One idea we’ve had on the Wikimedia Foundation Audit Committee is to put in place a visitor program.  We think it could be a good way to drive additional transparency, and also to help share some useful practices with other movement organizations.

Our next meeting is scheduled for 14 February from 1:30-3:00 pacific time.  The primary agenda item is the review a draft of our annual public disclosure filing with U.S. tax authorities.  If that sort of thing interests you, and you are available to dial-in to a conference call at that time, and you are comfortable with the parameters outlined below, please let me know via a comment or email at stu<at>wikimedia.org.

Thanks.

Selection of visitors

• The committee chair will drive process of soliciting visitors for each meeting, likely thru treasurers list, internal-l, blog post.
• We will limit to one visitor per meeting (we often have complex and confidential discussions so smaller group discussion are likely to be more valuable)
• To give many people the chance to participate, individuals can only “visit” one meeting
• Preference will go to visitors with an audit committee or treasurer role in movement organizations.
• We will also try to ensure rotation among geographies/languages/etc. 

Conditions for participation

• Visitors must agree to keep any sensitive content confidential, and to keep confidential any materials that are distributed prior to publication
• Visitors would be allowed to participate in most discussion, though the Chair reserves right to ask visitors to take some questions/conversations offline
• Visitors would not participate in executive session (when just the committee members meet, without management, the auditors, etc.)
• Visitors who have a financial/auditing background must be careful, because if they show too much interest they will be sought as future audit committee members.

This is an experiment that we’ll try for a couple meetings, and all of these are subject to change/improvement.

Today, together, the Wikimedia community did a really powerful thing. We raised an incredible amount of awareness about an issue critical to achieving our vision.

More importantly, we demonstrated once again the power of our community model. The thousands of you who participated in the community RfC. The volunteer administrators who helped crystallize our consensus. The incredible design, engineering and operations teams which implemented massive changes to world’s #5 web site less than 30 hours after the community’s decision. The editors who honed messaging. The lawyers who helped navigate so many tricky issues. The communications teams globally who spoke and wrote hundreds of times in support of our goals today and of our broader mission.

I have never been more proud to be a part of our community. Today we came together. Staff, volunteer, it didn’t matter. We all did it together. We are all the community.

Our work isn’t done. The principles (and money) behind SOPA/PIPA won’t just go away. Politics doesn’t work like that. And we have a few other challenges. Getting free knowledge to more people (500 million people a month is nice, but it’s just a start). Getting and keeping more new editors. Seeding Wikimedia communities in places they haven’t developed on their own. And many more.

But those are for tomorrow.

Today, let’s celebrate the fact that, eleven years after the birth of Wikipedia, the Wikimedia movement is stronger than ever.

-s

============================
Stuart West
Proud Wikimedia Board Member
stu<at>wikimedia.org

The #WikipediaBlackout just started. One question that keeps coming up is, “How many people will it affect?” Let’s put on our stat-nerd hat and build a reasonable estimate.

First off, if we want to put this in human terms, we need to think about people and not Page Views or one of the other metrics out there. One source for that is comScore, which has released fairly recent global data for November 2011 based on its panel of 2 million internet users.

Since the blackout itself is only on English Wikipedia, let’s start there. comScore estimates that each month 236 million people (or “Unique Visitors”) come to the English Wikipedia globally from a browser on a computer. Continue reading →

For those who are not following it, there is an incredibly interesting, incredibly important, and incredibly long discussion page in response to Sue’s notes on the future of fundraising and funds dissemination. It’s worth a read. To keep track of my own thoughts, and to draw in blog readers who don’t normally visit gargantuan talk pages, I’ll post large comments I make. Here’s one from tonight.

…the issue as I see it is a fundamental tension between our decentralized culture and the challenges of our newfound wealth. Together, over the past few years, we have all built some extraordinary capabilities in raising funds to pursue our vision. That has given us tremendous resources to pursue free knowledge. But if we want to continue to have access to resources at that scale, we have to accept the responsibility to our donors to ensure every contribution is spent wisely and with the greatest impact. That requires Continue reading →

Ahead of our scheduled WMF Board meeting in early February, I’ve been thinking through a really hard and thorny movement-wide issue. Last time I was dealing with a similarly hard issue, I put some rough notes/questions up here and asked for your thoughts and help thinking through the issue. I’d like to try another Request for Comments with a related but bigger issue.

Let me set this up as a thought experiment. Imagine that we can all go back to the beginning of our movement. Imagine that we have a clean slate and can start fresh. But also imagine that we have the benefit of the past 10 years of experience, and with it all the lessons we’ve learned about ourselves and our strengths and weaknesses as a community.

Let’s say our objective is to define the basic structure of a movement that will most effectively help our community pursue our vision over the next 100, 200 or even 500 years. Long-term impact is the primary objective.

If we could start over, how would we organize our movement?   Continue reading →