Wikimedia Foundation elections/2017/Board of Trustees/Candidates/lv

I will use what I learned when I was Chair of Wikimedia UK to keep WMF focused on its mission and its communities, and ensure the Board is open, listening and effective.

The Wikimedia movement is about communities first. We should never fall into the trap of thinking WMF is only about tech.

I’ve been part of the Wikimedia movement for over 13 years. I have seen how we’ve transformed from a crazy idea into a remarkable, vital, reality, at the same time as the rest of the internet has filled up with cat gifs, clickbait and fake news. I have also seen how, when the WMF board works well, it helps staff, affiliates and communities pull together to common goals - and the problems it causes when it doesn’t.

I started editing Wikipedia in 2004 and became an English Wikipedia admin in 2006. From 2007 for a few years my main focus was on improving en.wp articles on battleships resulting in four English Wikipedia Featured Articles, which between them get about 160,000 views a month.

I’ve written essays on Meta about how the WMF should handle conversations with the community, and about how we should think about measuring impact. If I’m elected to the Board I’ll do my best to take my own advice.

How we continue to build our communities, and how we promote diverse, top-quality content is the most pressing question we must address in the strategy process.

I have a record of making positive changes to Wikimedia organisations that last beyond my own term of office. I joined the board of Wikimedia UK in 2011. In 2012 I became Chair to sort out some serious governance problems we faced at the time. This meant working with the WMF to review Wikimedia UK’s governance, implementing the changes, and moving on to develop our strategy and impact.

I’ve experienced most of the difficult situations for a board member, like managing a transition of an Executive Director, or handling serious disagreements on the Board, and overcome them.

I have led the development of training for Wikimedia board members. I set up the first two international board training workshops, and helped shape Wikimedia Conference towards improving affiliates’ governance and programmes.

I’ve also been involved in a number of GLAM and education outreach projects, setting up partnerships with institutions like JISC, and running editathons on topics ranging from World War I to feminist cinema.

Outside of Wikimedia, I have been a fundraiser for a number of non-profits, and worked and volunteered extensively for the UK’s Liberal Democrat party. I find this perspective valuable in thinking about the Wikimedia movement.

The next big thing for our movement should be democratization, integration of non-organized editors and solidarity within the movement.

By choosing me, besides giving me Board member responsibilities, you are giving me the symbolic power to not only raise those issues but also work on them.

I have been a member of the Language committee since 2008, I have been responsible for helping small communities create Wikimedia projects in their own languages.

As a (former) steward I've successfully solved a number of difficult issues on various wikis, giving those projects the chance to flourish and become important parts of their own societies.

In some regards, my on-wiki contribution has been structural, including active participation in the creation of the Language proposal policy and of the Closing projects policy, and in introducing global sysops etc.

In 2004 I initiated the creation of the Serbian Wikipedia community. During the following couple of years I worked on building the community around all other Serbian language Wikimedia projects. I was an administrator and bureaucrat on most of the projects in Serbian (as well as a checkuser on Wikipedia). I've significantly contributed to Wikinews in Serbian and Wiktionary in Serbian and Serbo-Croatian, and to a lesser degree to many other projects, including Wikipedia and Wikinews in English.

I was a co-founder of Wikimedia Serbia, the fifth Wikimedia chapter in 2005, its first president and former Board member. Besides creating the organization, my most significant contribution to WMRS was work on its professionalization and on establishing its office between 2009 and 2012.

In various roles inside of WMRS, I've organized a proto-Wikimedia Conference in 2006, as well as a couple of regional conferences which would eventually become Wikimedia Central and Eastern Europe.

My latest contribution to the Wikimedia movement was as a catalyst and initiator of AfroCROWD, the project aiming to incorporate Black Americans into the Wikimedia movement. I reached out Alice because i knew she was a Black American open-content activist, engaged deeply in the work with various ethnolinguistic groups of Americans of African descent and educated her on the multicultural gap in editorship and content on Wikipedia.

I am personally structurally contributing to some parts of our movement, like giving servers and maintenance to the websites for Wikimedia Serbia and AfroCROWD through my small company.

I was a member of the Affiliations, Research and Nominating committee.

Experience from the roles of steward/checkuser/admin/bureaucrat/ombudsman/FDC (chair). My editing has suffered heavily during my first term as a Board member (the only community-elected one still standing), but I’ve gained the experience needed for the job. My initial plan for the Board work and how it actually went are here. I did a lot of other work (HR, ED recruitment, governance). The wiki traits I have that the Board needs:

• I’m collaborative (I’ve proven other Board members can work with me),
• I’m able to stand up for sth (I resist pressure&groupthink and I speak up: I voted “no” when everyone else voted “yes” – we need such Board members, to avoid disasters such as the SuperProtect, which I helped remove, or the last year’s leadership crisis. This is a crucial (and uncommon) character trait: to be able to voice one's concerns, when others are quiet or discouraging you,
• I believe in communication with the community (I've done my best during a crisis in 2015/2016, sometimes against fellow advice and pressure, I co-headed an initiative to add transparency to Board duties and be more open, etc.)

The two years on the Board have been a fast learning experience in tough times. Having had it, I'm well positioned to build on it and avoid rookie mistakes (which I surely made, too, while gaining some grey hair). Now I want to help our movement get more democratic, externally&internally friendly, and help us regain our strategic focus so that Wikimedia never becomes irrelevant.

I'm a full professor of management (one of the youngest in the field in Poland) at NeRDS and associate faculty at Berkman-Klein Center for Internet&Society at Harvard. I wrote the first ethnography of Wikipedia (Common Knowledge? Stanford University Press - it won 2015 Dorothy Lee Award, among others), and I've published academic articles about Wikipedia, as well as op-eds in magazines (Slate, The Daily Dot, The Chronicle of Higher Education, etc.). I've had visiting appointments at Cornell, Harvard, Berkeley, MIT. My other current research projects involve FOSS organizations governance (OpenHub projects) and online community building in alterscience and DIY-science movements. I understand how good-will participative movements can slide into organizational tensions and bureaucracies, and I hope to be able to avoid it. More on my past work can be read on wiki.

I have experience from another board of an organization of a similar budget&size: Copernicus Science Center. I’ve advised on strategy professionally. I also developed and sold 3 Internet startups (but no, I'm not a Silicon Valley type, not even close ;).

My experience of having grown up in a regime with censorship, and frugally (~30 USD/month) help me understand the world outside of the Western bubble. For the last 4 years I've been a member of honorary committee of Polish Pride Parade. As a hobby, I practice krav-maga (and I'm an Israeli-licensed instructor), but I've never ever hit a person outside of a training, and I really rarely get angry - possibly due to a really high stress-threshold.

To achieve our goal of open knowledge we need to work together as equals, determine our goals together, and maintain our independence. The board needs members who understand our communities. After more than 10 years and 210,000 edits across 110 projects I meet this need.

Our editing communities are unique and how they function often poorly understood. This understanding can only really be gained by being extensively and consistently involved over many years. As an active editor, I have an excellent understanding of our core values and internal workings. I have been an admin on English Wikipedia since 2010.

While my online work has mostly focused on developing medical content I have also been involved with helping build a copy and paste detection tool known as CopyPatrol, worked on issues pertaining to undisclosed paid editing, spoken out in favor of our right to host openly licensed content, and helped reunite and bring Wikivoyage on as a sister site.

In 2011 I started the medical translation project, initially in collaborating with Translators Without Borders with later Rubric and Wikimedia Taiwan among others joining. These efforts have resulted in the translation of more than 5 million words with work occurring in more than 100 languages.

The WMF is in a much better position today than when I was elected to the board in 2015. This is in part a result of my efforts to uphold our values of transparency and democratic decision making. Successes include the roll back of superprotect and the replacement of our ED with one who is a better fit for our movement.

Other movement efforts include being a founding member of Wikimedia Canada (WMCA) in 2010 and Wiki Project Med Foundation (WPMEDF) in 2012. I am currently on the board of WMCA and the chair of WPMEDF.

In collaboration with Wikimedia Switzerland I helped develop offline medical apps. We currently have versions in 10 languages with more than 150,000 downloads, of which ~80% are from low and middle income countries. These apps are reaching a population which our online content often struggles to reach. Following work with WMF staff, the main Android app will soon have improved offline capabilities.

I have researched and published on Wikipedia in peer-reviewed journals, as well as spoken about the importance of what we do. This has included giving talks at academic conferences, speaking to the press, and giving lectures to students. I have been involved with collaborations with a number of like minded organizations including academic journals, the World Health Organization, and the University of California San Francisco.

I made my first edit to a Wikipedia article over ten years ago, when I was a little school child who is too disappointed of how little, poor resources he could access in his very own language. Since then, Wikipedia had raised me, educated me, and helped me grow up and understand the world so much better; it taught me how to be subjective, respectful and take an unbiased as far as possible in literally every matter.

My work focuses on editing content and creating long, extensively researched articles. So far, I have contributed over a thousand articles on Arabic Wikipedia, nearly 60 of which were nominated as good or featured. I have various contributions to sister Wikprojects as well, having helped in founding ar-Wikiversity and creating a lot of content for Wikibooks and Wikinews among others. Earlier this year, I have successfully finished and electronically published my first book, Hikayat Wikipedia (The Story of Wikipedia), which was viewed and downloaded by a few thousand people. I also do a plenty of logistic work. I was an online ambassador of Wikipedia education program (Egypt), a Wikipedia Library coordinator (Arabic language) and an OTRS member for various periods of time. In 2017, I helped facilitating the strategy discussion among the Arabic community as a Strategy Coordinator.

I am a long-time Wikimedian, mostly a content creator. I have been editing for more than 11 years, starting out in the English Wikipedia (where I wrote a Featured Article) and then moving to Spanish Wikipedia, where I have significantly contributed to 14 Featured Articles and am an administrator and bureaucrat since 2007.

I also contribute to Commons and Wikidata. I’m currently doing the #100wikidays challenge - and so far so good. I also own an active archive bot, RaystormBot.

I have been part of multiple project initiatives – I founded the successful Spanish LGBT Wikiproject and have coordinated and organised several editing contests, such as UN Women and Wikipedia, Iberoamerican women and BBC 100 Women. My commitment is to help underrepresented voices be present in our projects and considered at the Board level, and I work for that every day.

I’m the Vice Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation Board. I rejoined it at arguably its lowest point early last year, and worked with the other trustees to improve the situation. Since then, we’ve appointed a new ED, initiated the Movement Strategy process, worked on increasing transparency, made anti-harassment a priority, and approved the environmental impact resolution.

The Board is in much better shape now. There’s still work to do, but we’re on the path to living up to expectations. I believe in cooperation, listening and including all points of view, understanding the root problems and finding common ground to move forward.

The diversity of our movement is important to me, and I‘ve always worked in that direction. Before joining the Board, I was a member and first Treasurer of the Affiliations Committee, when we introduced user groups. I was also a member of the IEG committee, and I support Iberocoop since its creation.

I was a founding member and first Vice Chair of Wikimedia Spain. I co-founded and advise Wikimujeres. I also advise Whose Knowledge? I regularly help out with events in Madrid.

I teach at the Digital Communications, Culture and Citizenship Master’s degree at a Spanish University.

I have been editing Namibian articles for a number of years now. While my edit count (roughly 17K across all projects) is low compared to other candidates, please consult the results. I believe I have made a positive change in the coverage of Namibian politics, geography, and history.

I am probably best known for the Oral citations experiment, a controversial effort to convince fellow editors to allow citations to oral sources in order to accommodate the requirements of societies whose main mode of knowledge transfer is oral.

I have met every regular Namibian editor in person and have been to the first-ever meetups of Namibian Wikipedians. Unfortunately we fit on a single table, a sign of how difficult it is to popularise Wikimedia projects in Southern Africa. This is despite all the workshops and university assignments that I have organised, and despite the support from outside institutions. See the Signpost of December 2016 for some reflections of the difficulties.

I have given talks on several conferences, attended Wikimania (4x) and WikiIndaba (2x), and organised an editathon and several outreach activities. I have also published academically about Wikipedia, its role for human knowledge, its approach to written and oral knowledge repositories, its conflict-laden relationship with indigenous knowledge and the communities that harbour it, and many other aspects. For three of my research projects I have received grants from the Foundation, and I have written on the WMF Global Blog as well as for the Signpost. My user page contains a rather long list of events where I have been involved, and links to videos, slide shows, and web pages showcasing my work.

I teach computer networking at the Namibia University of Science and Technology and have been in various managerial positions of my university for almost a decade. From that exposure I draw the experience of

• managing and steering the hiring process and vetting prospective candidates,
• reading and understanding Legalese,
• delivering work of the expected quality on the set deadlines,

abilities that I am willing to lend to the Board of Trustees, should you have confidence in me.

I have been contributing to MediaWiki as a volunteer developer for many years, initially creating the MediaWiki API in 2006. Until recently, I also worked at WMF for four years, leading Wikipedia Zero and Interactive engineering efforts. I am one of the top five MediaWiki code contributors.

At WMF, I worked on adding interactive maps to articles, and collaborated with many Wikipedia and Wikivoyage language communities to improve the new technology.

As a volunteer, I created the Signpost-featured <graph> tag (GSP example, night sky, graph template collection). I also created Commons Datasets, allowing wikis to reuse content beyond images, and paving the way to shared multilingual templates.

I feel the wikiverse has become complacent with our success, and needs to focus to continue improving. Just like hands-on museums, our content needs to be captivating, full of interactive multimedia, and focused on learning. I believe Wikipedia content is too "static", and often does not tell an engaging story.

Readers need to interact in order to learn better. Editors need good tools to create and mange content, and to easily cooperate with each other. Let's put editors’ needs first, concentrate on wishlists, and don’t try to replace editors with algorithms.

I regularly attend and present at Wikimedia and OSM community events including Wikimania, the developer's conferences (hackathons), and the local meetups where I live in New York City. I have presented at numerous Wiki-related as well as general educational learning conferences in Armenia, Ukraine, Russia, and USA. I strive to educate people about the values Wikipedia represents, the way it functions, and the value it brings to the world.

Outside of the Wikiverse, I used to work as a CTO of an investment firm, tech-consulted several banks, went to Burning Man for many years, and hosted couchsurfers. I enjoy hiking, camping, campfires with guitars, as well as the city life. Recently I joined Elastic, the developer of the open source technology behind Wikipedia search. There, I continue improving the cartography tech built for Wikipedia.

My wife encourages my wiki habit, but with the exception of special events, I try to keep my work/volunteer/family time balance in place.