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''By [[user:Anthere]] - september 2004''


==General report==
<center><font face="Palatino,Verdana,Arial" size=4>Letter from the Board</font></center>
<center><small>''cf. the original [[Translation requests/NL-1/Fr:#3|French version]]''</small></center>


<center><font face="Palatino,Verdana,Arial" size=4>'''Letter from the Board'''</font></center>
[[Image:New-sunf-patch.jpg|left|150px]]


[[Image:Wikimania conference1.jpg|left|300px|Jimbo, Angela, Anthere, Tim...]]
<br/>
<font size=6 color="#2A7E54">T</font>his newsletter arose out of a desire to share our activities and opinions with a broader audience; it is addressed to the tens of thousands of contributors to the Wikimedia projects, and to the many others who support our activities.


''to be written''
The Wikimedia Foundation was created as a result of the evolution of [[w:|Wikipedia]], [[wikt:|Wiktionary]], [[b:|Wikibooks]], [[q:|Wikiquote]] and [[Wikisource:|Wikisource]]. The exponential growth of these projects has required the creation of new structures and new modes of functioning. These structures include the legal capacity to receive donations; the creation of systems for compensation, for requesting grants, for managing domain names and server clusters, and for publishing content via print, CD and DVD; and the coordination of new communication channels between the different projects.


</div>
Despite this evolution, the contributors continue to be the vital force and the greatest resource of the Wikimedia projects, and these new structures will continue to be decided on democratically. The Wikimedia Board has the role of organizing related debates and making decisions to ensure the best possible conditions for the development, maintenance, and wide distribution of our free content. We are governed by a desire to protect Wikimedia's founding spirit, based on openness (everybody can edit), trust (no need to have special qualifications), collaboration (via a wiki), respect for others (in attending to the contributions of others), and a gift culture (based on volunteering).


Over the past three months, we have built a solid base for Wikimedia's future. We have laid the groundwork for a membership system, made numerous contacts with people and organizations that will aid our projects over the coming year, and begun applying for grants and organizing regular fundraisers in order to ensure Wikimedia a stable financial future. Official positions have been given to Daniel Mayer and Tim Starling, to ensure transparent publishing of Wikimedia's finances and to increase communication with our developers, respectively.


===Overview===
In coordination with the German and French chapters, we have made contacts with publishers
<!--
to distribute Wikipedia's content on CD and DVD, and started preparing snapshots of Wikipedia for such offline distribution. Meanwhile, a worldwide press release was distributed in celebration of our reaching the milestone of one million articles. We are establishing increased contacts with the press, and aim to further increase our projects' visibility with the help of a multilingual PR committee.
<small>''By [[user:Anthere|Anthere]]''</small>


[[Image:Fljhfdshrukeurrewfd.jpg|150px|left|Credit cards]]
Finally, we are setting up a new official website dedicated to the Foundation. This will provide information to the public about our Foundation and its mission, our many projects and initiatives, and plans for the future. The website will also detail our financial situation (as the current site does), and offer online membership registration. Watch wikimediafoundation.org for updates over the coming months.


To start with, here is a brief summary of our financial state at the end of 2004:
If you have questions or comments, we would love to hear from you. You can reach us on our talk pages (see [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board#Contact_us]), or by email to: <tt>board</tt>&nbsp;(at)&nbsp;<tt>wikimedia.org</tt>.


In 2004, our global revenues were US$150,000, while expenses reached about US$123,000 dollars. The [http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Bank_history/2004 full bank history] for 2004 is available on the Foundation Website. The most striking financial trend for 2004 was the amazing growth of our needs. In just one year, our server farm grew from 3 servers to 50! Naturally, this meant increasing costs throughout the year, to purchase new equipment and to support bandwidth requirements.


A [http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget/2005 budget meeting] was held in early 2005, to estimate our growing needs. Following this estimate, a successful fundraising drive was held in February, yielding over US$90,000 dollars.<br>
<center><font face="Palatino,Verdana,Arial" size=4>Overview</font></center>
To date, most of our income has come from individual donations, ranging from US$5.00 to US$20.00 dollars. These donations have come from editors and readers who appreciate what we are doing. The success of our fundraising suggests that our growth can still essentially be supported by individual donations.


Other revenues included grants and sponsorship. Our most recent grant was from the '''[http://rlounsbery.org/default.asp Lounsbery Foundation]'''. An important issue with regard to grants and donations is that the Wikimedia Foundation has finally been classified as a public charity, and granted tax exempt status by the IRS. This will certainly offer new incentives to potential grantors. During the first months of 2005, an IRC meeting was held on grant issues, and we considered looking for a Grants Manager for the Foundation. Later in the quarter, Wikimania, the first international meeting organised by and for wikipedians (taking place in August), was granted its first sponsorship, from '''Gurunet.'''


With our existing funds, we purchased some [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware technical equipment] in [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_ordered_January_2005 January]. Numerous hosting proposals this quarter allowed us to purchase less hardware than expected. The donor of the first set of French [[w:squid (server)|squids]] donated three more, soon to be hosted by '''Lost Oasis''' for free; other propositions are currently being studied (see [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_partners_and_hosts Wikimedia partners and hosts]). In particular, discussions are ongoing with Google, but no agreement has been reached. The general trend is to multiply our partners, insuring independence; while making agreements that are technically relevant.
'''Where can I find information about the Foundation?'''<br/>


A new expense is ''salary''. Since early 2005, the Foundation has been employing two part-time developers, '''Chad Perrin''' and '''Brion Vibber'''. The board has also decided to hire a person full time to do secretary work, such as physical paper work, sending out packages, purchase of tech parts, phone calls. The position will be local to Florida. Discussions are ongoing about hiring other people but no decision has been taken at that point.
Current information about the Foundation can be found in this newsletter, on the dedicated mailing list [http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l], on the Wikimedia Meta-wiki [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page], and at the Foundation's website [http://wikimedia.org/wiki/Home] (in progress).<br/>


The [[Privacy policy]] on all Wikimedia projects was approved at the last Board meeting. It will be translated in all languages and made visible to users and visitors over the next few weeks.
'''How many people make up the Board of Wikimedia?'''<br/>


Finally, the legal organisation of the Foundation has been strengthened in the past few weeks, with the creation of a [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal page] to coordinate discussions of legal issues.
There are five members, including Jimmy Wales, the founder and chair of Wikimedia. Angela Beesley, secretary, and Florence Devouard, vice chair, are the two elected representatives. Michael Davis is the Board's treasurer and works on Wikimedia's financial matters (see ''Finance''). The fifth member is Tim Shell, who participates actively in the English Wikipedia, and is often found on the #wikimedia IRC channel.<br/>


-->
'''What are the official positions and committees?'''<br/>


'''Board meetings'''
Daniel Mayer is the Chief Financial Officer. He is responsible for finances, with the oversight of Michael Davis. In particular, he is in charge of establishing our budget [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_budget] and balancing our books [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_bank_account_history_for_2004].


A complete list of notes from Board meetings may be seen at [[meetings]].
Tim Starling is the Developer Liaison, the primary contact between our Board and our community of developers. Developer activity falls into two main areas: server maintenance and development of the MediaWiki software, which is also used for many non-Wikimedia applications.


;Latest meetings:
Tim Starling is setting up a Developer Committee [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_committee]. This committee will be made up of the most active developers and, among other things, will help formalize a method for reaching development decisions, such as the direction of future development, the definition of necessary purchases, and the processing of technical requests.
{{Latest meetings}}


*[[Budget/2005|Budget meeting]]
There are no other official committees, but there are important groups that are much like committees, which form naturally, particularly relating to grants and public relations. For example, Danny Wool has been coordinating a number of grant applications. For other potential committees, see [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_committees].<br/>
*See also this recent list of [[:m:Board_agenda/Open_questions|open questions to the board]].


===Collaboration===
'''How does the Board communicate among its members?'''<br/>


====Summary on collaboration====
Board activities are recorded on the Wikimedia Meta-wiki [http://meta.wikimedia.org], and will in the future be on the Wikimedia Foundation's site [http://wikimediafoundation.org]. Communication takes place via email, as well as, through the foundation-l mailing list, which is open to the public and publicly archived. Members of the board also frequent the #Wikimedia IRC channel on freenode [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC], where they can be reached for a quick response. While three Board members -- the quorum required for a proper Board meeting -- are frequently present on IRC at the same time, such times are not generally official meetings.
We worked out a number of collaborations with other organisations in the past six months, and are discussing many more.


<!--
There have been a few active meetings of board members over the summer. On July 4, 2004, Jimmy, Angela and Anthère met in Paris (summary: [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_meetings/4_July_2004]).
*''Kennisnet''
*''Yahoo''
*''DirectMedia''
*''Mandriva''
-->


We are in discussions with two organisations about the possibility of offering '''on-demand book printing''' from Wikipedia. One of these organisations printed a Wikireader on Frankfurt during Wikimania for a test. Our current concern is that by doing so, we are potentially stepping beyond the protections of the DMCA and running an unacceptably high level of copyright risk. So, we are currently moving at slow speed on the matter.
Later that month, there was a meeting to discuss the creation of an official foundation website at www.wikimediafoundation.org; many took part in the discussion, including Angela, Anthère, Mav and Tim Starling (summary and results: [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Foundation_website_meeting%2C_July_2004]).


<center>[[Image:Uf008502.gif]]</center><br>
There was also a quick ad-hoc meeting on September 5 about the creation of a database for a tentative Wikispecies project, to let its enthusiasts discuss what they want it to become. All but one of the board members convened for around 20 minutes to discuss this (summary: [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Board_meetings/5_September_2004]).<br/>
<center>''A fabulous strip from JD Frazer [http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20051102]''</center>


Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation will form a new partnership beginning of year 2006. 1-Click Answers, Wikipedia Edition'' software will be linked from the [[w:en:Wikipedia:Tools|English Wikipedia Tools]] page. Please see the [http://www.answers.com/main/ir/press10202005.jsp press release] by Answers.com and [[w:en:Wikipedia talk:Tools/1-Click Answers|discussion]] for more information. The announcement raised some very critical comments, from editors and in the press (see [http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/trouble_in_wiki.php]]. Explanation in French : [//lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediafr-l/2005-October/001046.html].<br>
'''Do Jimbo, Tim and Michael dominate Board decisions?'''<br/>
We also previously reached an agreement in last spring to provide a live feed of our public data to '''Answers.com''', live feed which is still currently under work for full operability (Brion Vibber is currently working with them to make this happen).


<!--
[[Image:Facetie.jpg|200px|left|Important Board discussion in Paris]]
Kennisnet is collaborating with Wikimedia in many ways; both by sponsoring software research and development, and by offering local hosting and the use of their servers. (For more information on Kennisnet collaborations, see ''Kennisnet'', pg 7.)
To date, Tim and Michael have played a minimal part in board discussion and decisions, and there is no plan to change this. In order to ensure that the community voice is real, Jimbo has pledged, as a matter of convention, never to vote against Angela and Anthere, unless he feels that it is an issue of an absolutely fundamental change of direction for the project -- which is not likely to happen, since Angela, Anthere and Jimbo share the essential values of the community and the project. So as a practical matter, power is in the hands of the two democratically elected board members on most issues, and Jimbo defers to that.<br/>


Another dozen hosting offers, both large and small, are under discussion. Some are tentative, some want "co-marketing opportunities," etc. Right now, we are telling most of them that we are interested but that we will not be technically ready for a few months; so we should talk now to plan ahead but are unlikely to announce anything soon. We must first organise the deals recently concluded, and take time to think and organise, rather than proceeding in haste.
'''How many board decisions are made by vote?'''<br/>


-->
We prefer to discuss things, find proposals that we can all agree on, make compromises to accommodate each other, where necessary, and reach agreement. All informal votes taken, so far, have been unanimous.<br/>


<!--
'''Does the Board record or publish their activities anywhere?'''<br/>
====Top rank sales for Directmedia DVD of German Wikipedia====


[[Image:Wikipedia 2005 Label DVD small.PNG|left|110px|German DVD cover]]
Most of the time, we discuss things on #Wikimedia IRC channel on freenode. On this channel, everyone is free to not only follow board deliberation, but also to participate to the discussions and help us to make decisions. Logs of planned IRC meetings, such as the one regarding the Foundation website, are published on Meta and the Foundation wiki, along with summaries of other meetings. However we also meet on private channels and exchange private mails, as well. It's important for us to be able to speak freely, to think out loud, so to speak, without people taking our speculative comments and thoughts as being new policy or set-in-stone decisions. We hope that our activities are sufficiently visible through this newsletter, board meeting minutes, official announcements on the mailing lists and the Wikimedia website.<br/>


After the succesful distribution of the [[w:de:|German Wikipedia]] on CD, the German publishing company [[w:Directmedia|Directmedia]] has released a DVD edition. The DVD is based on a snapshot of the wiki from March 3, which was quickly reviewed to remove potential copyright violations, vandalism and templates which are only useful in the online version of Wikipedia. Structured bibliographic information about key people, a new feature added for the CD distribution, was also added for more people.
'''How can I become a member of the Foundation?'''<br/>


The DVD contains 203,000 articles and thousands of images. It includes software for browsing the content with a fast full text search and features for annotations, bookmarks and so on. The DVD is shipped with software for running on Windows, MacOS and Linux; although the latter is still new and under heavy development.
Anyone who is interested in supporting the activities of the Foundation and has contributed under a user name to any Wikimedia project is a Volunteer Active Member of the Foundation. Starting this year, it will also be possible to become a Contributing Active Member by paying membership dues.


The DVD was the best-selling software product at [http://amazon.de Amazon Germany] the day after it was announced. Two days later, the 10,000 copies made for the release had sold out and a new set were ordered from the factory. These will be delivered within the next few weeks.
Discussions in July regarding membership dues led to the following proposal:
:Becoming a Contributing Active Member will cost 60 USD (or the equivalent), and does not require being an editor of a Wikimedia project. Volunteer Active Members may become Contributing Active Members for 6 USD, but are encouraged to pay the normal fee if they can. Members can choose how they wish a portion of their fee to be used (for instance, "''30 dollars should be used only for hardware purchases''").


The DVD also contains data packages for [[w:Tomeraider|Tomeraider]] and [[w:Mobipocket|Mobipocket]], allowing it to be installed on PDAs, as well as a "bonus CD-ROM." This CD is a bootable LAMPPIX-CD containing an Apache server, a MySQL database and Mediawiki. This runs a Mediawiki installation directly from the CD-ROM, which you can boot from in order to have access to over 200,000 articles from your web browser.
There will be no obligation to pay dues; adding to and benefiting from projects will always be free. Contributing money is nothing more than an additional way of helping the project. The full membership proposal may be found on Meta at [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership_fees]; other questions about membership are answered in the [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership_FAQ Membership FAQ]. See also [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership].<br/>


The DVD's ISBN is 3-89853-020-5; it can be ordered for 9.90 Euros from every book shop in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. For each DVD sold, one euro is donated to Wikimedia Deutschland. Both the DVD and the CD-ROM are available for free as ISO images, via P2P networks and on several FTP servers, encouraging sharing and broader distribution.
'''Is Wikipedia planning to have ads?'''<br/>
-->


===Public Relations===
Wikimedia does not plan to allow advertising on Wikipedia or any of its sister projects in the foreseeable future. We believe that suitable grants and donations from the public will provide for a secure future, without the need for advertisements. There are others ways, as well, to gather money, such a grants, prizes, gifts from our mirrors, donations of hardware etc... Running ads would likely raise money, but it would possibly lower other sources of revenues, in particular, donations, as well as, possibly upset some editors.<br/>


<!--
'''I hear developers are being paid now. Is it true?'''<br/>
An increasing part of the Board's activity is related to public relations. Jimmy Wales is travelling or offline more frequently, due to invitations to talks all over the world. A quick view of his [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User%3AJimbo_Wales schedule]
is probably the best summary of this. Other presentations have taken Angela and Anthere offline for days at a time (most recently at [[m:PixelAche|PixelAche]] for Anthere and [http://www.decadeofwebdesign.org/ A Decade of Web Design] for Angela).
For more on these conferences, interviews and press reports, see Press (pg. 6) and International (pg. 7).


Effort has recently been put into improving the public collection of presentation materials. Anthere crafted a leaflet in French with [[m:User:Notafish|Notafish]] for the [[m:TIC21|TIC21]] meeting in January 2005. Elian later released a collection of leaflets to be translated for the Fosdem meeting.
In July 2004, the Wikimedia developers were polled about the feasibility of a bounty system for development tasks. The motivation for this was to improve the guidance of development in certain directions (for instance, by offering payment for developing certain software features). The results of the poll can be found at [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_payment_poll/results].


[[Image:Jimmywales.jpg|thumb|right|150px|Jimmy Wales and Howard Rheingold [http://www.rheingold.com/howard/] at Stanford University [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales_lecture_at_Stanford_University_on_2_9_2005].<br><small>Screenshot of a video[http://cooperation.smartmobs.com/cs/node/248] by [[:en:User:Alterego|Alterego]].</small>]]
Working closely with the Developer Committee, we will be trying out a system of payment and other rewards for developers who choose to work on particular tasks. This will be a four-month trial run, after which we will step back and evaluate whether it was successful.


The full collection of current material may be found in three collections, for [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Presentations presentations], [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Promotion promotion], and [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Leaflet leaflets]. Most of this information may now be found in English, German, French and Dutch. Please add to these in other languages.
The proposed system allows for anyone to request new features, and for any developer to propose their own terms for filling a feature request. The developer committee will advise the Board about the feasibility and usefulness of requests and offers, and the Board will make the final decisions to accept or refuse offers for requested work.


-->
Details of the trial run are available at [http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Developer_payment]. All Wikimedia contributors will be encouraged to evaluate it when it is over.


===Organisation===


''To be written''


==The road ahead==
==The road ahead==
<!--
==The Board==
The Wikimedia [[Board of Trustees]] manages the nonprofit and supervise the disposition and solicitation of nonprofit donations. The Board of Trustees are the ultimate corporate authority in the Wikimedia Foundation Inc., and has the power to direct the activities of the foundation. The Board consists of five directors.


''WSIS''
A complete list of notes from Board meetings may be seen at [[meetings]].


==Archives==
;Latest meetings:
*[[/April 2005]]
{{Latest meetings}}
*[[/January 2005]]
*[[/September 2004]]


[[Category:English|{{PAGENAME}}]]
-->

==Archives==
*[[/2005]]
*[[/2004]]

Revision as of 15:46, 25 March 2013


General report

Letter from the Board
Jimbo, Angela, Anthere, Tim...
Jimbo, Angela, Anthere, Tim...

to be written


Overview

Board meetings

A complete list of notes from Board meetings may be seen at meetings.

Latest meetings

Template:Latest meetings

Collaboration

Summary on collaboration

We worked out a number of collaborations with other organisations in the past six months, and are discussing many more.


We are in discussions with two organisations about the possibility of offering on-demand book printing from Wikipedia. One of these organisations printed a Wikireader on Frankfurt during Wikimania for a test. Our current concern is that by doing so, we are potentially stepping beyond the protections of the DMCA and running an unacceptably high level of copyright risk. So, we are currently moving at slow speed on the matter.


A fabulous strip from JD Frazer [1]

Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation will form a new partnership beginning of year 2006. 1-Click Answers, Wikipedia Edition software will be linked from the English Wikipedia Tools page. Please see the press release by Answers.com and discussion for more information. The announcement raised some very critical comments, from editors and in the press (see [2]]. Explanation in French : [3].
 We also previously reached an agreement in last spring to provide a live feed of our public data to Answers.com, live feed which is still currently under work for full operability (Brion Vibber is currently working with them to make this happen).


Public Relations

Organisation

To be written

The road ahead

WSIS

Archives

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