Former Board of Trustees members

This page lists former Board of Trustees members.

Angela Beesley
Involved with Wikimedia projects since February 2003, Angela Beesley was one of the first members of Wikimedia's Board of Trustees, and currently serves on our Advisory Board. A co-founder and Vice President of Community for wiki hosting service "Wikia", she is one of the authors of the book Wikis: Tools for information Work and Collaboration (2006). Prior to her involvement with Wikipedia, Angela was an educational researcher and developer of student assessments. Angela was born in England and has lived in Germany and Australia.
 * Angela was on the Board of Trustees until she resigned from the post; her successor was elected 26 September 2006.
 * More about Angela: Biography on Wikipedia, Userpage

Michael Davis
Michael Davis is a graduate of Williams College and the University of Chicago. Before joining Wikimedia, Michael was the CEO of Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago. Michael currently resides in St. Petersburg, Florida, as the Chief Operating Officer of community-focused wiki hosting service Wikia, Inc.

Erik Möller
Erik is the Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, a position he assumed in January 2008, stepping down from the Board of Trustees. Erik Möller has been an active editor of Wikipedia since 2001 and has also contributed to the underlying software, MediaWiki. Möller developed the proposal for Wikinews, a Wikimedia project, and organized the vote that implemented it. Before joining Wikimedia as an employee, Erik was a freelance journalist and author (Die heimliche Medienrevolution: Wie Weblogs, Wikis und freie Software die Welt verändern), as well as a manager of wiki-related software development projects. He holds a degree in computer science. Beyond Wikimedia, he seeks to promote Free Content, Free Software, and balanced intellectual monopoly rights legislation. Until taking the position at the Wikimedia Foundation, Möller lived in Berlin.
 * More about Erik: Userpage

Tim Shell
Tim Shell is an Internet entrepreneur with an interest in self-organization, and decentralized order, as exemplified by Wikipedia. In 1996 he was pursuing his degree in computer science when he decided to chuck it and go into business, joining up with Jimmy Wales to start Bomis. Tim has lived in Chicago, Florida, and San Diego, and currently resides in Las Vegas. On December 15, 2006, Shell stepped down from the board.
 * More about Tim: Userpage

Oscar van Dillen
Oscar is an editor and bureaucrat for the Dutch-language Wikipedia and other Dutch Wikimedia projects. He also holds the role of steward since May 2005, helping and advising many projects in many languages. Van Dillen is a member of the Special Projects committee, which helps the Foundation pursue grants, oversee expansion efforts, and encourage partnerships between the Foundation and other organizations. Professionally, Van Dillen is a musician and composer, teaching World music composition as well as music theory in the jazz, pop and world music department at the Conservatory of Rotterdam.
 * More about Oscar: Userpage

Florence Nibart-Devouard
Florence was the Chair of the Wikimedia Board from October 2006 until July of 2008. She served as one of the elected representatives to the Board starting June 2004. Florence was born in Versailles (France). She grew up in Grenoble, and has been living since then in several French cities, as well as Antwerpen in Belgium and Tempe in Arizona. She holds two masters, one in Agricultural Sciences (a 5-year degree in agronomical engineering (Diplome d'Ingénieur Grande Ecole) from ENSAIA and the other a postgraduate degree (DEA) in Genetics and Biotechnologies from INPL.She has been working in public research, first in flower plant genetic improvement, and second in microbiology to study the feasibility of polluted soil bioremediation. She was employed until 2005 in a French company, to conceive decision-making tools in sustainable agriculture. She is now a consultant in Internet Communication Strategy. She joined the Wikipedia adventure in February 2002 and is known as a contributor under the pseudonym Anthere. Florence is 39, and lives in Clermont Ferrand with her husband Bertrand and her three children, Anne-Gaëlle aged nine, William eleven and Thomas two.
 * More about Florence: Biography on Wikipedia, Userpage

Frieda Brioschi
Frieda (born in 1976, Italian) joined the Wikimedia Board in July 2007. She has been involved in Wikipedia and other WMF projects since May 2003. In June 2005 she helped found Wikimedia Italia, a local chapter organization associated with Wikimedia, and was president of that organization until September 2007. She currently lives in Milan where she works as a programmer. She resigned from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees in September 2008 after being re-elected again as board member and president of Wikimedia Italia.
 * More about Frieda: Userpage

Domas Mituzas
Domas joined the Wikimedia Board in February 2008. He has been involved with Wikipedia technology since 2004, and has worked on site performance and operations since then. He also works for MySQL AB (recently acquired by Sun Microsystems) services division. Before that he built network services in Lithuania and other Baltic States. He was born and lives in Vilnius, Lithuania.
 * More about Domas: Userpage

Michael Snow
Michael was Chair of the Wikimedia Board from July 2008 until July 2010. He joined the Board in February 2008, after participating in Wikimedia projects since 2003. One of his contributions was the creation of The Wikipedia Signpost, a community newspaper for the English-language Wikipedia. Born in Pfullendorf, Germany, he now lives in the Seattle area. Michael is an attorney and earned his J.D. degree from the University of Washington.
 * More abut Michael: Userpage

Arne Klempert
Arne Klempert was born in 1972 and studied social sciences at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. He has 15 years of professional experience in traditional and digital communications. He's now working as Director Digital for Fleishman-Hillard Germany.

Arne joined Wikipedia in 2003 as an editing community member. A few months later he became press spokesman of the German Wikipedia (2004-2008). Arne was co-founder and Vice President of Wikimedia Deutschland (2004-2006), co-organizer of the first Wikimania (2005), and the first employee of a Wikimedia chapter - as Wikimedia Deutschland's Executive Director from 2006 to 2008. Following the appointment by the Wikimedia Chapters he joined the Board of Trustees in May 2009 and was reappointed in July 2010.

Phoebe Ayers
Phoebe Ayers joined the board in July 2010 and served as Executive Secretary from August 2011 to July 2012. She is a reference, instruction and collections librarian at the University of California, Davis, specializing in computer science and engineering information resources. Her interests include open access and access to scientific knowledge, the effective use of collaborative tools (such as wikis) within communities, and how trustworthy information and knowledge is created and used both on- and off-line. She has a BA in English literature and history and a MLIS from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Phoebe has been a Wikimedian since 2003, when she made her first edits on the English Wikipedia. Starting in 2006 she has been heavily involved in the planning of the annual international Wikimania conference, assisting with organization and facilitating the jury that chooses the conference location. She was also a member of the Special Projects Committee in 2006, has been a contributing writer for the English Wikipedia newsletter "The Signpost", has organized local meetups and events, and has given many talks about Wikipedia for library groups and others. She has also been involved in the wiki research community, chairing WikiSym 2010.

In 2008, she co-authored a book about the English-language Wikipedia titled "How Wikipedia Works: and How You Can be a Part of It" (No Starch Press). The book covers using, understanding, and contributing to Wikipedia; it is freely licensed and is only the second book in English to be published about the site.

Matt Halprin
Matt Halprin is a native of Menlo Park, California in the United States. He has lived in Evanston, Illinois, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Tokyo, Japan. He is married and the father of four children. Halprin graduated with High Distinction as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School and holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.

He has more than 25 years of business experience and has served on an array of boards of directors, both non-profit and for-profit. He currently serves on the board of Management Leadership for Tomorrow (which supports the next generation of minority leaders in the United States) and on the Advisory Board of Stanford's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (iRiSS).

Professionally, Halprin was a Partner and Vice President at the Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with technology clients on issues of strategy and corporate development. Subsequently, he spent six years as Vice President, Global Trust and Safety at eBay, where he led a team of 90 statisticians, policy managers, and product managers. Halprin was also Partner at Omidyar Network, the founder of eBay's philanthropic investment firm. There he led the firm's investments in technology platform organizations in Social Media, Marketplaces, and Government Transparency. After Omidyar Network, Halprin returned to an operating role leading Strategy, Corporate Development and Analytics at Ning, which was sold to Glam Media in late 2011. Currently, he leads Business Operations and Analytics at Yelp (NYSE).

Halprin was appointed to the WMF Board in August 2009 and was re-appointed twice.

Halprin worked on the board to promote effective Board Governance and served of Chair of the Board Governance Committee for more than two years. In this capacity, he helped introduce a Trustee peer evaluation process, effective Board Committee processes and transparency in board voting. In addition, he attempted to champion a more independent board and greater user choice via an opt-in image filter to help parents and educators. His term expired in December 2012.

Ting Chen
Ting Chen was born in Shanghai, China in 1968. He grew up in Harbin, in the northeast corner of the country, where he attended elementary school and middle school. In 1989 he went to Braunschweig, Germany and began his study of Electrical engineering. He was especially interested in semiconductors and their physics. He graduated in 1993 with a diploma and now he works as an IT specialist in Mainz, Germany. He can speak Chinese, German, English, French (un peu), and he reads Japanese.

His first experience with a virtual community was during his university time in the German Fido-Net, where he moderated a forum about science and knowledge for many years. He learned of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects through a 2003 news article about a German Wikipedia milestone. From then on Wikipedia became a new hobby. He started on the German Wikipedia and changed soon to Chinese Wikipedia, which was at that time still a young project.

Chen attended the first Wikimania (Wikimania 2005) in Frankfurt, where he took part on a panel discussion and introduced the Chinese community. He also helped organize the third Wikimania (Wikimania 2007) in Taipei. After Wikimania 2007, he and his peers decided to put a Chinese community member up for election to one of the vacant community selected board seats.

Chen was elected as Trustee by the Wikimedia Community on June 26, 2008, with his term officially starting in July 2008. He was re-elected in 2009 and again in 2011, and he was named as Chair of the Wikimedia Board in July 2010. He has served on the Audit Committee since 2010, as well as Board Governance Committee, both as part of his ex oficio duties.

While on the Board, Chen focused his time on the growth of the Wikimedia movement. He is proud that the Wikimedia Foundation and chapters have become so successful in fundraising and that the Foundation has succeeded in meeting its obligations under several financial audits. He also considers the 2012 Recognizing Models of Affiliation resolution to be an important step in embracing the growth and diversity of the Wikimedia movement. Finally, he advocates for openness throughout the community and he is pleased the Board adopted its 2011 Openness resolution.

Chen believes his multicultural and multinational life experience give him a unique perspective within the Wikimedia community. He traveled extensively to visit local and regional Wikimedia communities, where he hoped he made them feel important to the movement and well-represented on the Board.

Chen has user accounts on numerous Wikipedias, including Chinese (95000 edits), German (2600 edits), English (330 edits), French (130 edits) and Dutch (110 edits). He is a bureaucrat on, and serves as an ambassador for, Chinese Wikipedia, and he also contributes to Wikimedia Commons and Meta-Wiki. His first edit was on German Wikipedia on January 21, 2003.

Kat Walsh
Kat Walsh is an attorney and Wikimedian in the San Francisco area. Her areas of focus include free content licensing, software freedom, access to knowledge, and freedom of speech. She is currently Legal Counsel at [//creativecommons.org/ Creative Commons] and was previously a technology policy analyst at the American Library Association. She is an alumna of George Mason University School of Law and of Stetson University, and is currently a member of the Virginia State Bar and the US Patent Bar.

Walsh has presented at numerous conferences on topics including privacy, copyright, volunteerism, and online collaboration. She has participated in all but the first Wikimania, and at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, the Library of Congress, a few universities and government agencies, and the Creative Commons summit. She is also an accomplished bassoonist and violist, performing regularly in orchestras and chamber ensembles.

Walsh first became involved with the Wikimedia Foundation by volunteering on the e-mail response team, where she helped resolve some of the legal issues the Wikimedia Foundation faced. Her efforts here sparked her interest in copyright and Internet policy and led to her interest in Internet law.

Walsh was appointed to a partial term on the Board of Trustees in December of 2006 when the board expanded to seven members. She was then chosen as a community-elected Trustee in June 2007, re-elected in August 2009, and again in 2011. She served on the HR committee, and was the Executive Secretary from 2008 to 2009. In 2012, Walsh was elected Chair of the Board.

While on the board, Walsh focused her attention on strengthening the licensing policy and the updated terms of use. She was also instrumental in guiding Wikimedia Foundation messaging during the SOPA/PIPA discussions and she co-authored an important op-ed with Jimmy Wales in the Washington Post.

Walsh contributes primarily on English Wikipedia, where she has over 11,000 edits, over 70 article creations, and where she serves as a site administrator. Her current term on the board continued until 2013.