australia Inc. is an independent charitable organisation which
> supports the efforts of the Wikimedia Foundation in Australia. Your
> donations keep the Wikimedia mission alive.
> *http://wikimedia.org.au/Donate <https://wikimedia.org.au/Donate>*
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately
> directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia
> community. For more information about Wikimedia-l:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
> _______________________________________________
> WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list
> WikimediaAnnounce-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l
>
>
--
Biyanto Rebin | Ketua Umum (*Chair*) 2016-2018
Wikimedia Indonesia
Nomor Ponsel: +62 8989 037379
Surel: biyanto.rebin(a)wikimedia.or.id
~~~~
Dukung upaya kami membebaskan pengetahuan:
http://wikimedia.or.id/wiki/Wikimedia_Indonesia:Donasi
I'm speaking as a volunteer, not as WMF staff, if that matters to you.
Adrian Raddatz wrote:
> It should be pretty darn easy to make a policy on user interactions within
> technical spaces. There is certainly a practice which is already followed,
> so just codify it and call it a guideline or a generally accepted
document.
> I would certainly support a page that people can read to find our
> expectations for interactions, and what happens if you're naughty.
That's what a Code of Conduct is. :)
It would be wonderful if it were as easy as you describe, but it hasn't
proven to be.
It's taking longer because the WMF/Board did not initially take the
approach of applying this 'top-down' style to the technical spaces.Those of
us who have been involved (some, like myself before we became staff) want
to do it with community involvement and with thoughtful discussion. Are we
going to get it right the first time around? No, maybe not. Are we trying
to design something with thoughtfulness and flexibility? Yes.
MZMcBride wrote:
> And if we disregard any application of common sense, then yes, you could
> argue that a technical code of conduct is needed.
One could also argue that a disregard for common sense is exactly what
permits individuals to violate our shared expectations of community
behavior.
Yours,
Chris Koerner
clkoerner.com
A few weeks ago our Executive Director gave a talk on "Privacy and
Harassment on the Internet" at MozFest 2016 in London. I encourage you to
read the transcript:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Privacy_and_Harassment_on_the_Internet
Katherine argued that the Wikimedia project can take a lead role in
creating a culture of respect and inclusion online. I whole-heartedly
agree, and I hope you all do too. She concluded with:
"We have a lot of work to do. I know that. We know that. As Molly’s story
> illustrates, we are not there yet."
I'd like to open a broader discussion on how we get "there": how to
build/maintain places where we can get work done and control abuse and
vandalism while still remaining wide open to the universe of differing
viewpoints present in our projects. We can't afford to create filter
bubbles, but we must be able to provide users safe(r) spaces to work.
By habit I would propose that this be a technical discussion, on specific
tools or features that our platform is currently missing to facilitate
healthy discussions. But the "filter bubble" is a social problem, not a
technical one. Our project isn't just a collection of code; it's a
community, a set of norms and habits, and a reflection of the social
process of collaboration. A graph algorithm might be able to identify a
filter bubble and good UX can make countervailing opinions no more than a
click away, but it takes human will to seek out uncomfortable truth.
So although my endgame is specific engineering tasks, we need to start with
a broader conversation about our work as social creatures. How do we work
in the projects, how do we communicate among ourselves, and how do we
balance openness and the pursuit of truth with the fight against abuse,
harassment, and bias.
Let's discuss discussions!
Here are some jumping off points; feel free to contribute your own:
We currently use a mixture of Talk pages, Echo, mailing lists, IRC,
Phabricator, OTRS, Slack, Conpherence, and Google Doc on our projects, with
different logging, publication, privacy/identity, and other
characteristics. I tried to start cataloging them here:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-November/085542.html
Because of this diversity, we lack a unified code of conduct or mechanism
to report/combat harassment and vandalism.
Matt Flaschen replied in the above thread with an update on the Code of
Conduct for technical spaces:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-November/085542.html
...which should definitely help! The creation of a centralized reporting
mechanism, in particular, would be most welcome.
I created a proposal for the Wikimedia Developer Summit in January
discussing "safe spaces" on our projects:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T149665
Subscribe/comment/click "award token" to support its inclusion in the dev
summit or to start a conversation there.
I have another, broader, proposal as well, on the "future of chat" on our
projects:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T149661
Subscribe/comment/click "award token" there if that angle piques your
interest.
It seems that "groups of users" arise repeatedly as an architectural
meta-concept, whether it's a group of collaborators you want to invite to
an editing session, a group of users you want to block or ban, a group of
users who belong to a particular wikiproject, or who watch a certain page.
We don't really have a first-class representation of that concept in our
code right now. In previous conversations I've heard that people "don't
want <their wiki project> to turn into another facebook" and so have pushed
back strongly on the idea of "friend lists" (one type of group of users) --
but inverting the concept to allow WikiProjects to maintain a list of
"members of the wikiproject" is more palatable, more focused on the editing
task. From a computer science perspective "friend list" and "member of a
wikiproject" might seem identical--they are both lists of users--but from a
social perspective the connotations and focus are significantly different.
But who administers that list of users?
Perhaps we can build a system which avoids grappling with user groups
entirely. It was suggested that we might use an ORES-like system to
automatically suggest collaborators on an editing project based on some
criteria (like editing history), rather than force you or the WikiProject
to maintain an explicit list. Perhaps you can implement block lists to
combat harassment based entirely on keywords, not users. Do we trust the
machine to be more fair and less abusive than us mere mortals? Additional
ideas welcome! (I don't have a dedicated phab task for this, but
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T149665 might be appropriate if you want
to contribute off-list.)
Hopefully this has been enough to prime the pump.
Let's discuss discussions.
Let's live up to the hope placed in us by the Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/25/somethings-terribly-…
Let's retake the lead on building and renewing a healthy collaborative
community. We can't afford to be complacent or content with the status
quo. Let's come up with new ideas, build them, find the problems, and try
again. It starts with deciding that we can do better.
--scott
--
(http://cscott.net)
Hello all,
Over the past few months the Design team members at the Wikimedia
Foundation (user experience [UX] designers, design researchers, user
experience engineers, and communications) have been working with Arthur
Richards from the Team Practices Group to identify the high-level themes
that motivate design at the WMF. These themes have been turned into a brief
statement of purpose, whose intent is to articulate the vision and purpose
behind design at the WMF. This statement will influence the future
direction of design work.
At this point the stakeholders are ready for a review of the draft
statement. The purpose of this review is to gather a common understanding
of its purpose, and to identify any key themes that may be missing from the
high-level discussion. On the wiki page for the statement, you'll find
these themes and what they encompass in the "Background" section. If you
have an observation, comment, or concern about what is listed there, please
bring it up on the talk page. If it is relevant to the review and
understanding of the statement, it will be looked at for future drafts. If
there are comments about design and the design process in general, we'll
hold on to those until a time when they can be addressed for the broader
discussion of design in general.
All that said, here are the links:
* <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design/Statement_of_purpose>
* <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Design/Statement_of_purpose>
We look forward to seeing you on the wiki.
--
Keegan Peterzell
Technical Collaboration Specialist
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi all,
Over the past few weeks, we have been working with Talent and Culture,
Staff and executive teams to develop a job description (below) for the
role. I would like to share it with you early as well, before the
process starts.
I am very grateful to our staff and leaders here at the WMF for
collaborating on both the description and the process.
We also wanted to let you know that we’re beginning a process with Kathleen
Yazbak from ViewCrest, to vet internal/interim C-level candidates. As you
may recall, Kathleen helped vet Katherine as ED with the support of an
internal team including Katie Horn and Lisa Gruwell. Kathleen took the time
to understand our context, our culture, and meet with relevant stakeholders
so to:
-
Create a fair, consistent and timely process,
-
Create a process that is transparent to staff, and therefore trustworthy,
-
Keep interim leadership informed and engaged.
Talent & Culture and General Counsel roles will be the first to pilot the
process. We've written the JDs for both with an eye for consistency across
executive roles.
Thanks for engaging!
Best,
Amy
Job Title
Chief Talent and Culture Officer
Summary
The Wikimedia Foundation is looking for a creative and collaborative Chief
Talent and Culture Officer to join our executive team in San Francisco. As
a leader of the Talent and Culture team, you’ll help us think and act in
service of the future of our projects and the Foundation. We’re looking for
a candidate who is mission driven, transparent by default, has a truly
global view (e.g., honors and accepts a plurality of worldviews and
cultures), and can can champion an open and transparent culture.
Role
-
Work with the executive team to think and act in service of the future
of our projects (e.g. What kind of talent will we need? Which kind of
culture and structure will best support the work? Which systems and tools
will support WMF best? How will we continuously learn together? How should
we stretch and support the amazing humans we work with?).
-
Champion an open, diverse culture (e.g., How will we lead diversity in
recruiting? How will we build a diverse culture that reflects the
multiplicity of views across our projects? How will we celebrate free
speech, collaboration and create safe spaces?)
-
Be a partner in continually leading organizational transformation and
defining and developing our collective competencies for the future
-
Develop a strong, diverse Talent & Culture team guided by a clear vision.
-
Co-create the vision and direction for a team of ten. Ensure
coherence of philosophy across the employee lifecycle.
-
Clarify and / or delegate the planning to make it happen: the roles,
the responsibilities, the tools, the budget.
-
Counsel and mentor the team on a broad range of disciplines across
the employee lifecycle: recruiting, hiring, benefits, compensation,
onboarding, orienting, training and developing, performance, employee
relations, promotion and off-boarding.
-
Build a pipeline of successors.
-
Help recruit and orient high-level talent for the Wikimedia Board of
Trustees, the Wikimedia Endowment and key executive roles.
Requirements
-
Candidate has mastered the role of Chief of Talent and Culture. They
understand what Talent and Culture is all about: finding and cultivating
the right talent and building the systems and culture to deliver on a
mission.
-
Candidate has a minimum 10-15 years experience leading talent, culture,
HR and performance transformations.
-
Candidate has a leading edge understanding of employment law, benefits
and driving diversity in recruiting and managing.
-
Candidate can earn the trust of others, has excellent interpersonal
skills, excellent communication skills, an ability to judge talent and
people, demonstrates discretion in managing difficult decisions and
handling sensitive information, and can maintain a wide network of healthy
successful relationships.
-
Candidate must already understand or quickly grasp free culture values
and the implications for building an open and transparent culture.
-
Candidate has experience resolving challenging employee situations, in
compliance with laws, regulations and Wikimedia policies:
-
Strong training and experience in conflict resolution, including
fact-finding and resolution of internal disputes consistent with legal
requirements and Wikimedia policies.
-
Strong, practical understanding of labor law rights and
responsibilities.
-
Candidate has a Bachelor’s degree. A Master’s degree or equivalent
experience preferred.
-
Candidate demonstrates knowledge and understanding of cultures beyond
the United States, and the ability to work with an international,
multicultural focus.
-
Candidate ideally has experience in the nonprofit sector.
Amy Elder
Director of Recruiting
Wikimedia Foundation
(415) 999-8140
Join Us: WorkWithUs <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Work_with_us>
Connect with me on LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/amyelder>
Follow us on Twitter @wikimediaatwork
*Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. **That's our commitment and you can help continue to
make it a reality: *https://donate.wikimedia.org/ and https://
wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Ways_to_Give