The Longest Now

I am running for the Board again this year, with the hope of bringing a stronger community voice to the Board, and organizing good and frequent open discussions between the Board and community about priorities, core services, new initiatives, and the like.  Angela organized a few open meetings long ago when she first joined the Board which I really appreciated, and which encouraged some previously invisible community members to come forward with good ideas.

Meanwhile, my friend Kat Walsh has not yet stood for re-election to the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, though I hope she will!

Update: she did, and she was reelected for another term!  Congratulations 🙂

She is among the last of a certain breed of board members who have been strong advocates for community involvement in key decisions, and we could use more.  The current Wikimedia Foundation is strongly in support of openness even without nagging from the Board – for instance in framing the upcoming year-long strategic planning as a process to facilitate and crystalize plans from the many communities – but without active community trustees we might no longer be so lucky a few years from now.

My official statement, and throwback to an earlier era, after the jump.

Here is what I said in my brief statement, the blurb every candidate offers which is translated into dozens of languages before the election begins

Wikimedia should be a model for open, scalable organizations.

As a Board member, I would be a strong community voice, communicating regularly about the Board’s work, holding open meetings and soliciting public input. I support developing expertise within the community.

I would also

• fight for better support for translation and multilingual communication across Wikimedia, particularly for planning discussions
• represent the technical and practical needs of smaller projects
• encourage careful use of funds and goodwill, planning for long-term availability of the projects (with an endowment and core services)
• encourage delegating outreach & community development to chapters

About me: I am an editor, translator, steward, and public advocate for Wikipedia. I started the Meta translators network and the Wikimedia Quarto newsletter (in 5 languages) in 2004, and was secretary of the Special Projects Committee. I founded the Boston meetup group and helped run the first two Wikimanias, hosting Wikimania2006 in Boston.

Outside Wikimedia, for 3 years I have been director of content at One Laptop per Child, working on local partnerships for free content and offline distribution.

I greatly enjoyed Aaron Swartz’s regular blogging in 2006 about important ideas, and mean to follow his example for the coming weeks.