Board of Trustees

The Wikimedia Board of Trustees manages the foundation and supervises the disposition and solicitation of donations. The Board is the ultimate corporate authority for the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (cf. article IV, sec. 1 of the Wikimedia Foundation bylaws) and currently consists of ten Trustees.

History

Main page: History of the Board of Trustees

The Board of Trustees began sometime in 2003 with three members. Over time, it expanded in size to its current ten members. Much of the body's history can be found in Board resolutions and votes.

Roles and structure

As defined in the bylaws, the Board elects officers which have one of four roles:

• Treasurer
• Chair and Vice Chair (both need to be Board members)
• Secretary

As announced in 2008, the Board now consists of ten Trustees:

• Three seats elected directly by the Wikimedia community
• Two seats to be selected by the Wikimedia chapters
• One Board-appointed "community founder" seat (reserved for Jimmy Wales)
• Four Board-appointed "specific expertise" seats

Current members

Kat Walsh

Template:Board member infobox Kat Walsh is an attorney and Wikimedian in the Washington, DC area, with a focus on free content licensing, software freedom, access to knowledge, and freedom of speech. She is currently part of the legal team at 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. She is currently Legal Counsel for Creative Commons.

Walsh has presented at numerous conferences on topics including privacy, copyright, volunteerism, and online collaboration, including all but the first Wikimania, 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 email response team, where she helped resolve some of the legal issues the 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 7 members. She was then chosen as a community-elected Trustee in June 2007, re-elected in August 2009, and most recently in 2011. She currently serves on the HR committee, and was the Executive Secretary from 2008-2009. In 2012, Walsh was elected Chair of the Board.

While on the board, Walsh has focused her attention on strengthening the Licensing Policy and the updated Terms of Use. She was also instrumental in guiding Wikimedia Foundatin messaging during the SOPA/PIPA discussions and she co-authored an important Op-Ed with Jimmy Wales in the Washington Post.

Walsh edits primarily on English Wikipedia, where she has over 11,100 edits and where she is a sysop. She has created 74 articles. Her curent term on the board will continue until 2014.

Tenure Accomplishments

Since Walsh joined the Board in 2006, she and her colleagues have provided leadership and oversight for the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia movement in numerous capacities. In 2006, the Board hired Brad Patrick to be inaugural Executive Director and General Counsel and it created the Communications, Audit, Fundraising, and Chapters committees. The Board also supported the creation of Wiktionary and Wikiversity, the establishment of an Advisory Board, and the approval of Wikimedia chapters from Denmark and the Netherlands. For fiscal year 2006-07, the Foundation's total revenue was $2.7 million. In 2007, the Board hired current Executive Director, Sue Gardner, and moved the Foundation offices from St. Petersburg, Florida, to San Francisco, California. That year the Board became a signatory to the Cape Town Open Education declaration in order to support further development of a movement around open educational resources and developed the iconic Wikimedia Vision and Mission statements. For fiscal year 2007-08, the Foundation's total revenue was $7 million. In 2008, the Board re-structured to expand the number of Board seats to 10 overall and ensure that the majority would always be selected by the community. The Board also approved Wikimedia chapters from Czech Republic, Austria, Australia, Hong Kong, Russia, Indonesia, Hungary and Norway. That year, the Board received its first grant from the Sloan Foundation of $3 million over three years and it adopted the Pluralism, Internationalism and Diversity Policy designed to support the development of a WMF staff with international experience, languages other than English and the ability to work productively with people of diverse backgrounds. For fiscal year 2008-09, the Foundation's total revenue was $7.7 million. In 2009, after significant consultation process with the community and other stakeholders, the Board re-licensed the Wikimedia sites under CC-BY-SA 3.0 in order to achieve greater interoperability and free knowledge worldwide, and it issued a statement on Biographies of Living People (BLP), urging the global Wikimedia community to uphold the accurate information in BLPs. The Board initiated its long-term strategic planning process and added Wikimedia chapters from the UK, New York City, Denmark, Portugal, Ukraine, Macedonia and Finland. That year, the Foundation received a $2 million grant from the Omidyar Network to support key objectives, a $900,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation to improve usability, a $500,000 grant from the Hewitt Foundation, and a $300,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to increase usability on Wikimedia Commons. For fiscal year 2009-10, the Foundation's total revenue was $15.4 million. In 2010, the Board began a process investigating the issue of controversial materials usage in the Wikimedia projects, which resulted in the Board affirming that the Wikimedia projects are not censored, supporting the principles of user choice and least astonishment, urging the Commons community to continue to practice rigorous curation of content, and asking the Executive Director to develop a personal image hiding feature. The Board also endorsed a new fundraising strategy, focusing on fundraising primarily through the annual campaign in order to ensure the continued independence of the Wikimedia movement. The also approved the 5-year targets for the Wikimedia movement as part of the conclusion of its strategy development process and added Wikimedia chapters from the Philippines, India and Estonia.. That year the Board launched the process called Movement Roles, intended to discuss and resolve key Wikimedia issues affecting governance, collaboration and decision making across different parts of the movement. In 2012, the Movement Roles process concluded with the Board recognizing an expanded framework for affiliation of Wikimedia groups and the creation of three new models for affiliation: partner orgs, associations, and affiliates. Also in 2010, Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation donated $2 million to support core operations and Charity Navigator raised the Wikimedia Foudation from 3-Star to 4-Star, the highest possible rating. For fiscal year 2010-11, the Foundation's total revenue was $23.8 million. In 2011, the Board issued a proclamation urging the global Wikimedia community to obtain subject consent for images that portray identifiable living persons in a private place or situation and it issued a statement advocating on behalf of openness and collaboration in the Wikimedia movement, calling on the Executive Director to make it the top staff priority. The Board also expanded the Donor Privacy Policy and approved Wikimedia chapters in Spain, South Africa, Macau, Canada, Chile, Mexico, District of Columbia, Bangladesh and Venezuela. In 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation received its largest donation to date, $3.6 milliom from the Stanton Foundation to fund major investments in technology infrastructure. The Foundation also received another $3 million grant over three years from the Sloan Foundation and $500,000 from the Brin Wojcicki Foundation. For fiscal year 2009-2010, the Foundation's total revenue was $34.8 million. In 2012, the Board initiated a process reflecting upon fundraising and funds dissemination practices. This resulted in guiding principles for fundraising and funds distribution and in the establishment of the Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC), a mechanism for aligning funding decisions with global community goals. The Board announced that going forward, Board members individual votes would be made public and it approved new Terms of Use for the projects, designed to create clarity and transparency about the rights and responsibiilities of readers and editors, following a thorough and wide-ranging consultation with global community members. This year, Lisbett Rausing and Peter Baldwin have donated $1.25 million.

Jan-Bart de Vreede

Template:Board member infobox Jan-Bart de Vreede joined the board in December 2006 and currently serves as Vice-chair of Wikimedia Foundation since August 2011, a position he also held from January 2007 until July 2010.

Working at the Kennisnet Foundation allowed Jan-Bart to spend time promoting the use of wiki software and Wikimedia projects in education, amongst other things. The Kennisnet Foundation is a publicly funded Dutch organisation. At Kennisnet Jan-Bart is responsible for the Kennisnet communities. He has been involved with Wikimedia since 2004, through his role as a Board member and his work at Kennisnet. He has attended and spoken at all of Wikimania conferences.

He is currently involved with the Wikiwijs project within the Netherlands. This is a countrywide initiative aimed at encouraging teachers to develop and share Open Educational Resources.

Jan-Bart de Vreede spent most of his childhood in the Netherlands, also living in Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Kenya and the United States. He studied Business Administration at the Rotterdam School of Management. He has three children: Anna (1), Matthias (6) and Ruben (9).

Stu West

Template:Board member infobox Stu West joined the Wikimedia Board and has served as its Treasurer in April 2008; he also served as Vice-Chair from July 2010 to August 2011. He brings over 18 years of financial experience, including senior executive roles at publicly-traded companies including TiVo, Yahoo!, InfoSpace, and in investment banking at J.P. Morgan. He also worked with the United States Mission to the United Nations. Stu's educational background includes a B.A. in History from Yale University, where he focused on 20th century diplomacy. He is a dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, and lives in the San Francisco bay area.

Bishakha Datta

Template:Board member infobox Bishakha Datta joined the Wikimedia Board in March 2010. Currently the leader of India-based non-profit Point of View, she brings two decades of diverse, international experience as a non-profit practitioner, journalist and filmmaker dedicated to disseminating women's perspectives through media, art and culture. She has worked with organizations from around the world including Kenya, Uganda, the United States, Denmark and the United Kingdom. Bishakha received an MA in Communications from Stanford University, as well as an MA in English Literature and BA in Economics from Mumbai University. She lives and works in Mumbai.

Jimmy Wales

Template:Board member infobox Jimmy Wales is an Internet entrepreneur and wiki enthusiast, and founder of the Wikipedia project.

Jimmy was born in Huntsville, Alabama in 1966, and is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of Alabama. He worked as Research Director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm then located in Chicago. In the mid-1990s he started Bomis, a search portal focusing on aspects of pop culture, one of the first users of the freely licensed data of the Open Directory Project.

In 1999, Jimmy had the concept of a freely distributable encyclopedia and founded Nupedia, by hiring philosopher Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief and assigning two programmers to write software for it. Nupedia failed, perhaps due to being a top-down cathedral model, as opposed to Wikipedia, which is the ultimate bazaar. After two years of working with the Nupedia concept, that team opened Wikipedia to help channel content into Nupedia; Wikipedia became an instant success, but not in the envisioned way, and Nupedia was shut down. In 2003, Jimmy set up the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, to support Wikipedia and its sister projects.

In 2004, Jimmy founded Wikia. He was appointed a fellow of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society in mid-2005, and in October of 2005 joined the Board of Directors of Socialtext, a provider of wiki technology to businesses. He lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Ting Chen

Template:Board member infobox Ting Chen was named as Chair of the Wikimedia Board in July 2010 after being elected as Trustee by the Wikimedia Community in June 2008 with his term officially starting in July 2008.

Ting Chen was born in Shanghai, China in 1968. He grew up in Harbin, China, 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.

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 news article about the German Wikipedia achieving a milestone in 2003. From then on Wikipedia became a new hobby of his. He started on the German Wikipedia and changed soon to the young Chinese Wikipedia, which was at that time still starting. Ting 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.

Samuel Klein

Template:Board member infobox Samuel Klein (born in 1978 in New York) was elected to the Wikimedia Board in August 2009. He currently lives in Cambridge, where he leads local content creation and develops global advocacy for One Laptop per Child, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to providing access to knowledge and communication networks to children everywhere. He has worked with children and teachers in Peru, Uruguay, and Nepal to organize content and software jams and to teach others what they learn.

Samuel has been involved in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects for 6 years. He has spent much of that time writing and speaking about the Projects. In 2005 he published a Wikimedia newsletter in 6 languages, and served as a cross-project translation lead. He also served on the Communications and Special Projects Committees in their first year. He founded the Boston-area Wikipedia group, and organized the bid and local team that hosted the Wikimania conference there in 2006. He works on offline Wikipedia distribution, including the WikiBrowse project.

Samuel studied Math and Physics at Harvard University, and is an Associate of Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. He spent time teaching and developing software for facilitating translation and community-building before working on universal education.

More information about Samuel is available on his Wikipedia user page.

Matt Halprin

Template:Board member infobox Matt Halprin was appointed to the Wikimedia Board in August 2009. Matt has more than 20 years of business experience. Currently, Matt is Executive Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development at Ning, the world's largest platform for creating custom social networks. Previous to Ning, Matt was 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. Prior to Omidyar Network, Matt spent six years at eBay. As Vice President, Global Trust and Safety at eBay, he led a team of 90 statisticians, policy managers, and product managers. Prior to eBay, Matt served as a Partner and Vice President at the Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with technology clients on issues of strategy and corporate development.

In addition to the Wikimedia Foundation, Matt serves on the board of Management Leadership for Tomorrow, which supports the next generation of minority leaders in the United States. He has previously served on the boards of the Sunlight Foundation, DonorsChoose.org and Goodmail Systems. He graduated with High Distinction as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School and holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.

Alice Wiegand

Template:Board member infobox Alice Wiegand joined the Board in July 2012.

Patricio Lorente

Template:Board member infobox Patricio Lorente joined the Board in July 2012.

Former members

Main page: Former Board of Trustees members

Further reading

• Meetings (with minutes)
• Resolutions
• Board deliberations process