Press releases/Advisory Board

ST. PETERSBURG, FL – The Wikimedia Foundation announces the creation of an Advisory Board to the Board of Trustees. Comprised of individuals well known in their respective fields, the new Advisory Board will provide Wikipedia's governing body with their expertise and consultation in several areas, including strategic long term planning. Angela Beesley, former Wikimedia Foundation Board member and co-founder of Wikia, will act as Chair.

"We are extremely fortunate to have such amazing and talented individuals join the Wikimedia team. We look forward to working with the Advisory Board, and taking advantage of their skills and knowledge, " stated Florence Devouard, Wikimedia Foundation chair.

The new Advisory Board members include:


 * Angela Beesley, Co-Founder of Wikia and former member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation


 * Ward Cunningham, Director of Committer Community Development of the Eclipse Foundation, and Co-Founder of Cunningham & Cunningham.


 * Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons and public lead of Creative Commons South Africa.


 * Melissa Hagemann, Manager of Open Access Initiative, Information Program of the Open Society Institute (OSI)/Soros foundations.


 * Danny Hillis, Co-Founder of Thinking Machines Corp., Co-Founder and Co-Chair of Applied Minds, Inc, and Co-Founder of the Long Now Foundation.


 * Mitch Kapor, Co-Founder of Lotus Development Corp., Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mitchell Kapor Foundation, and Open Source Applications Foundation. He is currently an adjunct professor at the University of California at Berkeley.


 * Joris Komen, Executive Director of SchoolNet Namibia, and former bird curator at the National Museum of Nambia. Komen has played an intrinsic part in promoting the computerization of African museum collections.


 * Rebecca MacKinnon, Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre and co-founder of Global Voices. MacKinnon is also the former Bureau Chief of CNN Beijing and CNN Tokyo.


 * Wayne Mackintosh, Education specialist, eLearning and ICT Policy at the Commonwealth of Learning (COL), Vancouver


 * Benjamin Mako Hill, Debian hacker and author of the Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible and The Official Ubuntu Book. Currently, Hill works in the Computing Culture group of the MIT Media Lab.


 * Erin McKean, Chief Consulting Editor, American Dictionaries, for Oxford University Press, and Editor of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly.


 * Trevor Neilson, Partner in the Endeavor Group, and former Director of Special Projects at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.


 * Achal Prabhala, Researcher and writer based in Bangalore, India, who works on intellectual property rights.


 * Jay Rosen, Associate Professor and former Chair of New York University's Department of Journalism. Founder of NewAssignment.Net and author of PressThink.


 * Clay Shirky, faculty at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and former Chair of the Library of Congress’s Digital Preservation Working Group.


 * Peter Suber, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Senior Researcher at SPARC, and principal drafter of the Budapest Open Access Initiative.


 * Raoul Weiler, Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and Chair and Co-founder of the Brussels-EU Chapter of the Club of Rome.


 * Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices, and research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

To view complete bios, please visit http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Advisory_Board.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a US-registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity. It runs the websites for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.