Board of Trustees: Difference between revisions

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new officer positions and term expirations. Also, "founder" is not an officer position. Alphabetize other members. Also, restructure is old news now; rephrase to imply less recency.
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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. (article IV, sec. 1 of the [[Wikimedia Foundation bylaws]]) and currently consists of ten 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. (article IV, sec. 1 of the [[Wikimedia Foundation bylaws]]) and currently consists of ten Trustees:


* [[#Ting Chen|Ting Chen]], Chair <small>(term until July 2011)</small>
* [[#Ting Chen|Ting Chen]], Chair <small>(term until July 2012)</small>
* [[#Jimmy Wales|Jimmy Wales]], Founder <small>(term until December 2011)</small>
* [[#Jan-Bart de Vreede|Jan-Bart de Vreede]], Vice Chair <small>(term until December 2011)</small>
* [[#Stu West|Stu West]], Vice Chair and Treasurer <small>(term until December 2011)</small>
* [[#Phoebe Ayers|Phoebe Ayers]], Executive Secretary <small>(term until July 2012) </small>
* [[#Samuel Klein|Samuel Klein]], Executive Secretary <small>(term until July 2011)</small>
* [[#Stu West|Stu West]], Treasurer <small>(term until December 2011)</small>
* [[#Jan-Bart de Vreede|Jan-Bart de Vreede]] <small>(term until December 2011)</small>
* [[#Bishakha Datta|Bishakha Datta]] <small>(term until December 2012)</small>
* [[#Kat Walsh|Kat Walsh]] <small>(term until July 2011)</small>
* [[#Matt Halprin|Matt Halprin]] <small>(term until December 2012)</small>
* [[#Samuel Klein|Samuel Klein]] <small>(term until July 2012)</small>
* [[#Arne Klempert|Arne Klempert]] <small>(term until July 2012)</small>
* [[#Arne Klempert|Arne Klempert]] <small>(term until July 2012)</small>
* [[#Matt Halprin|Matt Halprin]] <small>(term until December 2012)</small>
* [[#Jimmy Wales|Jimmy Wales]], <small>(term until December 2011)</small>
* [[#Bishakha Datta|Bishakha Datta]] <small>(term until December 2012)</small>
* [[#Kat Walsh|Kat Walsh]] <small>(term until July 2012)</small>
* [[#Phoebe Ayers|Phoebe Ayers]] <small>(term until July 2012) </small>



The Board was substantially restructured in April 2008. If you are not familiar with these changes yet, please review the following pages:
The Board was substantially restructured in April 2008, as detailed in the announcement:
* Board Restructure [[Board_of_Trustees/Restructure_Announcement | announcement]] by Vice-Chair Jan-Bart de Vreede
* Board Restructure [[Board_of_Trustees/Restructure_Announcement | announcement]] by Vice-Chair Jan-Bart de Vreede
* Board Restructure [[Board_of_Trustees/Restructure_Announcement_Q%26A | Questions and Answers]]
* Board Restructure [[Board_of_Trustees/Restructure_Announcement_Q%26A | Questions and Answers]]

Revision as of 20:36, 7 August 2011

Template:BoardLang

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. (article IV, sec. 1 of the Wikimedia Foundation bylaws) and currently consists of ten Trustees:

The Board was substantially restructured in April 2008, as detailed in the announcement:


Ting Chen

Ting Chen

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 were 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.

Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales

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.

Stu West

Stu West

Stu West was named Vice-chair of the Wikimedia Foundation in July 2010 after joining the Wikimedia Board and being named Treasurer in April 2008. 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.

Samuel Klein

Samuel Klein.

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.

Jan-Bart de Vreede

Jan-Bart de Vreede

Jan-Bart de Vreede joined the board in December 2006 and served as Vice-chair of Wikimedia Foundation 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).

Kat Walsh

Kat Walsh

Kat Walsh is a Wikimedian from Herndon, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. She is a policy analyst and legal researcher with a JD from George Mason University, with a focus on information freedom and technology policy.

Kat has been a volunteer for Wikimedia since 2004, and currently gives workshops and presentations about Wikimedia, copyright, and online collaboration. She is active in the DC-area free culture and public interest community. Kat is also a classical bassoonist and violist, performing in regional orchestras.

Arne Klempert

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 contact 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.

Matt Halprin

Matt Halprin

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.

Bishakha Datta

Bishakha Datta

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.

Phoebe Ayers

Phoebe Ayers

Phoebe Ayers joined the board in July 2010. 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.

Former Board members

See also full list of board compositions and the list of relevant appointment resolutions.
Angela Beesley (June 2004-July 2006)
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 (2003-November 2007)
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 (July 2006-December 2007)
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 (2003-November 2006)
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 (November 2006-June 2007)
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 (June 2004-July 2008)
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 feasability 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 (July 2007-September 2008)
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 (February 2008-July 2009)
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 (February 2008-July 2010)
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

Roles of board members and officers

As defined in the bylaws.

Links