Wikimedia Foundation board - message from the chair, April 20, 2009

This is my report on the April board meeting, which was held in Berlin on April 3-5, in conjunction with a meeting/conference of the Wikimedia chapters. But first, let me say that it was wonderful to be able to coordinate so these could happen in the same place. I really appreciated the opportunity to get to know the chapter representatives, exchange ideas, and get a sense of their plans, priorities, and concerns. Thanks to Wikimedia Deutschland as the host, those that contributed so we could make sure every chapter was represented (itself an impressive accomplishment), and all who participated. My biggest regret is that we still had to have the board meeting and thus couldn't spend all of our time with the chapters, who had plenty to work on and discuss themselves.

This will only be a brief summary, but I want to at least touch on some of the more important points from the board meeting. As usual, more detailed minutes will be published later. And yes, we are trying to release the minutes more quickly - in fact, James has a draft for us to review already.

For housekeeping items, we approved the minutes from the January meeting (previously published, so you may have seen them already - in fact, they were published before we actually approved them), along with the Form 990 to be filed with the IRS. Once our auditors report back that it has indeed been filed, it will be posted along with an FAQ. With that complete, the Audit Committee has been reconstituted for the coming fiscal year's cycle, and all of its members are staying on. Sue also briefly reported on the status of the CPO hiring process, the result of which was recently announced so you already know about that.

Moving on to larger items of discussion, we spent some time on the issue of biographies of living people (or BLP, for the acronym-happy), which is an ongoing challenge in a number of Wikipedia languages. Since the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't control the content of the projects, and editing is entirely the domain of the volunteer community, there are limits to what the board should appropriately do here. Ultimately we worked on and passed a formal statement on the issue, which we'll be publishing shortly. We also passed a brief statement on the foundation's approach to trademarks. Both of these are in general terms, and the ideas in them are probably not new to most of you, but we think they contain some important shared principles.

Sue presented an overview of the annual plan for 2009-2010, which the staff is currently developing and will be finalized before the end of the fiscal year in June. The annual plan is a regular part of our operations, but beyond that, we discussed development of a long-term strategic plan for the organization. This is something that would frame the overall goals and direction of Wikimedia, not just the foundation but the overall movement, and supply the goals that an annual plan would seek to implement at an operational level. We touched on the strategic plan during a combined session of the board with the chapters and got a lot of interesting thoughts and positive feedback. Since our meeting, the board has recently passed a resolution directing Sue to develop a working process for this strategic plan. We anticipate it will really kick off around July, and be ongoing for roughly a year or so. It's been emphasized throughout that the planning process will need to involve the Wikimedia projects, chapters, and volunteers participants at all levels, so this will be fairly unusual and challenging compared to strategic planning as it is done in typical organizations.