[Foundation-l] Board report Sept-Oct

Wed Nov 16 00:40:03 UTC 2011

Hi all,
The Sept-Oct activity report for the Board of Trustees is published on
Meta here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_Reports/September-October,_2011

This is an informal report that we started doing a few months ago to
try and communicate more about what the board and individual trustees
are doing. You can find past reports (July-August and May-June) at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_Reports.

Text of the report follows. Feedback is welcome! -- phoebe
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Board of Trustees -- activity report September-October 2011

* Resolutions and votes

New chapters: The Board approved three new chapters in
September-October: Wikimedia District of Columbia, Wikimedia
Bangladesh, and Wikimedia Venezuela. Congratulations to all!

Update to the donor policy: The donor privacy policy, an updated
version of which was approved in July by the Board, had some small
amendments which the Board approved; the latest version of the policy
can be found at donor policy.

* Other Board work

Meetings: The Board met for its regularly scheduled meeting on October
7-8, in San Francisco (agenda).
    The next IRC meeting is scheduled for November 6, and the next
regular quarterly meeting is scheduled for 3-4 February 2011 in San
Francisco. Agendas will be posted here.

Audit Committee: The Audit Committee met in late September to review
the preliminary results of KPMG's independent audit of the 2010-2011
fiscal year. Other agenda items included an update on the 2011
fundraiser. Stu and also Renata from the Audit Committee spent time
with new Chief of Finance and Admin Garfield Byrd, helping orient him
to the foundation and broad movement.

Future of fundraising process: The Board, led by Jan-Bart, kicked off
a process to develop a fundraising model for 2012 and beyond. The
first step is developing criteria against which fundraising and funds
dissemination models will be judged; the Board will then ask Sue and
the staff, with community input, to develop potential models and judge
them against the criteria. The process is laid out here, with links to
the pages for criteria, which everyone is encouraged to edit and
discuss.

* Trustee outreach and other activities

- Kat attended the Creative Commons Global Summit in Warsaw, Poland.

- Phoebe attended WikiSym 2011, an academic conference about wikis and
open collaborative software that was held this year in Mountain View,
California. There were many papers about Wikipedia research presented;
some of them are summarized here. Phoebe also presented a workshop at
WikiSym, with Reid Priedhorsky, about collecting the literature about
wikis and Wikipedia; see the workshop page for details.

- Ting attended WikiConvention 2011 in Nürnberg, Germany from Sep. 9th
to 11th, a community gathering of German Wikimedians. On Sep. 23rd he
made a speech on the OpenWorldForum in Paris about the Biography of
Living People Policy on Wikimedia projects.

- Stu continued to help develop Reports and started a new
movement-wide transparency page, Financial reports.

- Sam attended the launch of the Digital Public Library of America in
Washington, DC on October 21-22, as part of their Audience and
Participation workstream. He spoke in their plenary session about the
need to improve digital citations and the m:Wikicite project proposal.

- Bishakha was neckdeep in supporting the community team behind
WikiConference India 2011 which will take place from 18 to 20 November
2011.

- Jimmy spoke around the world in September: in Cambridge (YouGov),
Lima, Peru (conference of former South American Presidents),
Indianapolis, Indiana (marketing conference), London (ICT4D
conference), and Austin, Texas (school board members conference).
Additionally, he attended the unveiling of the new Human Rights Logo
in New York (where he was one of the judges). October took him to
London, Istanbul, San Francisco, Frankfurt, Bologna, New York, and
Amsterdam.