When I turned seven, I remember clearly walking outside in our driveway in the cold clear winter air, thinking that this was the beginning of the end. I felt an immense world-weariness, the weariness and jaded cynicisim of age (which had grown on me, turned me, since I was six: now I knew more, knew better, than I did as a smaller child). I was serious and sad, but at the same time in a funny way lighthearted: well, it’s already bad, so that’s liberating. What’s the world going to do to me, if I am heavy of heart at seven? Things won’t get worse, at any rate.

I should be clear that nothing especially bad had happened to me; I had a happy childhood. My mother was sick, but that was both years in the past and years in the future; at the moment that I am remembering, everything was fine. It was just a sort of cusp I reached, as I think many children do. Some remember, some forget; I was serious-minded and so was pleased to adopt a kind of jadedness into my personality. As I say, it was freeing to acknowledge, and gave me a sort of edge with which to tackle the world. You laugh, as you should, but as you can see I never forgot that clear sense of seeing through different layers: the ones you express, and the ones you keep to yourself, and that they are both equally true, this happiness and sadness at the same time as you balance the burden of the world.

I was thinking about this tonight, while lying in bed on a rainy fall evening, because of my ongoing struggles with ennui and depression, which I fall into fairly easily but also am good at talking my way out of. Depression, after all, is boring. No one wants to hear about mine, not even me. So I cheat and trick my way around it; I give myself excellent pep talks. I pay close attention to my moods and all the tiny ways they are affected. “Perhaps you are not actually depressed”, one meme going around on the internet this year says, “perhaps you’re just hanging out with assholes.” There’s always a chance, I suppose, though I do not think so. Advice from other people is usually not especially interesting, as it often boils down to “you have a lot to live for” — well, yes, but you must understand it’s been all downhill since I turned seven, so things are relative.

I’ve had leisure to reflect on all this the last few months, since I’ve had a bit more time on my hands — both from work flattening out, and some projects ending. I took a long and restful break after leaving the board; a full multi-week wikibreak, and then I went back to just editing. I’ve done a lot of editing this fall. I heartily recommend it. There were a couple of months in there where people would ask me to do things: I’m not ready! I would say. It was as if leaving in that moment all my grit and ambition collapsed like a deflated balloon, and I needed to be reinflated before being useful again. I am getting ready. I may be ready now. But the break was wonderful, relaxing. It makes me once again want to write about editing, and practice it well; some part of me feels like every article I make better is a small atonement for also adding to years of drama and discussion. This makes little sense, but it’s an accounting that matters to me, on this project I love.

I’ve travelled a lot this summer and fall as well: a long and glorious trip in Europe this summer, for a wedding and friends; and many smaller trips too. I had a week of company from my dad, which was lovely. I worry about my family, and have grown closer to them the older I’ve gotten. My dad and I are just alike: we think about each other, but we do not call. Other people would think us neglectful, but I think we understand each other. We’d both just as soon avoid the work of growing older, too: healthcare and paperwork, cleaning up the house and taking care of things. I feel responsible for both of us, and therefore anxious, but not so much so that I can’t procrastinate on both counts.

There are many lovely, beautiful things that I have thought about writing about recently; my trip diaries, my projects, ideas. But this summer and fall I’ve been turned inward a bit, focused on rest, or I suppose what most people would call a normal 40-hour a week schedule with lots of vacation time, which certainly feels like rest. I have not put pen to paper in months, but perhaps I’ll start again soon, use writing as a long-promised trick up my sleeve: use this Samhain as a start of opening up to the world again, rather than the more traditional withdrawing in. I have always loved fall and winter best, anyway, and I am again feeling expansive: like a lot of things could happen if I let them. Time, perhaps, to find a new layer to look through.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

One of my favorite casual foods in all the world is a big plate of rice and salad all generously topped with some sort of cool, creamy dressing. Everything gets mushed together, you get the filling satisfaction of the rice, get to feel virtuous because you’re eating salad, and everything has a lovely creamy mouth-feel. I have been putting yogurt on my rice most of my life, but in most Mediterranean or middle eastern restaurants, such a thing happens because you ordered a kebab plate with rice and you get the salad and dressing as a bonus. As far as I’m concerned, though, the meat is an afterthought.

At New York-style halal carts, of which I am pleased (but my waistline is not) to report that there is a quite tasty specimen not 50 feet from where I work, the sauce is mayonnaise-based (we think). It tastes that way, anyway. Mayo with some lemon or vinegar and something.

But yogurt sauces work too, and since I am half-assedly trying to diet (and therefore only eating mayo on half the things, instead of everything) that is what I decided to make for dinner tonight. Everything else followed.

Note: I had strong-tasting yogurt and this came out a bit too bitter, so I wouldn’t follow it exactly. Add garlic instead of pepper? Oregano instead of mint? Add some, dare I say it, sugar or mayo? Or maybe just put it over iceberg like the halal places do instead of fancy spring mix, which already has a bitter flavor? Or just make some tzitziki and shush? What do I know? I just made this shit up. You get the general idea, though. There are no pictures because I already ate it, but it came out good-looking too.

==Rice and salad and faux-kofta plate recipe==
* Rice: cook some rice. Do a better job of it than I did. I seriously need to get a rice cooker. I guess if you were feeling fancy you could season it with something.
* Salad: acquire some salad. I used spring mix because it comes in bulk pre-cut at the coop and you don’t even need to wash it. See above about strong-tasting lettuce, though; butter lettuce or iceberg would work well. You could throw in a tomato or cucumber or something, again if you were feeling fancy.
* Sauce: this required me going to the store, because I didn’t have any of this stuff. But I needed to go to the store anyway so it was ok.
** yogurt — a cup or two poured out into a bowl for mixin’
** olive oil — important. Drizzle some olive oil into the yogurt. Yum.
** salt and pepper. I might skip the pepper next time. Too much. Salt’s important though.
** mint — I used dried spearmint. I was going for that cool, refreshing middle-eastern flavor of yogurt and mint. Oregano: also delicious, closer to Greek-style.
** feta — a couple-ounce chunk, crumbled up in there
** lemon juice — from 1/4-1/2 of a lemon
mix. taste as you go and pour over stuff. The poor man’s version has no feta. The more fattening but delicious version involves a healthy dollop of mayo with everything else.
* faux-kofta: I was thinking about lamb kofta, which are amazing. But they require a lot of spices to be done properly (and/or pine nuts, currents, etc.). Also there was only frozen ground lamb at the store. And I was feeling like a cheapskate. SO I got some ground beef instead and chopped some onion which I sauteed the heck out of in olive oil and then I mixed it all together with salt and pepper and fried them up like hamburger patties. I have never done such a thing with onions and ground beef before but it was very good, if a bit greasy. Anyway: the point is make yourself some delicious meat. Or, you know, not. You could make a pretty respectable version with veggie burger mix. I might eat the leftovers with fried-up tofu tomorrow.

Arrange on a plate. Pour yogurt sauce over everything. Devour outside on the hottest day of the year, and wonder if summer isn’t so bad after all. (Answer: it sucks. It was almost 100F today). Be pleased that you managed to cook yourself a filling, reasonably healthy dinner.

Hat-tip to Lauren and her awesome dinner blog for getting me started looking into halal cart recipes.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

I had the great privilege of speaking at DPLA West last weekend, where I was one of a panel of speakers giving perspectives on the possibilities of the DPLA; I spoke as a Wikimedian and as a librarian.

It was only five minutes, so I wrote down my talk in full; the text is below. I was pretty happy with it as a short, punchy speech.

———————

A couple of years ago a Wikipedian named Liam Wyatt had an idea that the Wikimedia projects should do more formal outreach with libraries and museums and archives. Liam ended up being the first Wikipedian-in-Residence, at the British Museum, helping curators and Wikipedians alike share the Museum’s immense treasures with the world via Wikipedia articles. Other cultural institutions thought this was a cool idea, and today there are Wikipedians in Residence throughout the world, in institutions like the Smithsonian and the National Archives. And there have also been tremendous donations of archival collections to Wikimedia Commons, which is our immense free media repository, with images from NARA and many, many other sources finding a new home and a new audience as freely licensed works that Wikimedians and everyone online can use. And I hope that we can link these collections to the DPLA, and vice versa, sharing tools and metadata as common community-curated platforms.

Why does this matter, that cultural resources are now free on the web? Among other reasons, because it enables them to be seen and to be used. Wikipedia is by far the largest and most read reference work ever to exist in human history. And to make it great — to really cover all of human knowledge — we need to be able to access and share the vast riches that are in cultural institutions. Openness and free licensing for Wikimedia is not something we simply pay lip service to; it’s a concrete part of how Wikipedia editors are able to do their work of using and curating information to make something useful.

And in turn, of course, all of the content on Wikimedia projects is free for reuse and remixing as well. An example is the Wikidata project being developed now by Wikimedia Germany. Wikidata aims to be a central storehouse of semantic data that’s tied to Wikimedia projects – so that, for instance, you could update the population of the United States in Wikidata and have it be automatically updated in all the Wikipedia articles in all 270 languages. And imagine the power of linking all this shared data up to databases of references – like, say, the Harvard libraries catalog — and great open data sources, the way that Commons has opened up to the great archives of the world. And so, I hope that the DPLA, too, is a force for open data, to help make this astonishing vision possible.

But of course, all of these efforts are dependent on people editing and compiling. When I look at a Wikipedia article, I don’t just see text. I see the individuals behind it — the quirky, amazing people. We tend to talk about the Wikipedia community as if it were a monolith, but of course it’s made up of thousands of individuals all doing different things — from editing articles to fact-checking references to doing in-person outreach, like Liam, but all working under the same broad umbrella of shared values about free knowledge. And I think that the reason Wikimedia works, sometimes against all odds, is that every level of our organization and our projects is open to community contributions and community leadership. And so more than anything, I hope that the DPLA follows the same model. I hope that it is open to all kinds of contributions, large and small, no matter what your talent or passion or position is.

It’s not easy to build a great information platform. We know it’s not easy. And I see the problems from the library side, as well, in my job as a reference and collections librarian. We are fortunate at the University of California to have the strength of the UC library consortium and the California Digital Library behind us, which means that the faculty and students that I support on a daily basis have access to phenomenal library resources. But there is a cost to this that’s not just financial. From the behind-the-scenes perspective, wrangling those resources, licensing and managing them, and trying to negotiate with publishers can feel like death from a thousand papercuts. And all of that librarian effort, the work of hundreds of people, means that UC researchers and scholars do have access to the books and journals that they need — but they are the lucky ones. Most of the half-billion readers of Wikipedia from around the world can only imagine having such access to information.

We can do better. And we must do better, in order to fulfill our collective mission as research libraries, as public libraries, as a free knowledge movement, and as individuals committed to preserving the cultural record and eliminating information disparity. I want to live in a world where my next-door neighbor and I can both look at the same Wikipedia article, and both get access to the same sources cited in it, even though I am affiliated with a great research university and she is not. And, I want the Wikipedia editors who write that article — the editors in Bangladesh, in Argentina, in rural Wyoming, in New York City — to also have access to those great sources — indeed, as Wikimedia’s vision says, to have access to the sum of all human knowledge.  Together, I think we can make that happen. Thank you.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

Tonight I went to a nice talk about particle physics, and observational scale: the idea that how we observe something, and at what scale, changes what we see. A simple idea, fundamental to art and science, often forgotten in other areas.

I am fond of the human scale, myself. If I am honest about my understanding of the world, theory is largely lost on me, as are physical things only seen with sophisticated instruments. If there is a chance of sighting something with glass alone — whether far or near — I feel I can get some kind of handle on it; it seems my capacity for conceptual understanding is firmly rooted in the technology of the 18th century. Not that I disbelieve the particle physicists, the radio astronomers, the quantum chemists: but I only feel polite curiosity at their results, not true wonder. (This is, parenthetically, one of the reasons I doubt I’ll ever really get a proper handle on the physical workings of computers; though I grasp the general idea of a semiconductor, understanding it seems a different matter. But give me high-level code — again, a human scale — and I do just fine).

Complexity is not the issue; scale is. Give me trees, or flukes; moon craters or ants, steel or ash. Something visible; something tangible. This is what I have always thought my relationship to science was; dirt on the knees, cells under a microscope, everything else for others with a stronger capacity to believe in equations and shadows on walls, who can tell the rest of us stories about the very small and far away.

I have thought this. But if it’s true that I like the concrete, then why have I spent so much time on the truly intangible: trying to decipher the meaning of words, the feeling of agreement, the nature of love?

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

My friend and colleague Ben Yates died Monday evening. He was 29. He was my co-author, with Charles Matthews, on our book How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It. He was a skilled artist and designer, and he was responsible for the beautiful figures in the book.

I first encountered Ben before that, in 2006, when he contributed designs for our international conference Wikimania. Ben ended up designing a striking and easily reproducible logo for Wikimania 2006, which we have used ever since for the annual conference. Ben was also interested in Wikipedia merchandise, designing t-shirts and posters, and helped propose fundraising ideas (including the idea of collecting stories from community members) that are only today really being implemented at the WMF — he was ahead of his time.

Ben had been a Wikipedia editor, as User:Tlogmer, since 2003. He wasn’t a heavy contributor, but he was a good one, and like me he was interested in the project from a meta perspective. He wrote a blog about Wikipedia that, while it ran, was widely read in and out of our community — the reporter for the New York Times that has long covered Wikipedia issues once mentioned it to me as one of his sources. Ben was insightful and incisive, funny and smart, with a fondness for the small, absurd things that make Wikipedia so enjoyable. He had a long history of contributions to collaborative projects; he was a contributor to Everything2, starting in 1999. And he was a musician in addition to an artist and writer.

We worked closely together for months on the book, but never got a chance to meet in person. The three of us did almost all of our work over email, and on those long threads and endless discussions Ben was always patient, responsible and helpful; I never had a bad interaction with him. He was shy, too; I never knew much about his personal life. In the last couple of years, we weren’t in close touch; we corresponded a bit and I knew that he was still living in Michigan, where he was from. He never got a chance to go to Wikimania, the conference that enabled his logo to be shown on 5 continents, from banners on the street in Taiwan to books in Argentina.

Ben was a lovely person, and he will be greatly missed.

Edited:

I was looking for things on the web by Ben, and came across this short piece he wrote on Andrew Lih’s wiki where contributors speculated about the way forward for Wikipedia. Ben died on the eve of Encyclopedia Britannica posting that they were no longer going to produce printed volumes, so this seems prescient — as does the note about alternative views, given recent discussions.

From http://wikipediarevolution.com/wiki/Rivals%2C_spinoffs%2C_parallel_projects

“Wikipedia will not see a real competitor for a long time. Direct competition is a quixotic task, because of wikipedia’s mindshare advantage, or whatever you want to call it — size begets size.

But “rivalry” is the wrong way to think about it. There’s a lot of potential for other ways of viewing and framing and contextualizing and thinking about wikipedia content — who’s to say that there shouldn’t be wikipedia in one frame and another resource in another? Or a commentary on the wiki page integrated into the text, color-coded? Or that the most recent version of the wiki article must be the canonical one (the one you see first)? There will be alternate interfaces to wikipedia’s content, especially as the API becomes more full-featured.

The catch is that a customized version of wikipedia (look! I’m by default only seeing the article revision rated funniest by wikipediafilter!) is in some ways less compelling than the ordinary version — there’s power in seeing what a bunch of other people are seeing. It ties you into society. Alternate interfaces will have to overcome this obstacle if they are to succeed.”

Ben’s obituary is here.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

As in the past election, I’m posting my candidacy statement for the Board of Trustees publicly. I’m running as a part of the chapter-selected seats process, which is outlined here. My term is up in July; the chapters aim to have a decision made in May.

It has been a true honor as well as a stressful endeavor to be on the Board the last two years! My statement, which is in the form of a letter, follows. It’s long; my apologies. I was feeling reflective.

——–

Dear colleagues,

I write this on the way home from the 2012 Finance Meeting, which was an unexpectedly joyful event. At the end of the meeting, we were all asked to write down a word summarizing the weekend. Mine was “community.” To me, the idea of community — people brought together over shared experience and shared work — is the essence of Wikimedia: it is what defines us as more than just a website or reference work. On every level, whether it be financial decisions, organizational communication, software development, or writing articles, remembering that we are all part of the same community is what makes our work and mission possible.

After much thought, I am running for another term on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. To say that being on the Board is difficult is an understatement; it is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But it is also important, exciting work. I have been honored to have been a part of it the last two years, and I would be glad to continue on behalf of our community.

I believe I bring the following qualities and experiences to the Board:

* Familiarity with the Board and the WMF
Becoming a trustee involves a steep learning curve. It can be particularly difficult to negotiate the transition from being an outspoken community member with many friendships and connections to a position of impartial and hands-off organizational leadership. In addition to this (sometimes painful) transition and learning to work collegially with the other trustees and Sue, in the last two years I’ve also learned a good deal about non-profit governance issues and best practices though books, conferences and my fellow trustees. Continuing education and professional development is a priority for trustees, and if reappointed I would continue my governance education. I have also spent many years closely following WMF developments, and bring knowledge of both our history and the organization’s current projects to the Board.

* An academic background, specifically a background in libraries
Over the last two years my background as an academic librarian has strongly influenced my viewpoint in certain discussions, including those around how we should do planning; I believe that it is imperative for us to think of our role as stewards of the projects, and as such to plan for long-term site operation funding and preservation mechanisms. I also bring a belief in access to knowledge for all as a fundamental right, the academic values of shared governance and open scientific debate, and as a researcher, a specific familiarity with our own vibrant wiki research community. I think it is important for the Board to include at least one trustee with this type of background. I am proud to have been the first librarian on our board, and I have tried to make the most of the opportunity by promoting Wikimedia within the library community (though talks and outreach) during my service.

* Commitment to good organizational communication
I ran for Executive Secretary of the Board because I think organizational communication is critical to Wikimedia. As secretary, I’ve followed up on the great work that my predecessor SJ did to improve internal communication processes (such as developing better resolution voting mechanisms), with trying to improve Board communication with the wider community. In addition, I have also focused on internal communication, including summarizing Board discussions and bringing community discussions forward to the Board. I think I have done a fairly good job as secretary, but there is still a great deal more that I would like to do in terms of reporting Board activities, clarifying meta pages, posting information in a timely manner, and making it easier for the community to give input to the Board. Communication is one area where I feel my specific skills, background and interests can really help the Board as a whole succeed.

* Commitment to understanding and supporting our community, and the individuals and groups in it
I have a sympathetic and consensus-based approach to managing relationships and problem solving. I sometimes feel that my role within Wikimedia (in and out of the Board) is to engage in a certain self-reflection and to bring empathy for the situations of others. I have wide experience within our community, including meeting many Wikimedians around the world; I try to always bring those viewpoints and my own experience as a community member to the table. An example is in the fundraising and funds dissemination discussions, where I have attempted to understand and bring in the perspective of what it means to be an independent organization affected by our proposed changes.

* An open mind
I bring an open mind to Board and community discussions; I listen carefully, take the time to reflect, and am not afraid to change my mind based on what I hear. An example is the controversial content discussions, when I entered soon after I joined the Board. I was initially skeptical of the need for action on the issue; but I listened carefully to trustee and community concerns (as expressed in the Harris report and in discussions) and was convinced that there was a real thread of concern that should be addressed. I worked with fellow trustees to carefully craft a proposal around the Harris recommendations that we felt wouldn’t go against Wikimedia principles. After much outcry and reflection, today I think our specific proposal for an image hiding feature is not the right way to address those concerns (which are still quite real), and I support rescinding that part of our resolution. In all of this long difficult process, I have tried hard to keep an open mind and to listen to concerns fairly in order to come to the right decision.

* Time, energy, and the ability to keep up with the challenges facing us
This is an intense period to be on the Wikimedia Board. It is difficult to commit the amount of time and energy that is needed, and I had to think carefully before deciding that I was up for the challenge again. However, I am in a good situation personally: I have the support needed from my job to spend time on Wikimedia, I have the energy to do it, and I have the skills needed of being able to read, parse and summarize a vast amount of material, and of being able to write well and quickly. And I am responsive and responsible to my obligations — something that is important, as the Board very often relies on each member being available for a particular question or vote on short notice. On the Board, you can’t quit or go on an extended wikibreak; each trustee must be consistently reliable.

All that said, there are certain things I lack that the Board does need:

* Direct chapter experience
I do not have Wikimedia chapter experience, although I do have experience running a local chapter of another organization (a professional library association), and I have spent a good deal of time working and socializing with Wikimedia “chapters people” in a variety of settings globally. I have also worked hard to learn about the chapters. However, my own personal experience as a community member has been one of individual volunteer work and empowerment.

* Global diversity
I am a monolingual American. Though this makes parts of trustee work easier for me — speaking English natively enables me to keep up much more easily, and living in California means trips to the WMF office are faster and cheaper — nonetheless, I feel the lack of having a truly global perspective. Our Board has discussed our pressing need for more diversity, particularly for geographical diversity and especially perspectives from the “global South.”

* Other special expertise
I do not have special financial, management or strategic planning skills related to large, international organizations, nor do I bring a deeply technical perspective. Though we currently have a skilled treasurer, other trustees with financial expertise, and a highly competent staff, the Board is always in need of trustees who have a deep financial and nonprofit background. In addition, we do not currently have anyone who comes from the technical development community on the Board. While a number of us have done our share of minor hacking, and several trustees have managed large technical organizations, it would be helpful to have a voice directly from the tech community on the Board.

In conclusion:

The next two years, the Board will face multiple planning challenges, including setting up a new funds dissemination structure (probably including a “funds dissemination committee”); changing how WMF annual planning is approved as a result; figuring out how to do movement-wide and continued WMF strategic planning, and setting up long-term support for the projects. We also face the growing and unsolved editor retention and recruitment crisis; must guide the WMF as it rolls out changes to update and improve the projects (including a visual editor and continued global infrastructure); and continue to set the tone for what kind of an organization we are.

I know there are many good candidates running for the Board this year, including people who have run in past community elections; many of the other candidates would be great on the Board, and I would be glad to see them seated. I am excited about the work facing us and the chance to continue; regardless of the outcome of this election, however, I am truly grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of this during the past two years. Thank you for it.

You can find my professional C.V. at http://phoebeayers.info/Ayers_CV_2012.pdf and my wiki-C.V. on my userpage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/user:phoebe.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

The Board has taken up two weighty subjects in the last few weeks and months: fundraising and funds dissemination (or, how should we best distribute resources — including fundraising resources — around all the many Wikimedia-related projects); and movement roles (or, what are all the moving parts in Wikimedia, and what roles do they play and what recognition should they get?)

Suffice to say that I’ve been taking a lot of headache relievers this month.

These questions are hard in large part because there’s no real accepted model or best practice we can follow; there are plenty of other international fundraising non-profits, but none quite like us — that operates almost entirely online and is volunteer-driven — and at any rate, other big international non-profits don’t have these questions entirely solved either. There are always issues.

So in large part discussions are being driven by a combination of both philosophy and gut instinct, and practical issues. For instance, accounting practices and funds transfer restrictions on the one hand, and a commitment to decentralization and openness on the other. This is not a statement meant to denigrate gut instinct; I’d say on balance, the group of people talking about these issues has as good an instinct for how to lead an open, online, international community as anyone on earth. But it does mean that we are often a bit lost in discussions, because there are multiple layers. Data won’t answer the philosophical questions; philosophical orientation won’t make data go away.

For my part, there are certain things that I do know; I know what behaviors I personally want to see emerge and be encouraged by our practices, both financial and recognition-oriented.

* I want to make it always clearer, easier, and more open for volunteers and editors everywhere to get involved in online and real-life Wikimedia projects, to take leadership of those projects, and to become involved in Wikimedia governance if they so choose.

This is often referred to as “empowerment” but I’ve never liked that word; it’s so nonspecific. And we use “decentralization” a lot too, but that can also be nonspecific. I mean very specific things: I want existing projects to be easy to find and clearly linked to online endeavors. I want it to be easy to identify gaps and propose new projects, and have those projects be peer-reviewed and taken seriously in defined processes, including funding processes. I want it to be easy and always welcoming to both volunteer for a project and to look for volunteers, and to find resources and information from work that has gone before.  And I want the processes of governance (including funding governance) and the ways that decisions are made on any given level to be open, transparent, non-discriminatory and welcoming. While they are open, our bodies and groups should be robust: not prone to takeover by a few strong personalities or outliers, and built on practices that can be replicated and taken up by new people who join. I want it to be possible for people from all parts of the projects and beyond to come to the table and help set the agenda, to bring up new ideas and then execute them without barriers and dependencies in their way from the existing structure. I want to encourage the personal pride and sense of ownership (in the best possible way) of community members in the projects.

I want it to be easy to be inspired to build things, and then to do so.

This covers everything. It covers chapters, informal projects, wikiprojects, and the Foundation.

* A variation of the same theme: I want an organizational structure — again, online and off — that anyone at any level can figure out how to participate in.

Say: I’m an editor. I love doing work in the real world in my community. I want to start a mailing list for the regular meetups I’ve been running. Also, I want to be able to apply for a grant to fund supplies for a conference. And I want to put up a geolocated notice on Wikipedia about my group, get the museum professionals in my group hooked up with international GLAM efforts for ideas, and there’s been talk of a mediawiki hackathon in my area and I’m interested in making that happen. Lastly, I want some ideas for presentation materials to teach teachers about Wikipedia. I don’t speak English. There is no chapter in my country. I should be able to do this, and I should be able to get help easily and efficiently.

Say: I’m an editor. I want to get a project funded to buy some reference materials. (”Wouldn’t that be nice? I think.) I live in a country with a national chapter. I want to contact them for help and propose my small project for funding, and get a reasonably fast answer.  I should be able to do this, and I should be able to get help easily and efficiently.

Say: I’m a new staffer at the Wikimedia Foundation. I am working on… well, let’s say new MediaWiki features. I want to get some community feedback from a wide variety of editors in different languages on a few different designs. I don’t know where to go or how to ask. I should be able to do this, and the structure of our organization should help me.

Say: I’m a reader. I’ve never edited; I want to. I also happen to be a real-life expert in something. I’ve heard there’s a Wikipedia conference in my area; should I go? Also, I want to give the project some money. This should be easy.

Say: I’m in a leadership role on the projects. I have been involved in Wikimedia for a long time. I want to help out editors; I want, also, to help make big-picture decisions about future strategy and large-scale funding. I am concerned about the direction Wikimedia is going in, and I think there are important classes of projects that haven’t been funded; I have big ideas. I want to have a say in not just overall governance but also strategy; and I want to be able to weigh in on whether budgets are appropriate and what new projects should be started; I want to help make these decisions even though I’m not on staff or the WMF board or on a chapter board.  I should be able to do this, in a respectful, open, and meaningful way; I should be able to lead as part of a community.

Say: I’m in a leadership role in a chapter. I have started a chapter, and nursed it through the first few years. I am thinking about the organization’s future: what kind of projects should we work on, how will we stay sustainable, and who will take over after me? I want to see us funded in a responsible way; I have an ownership stake in making this organization work. I feel I can offer a lot when it comes to peer review. I do not want to see what I’ve built be undermined or destroyed through neglect; I know we do important work. I should be able to participate in a community of peers, and get help building this group, and share my knowledge too.

* I want the projects — Wikipedia and her sisters — to be kept online and made available forever; to serve as a corpus of free knowledge that can be openly stewarded for the long haul.

I was around when we had the “Wikipedia forever” slogan in the fundraiser, and it amused me up too (4eva!) But I am reminded of our seriousness of purpose. We’re in this business in the first place to promote free knowledge, and our role is to be caretakers of the Wikimedia projects. Financially, that means that operating costs for the projects need to be covered without caveat for a very long time, because we are stewards of something important.  It also means that we should worry about the sustainability of the projects above all, whether than means losing editors or bad software or simple hosting needs. When it comes down to it, I’d place this financial goal above all others, with the additional notion that….

* I don’t want us to embarrass ourselves over money.

Seriously. That means we have better things to fight about, as a movement. It means that money is important, because it enables us to put this thing out to lots of people and do stuff that supports that — but we shouldn’t overweight it . We are worldwide famous, after all, for building the best reference work ever without paying anyone to do so and then giving it away. Money is not our motivation around here, in general, and we shouldn’t confuse it as a substitute for things that are hugely important to us — like autonomy and agency and collaboration.

It also means that when things get fucked up somewhere, for some reason, as they no doubt will someday in the largest online movement that ever was (and have in fact already in our distant and murky past), that we have good peer review, professionals, and accountability practices to deal with it, without crisis. That we don’t inadvertently put people who do have better things to worry about at risk, because they don’t know how we need money to be handled to meet unforgiving national tax codes. That we share what we know on this subject, and encourage sunshine. That we are not in a position of being stressed out by externally-imposed requirements, or ideally internally imposed ones either.

* I know that we will iterate, and that’s OK.

One thing that is hard in these conversations is I sometimes feel like there we all suffer from a lag between what we talk about — what was-once — and the reality of what it is today. Things are not the same as they were in 2009, people. For one thing, Wikimedia’s fundraising department is now even more kick-ass and getting more efficient by the minute (for those who haven’t spent an afternoon in the fundraising war room, I encourage it). We are regularly making choices that change the territory: having Global Collect means we can efficiently collect payments from all over the place in all sorts of mediums. This is new! It changes the territory! On the chapters side, we’re at nearly forty chapters which is a lot, and they are all sorts of different kinds of organizations, with different needs. And I haven’t heard anyone argue for a straight 50-50 split recently — we tried that, and it doesn’t really work in lots of situations. We are iterating. We will continue to iterate. And even this round will not be perfect, even though we (the board) are trying our damnedest to approach it with intentionality and thoughtfulness for the long term.There will be unexpected consequences for some of the things we do, and bad habits that we inadvertantly reinforce. We need to be able to name and fix these when they come up.

—

But: my dear friends and colleagues, you know what I don’t know? I don’t know what all of the above means when it comes down to making, say, decisions about payment processing criteria or how to build a funding decisions body or even if a funding decisions body is the right call (though at this point in my thinking I think it is). I just know what I, personally, want to solve for. And I think we’re actually on the right track, despite ourselves, to building a good and robust structure. But what I’m looking for is help figuring out how to build the right things. And if we are trying to solve for different outcomes, then I want that to be clear and explicit and on the table; this will take all of us.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

(NB: or you could just watch this Clay Shirky video)

I wrote this for a science librarians mailing list, and in lieu of having time to write another post (today is a big day for us at Wikimedia) reproduce it here.

—-

I’m a science librarian at UC Davis and sit on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia.

In a nutshell: it’s far easier to stop bills from being passed than it is to overturn them once they have been passed. Wikimedia stands with much of the rest of the internet community in being concerned that these bills, as written, don’t just threaten individual sites but indeed threaten the whole structure of the open Internet. SOPA/PIPA have provisions that would overturn  the DMCA “safe harbor”, by requiring not just sites to take down links to infringing content on request and without review, but also ISPs to block access through DNS hacks and payment networks to stop payment to targeted sites. This is a kind of blacklisting that to date has only been seen in repressive regimes. The target of the legislation is “foreign infringing websites”, but the entire internet’s architecture would be affected.[1]

So no, it’s not just our business model that Wikimedia is concerned about. We are concerned about the entire network that we all rely on to freely and openly access information. And while Wikipedia *articles* hold to a principle of neutrality, Wikipedia *the project* is political: our mission and belief is that that everyone on earth should have access to good information, and that is a position that is under constant threat from censorious actions around the world. Wikimedia is in a unique position in that we aren’t dependent on ad revenue or commercial interests, and don’t have ties to big media (like most news outlets do) or shareholders (like most big information companies); we are only dependent on the goodwill of our community, and that community has spoken quite loudly and clearly that they want to protest these bills.[2]

Day in and day out, we take the internet for granted — that the network is there as a public and common good, and will always be accessible. But in fact, the open internet as we know it is dependent wholly on the legislation regulating it, and the U.S. has been a leader in this way in the last couple of decades, with laws that have enabled the innovation of Silicon Valley and the most vibrant information-based economy in the world. Bills like this threaten that openness. We don’t take a protest lightly — it is a big decision, and there are many questions about timing and so on — but we are willing to stand up for our beliefs and what Wikimedia stands for.

The American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries have both spoken out against SOPA/PIPA, as the bills would also affect library and university networks and would serve to greatly expand copyright infringement penalties [3]. However, most major publishers have signed on as being in favor of the bills[4]. So while the next couple of days are indeed a chance for libraries to shine as places to get information even when major websites are offline — be aware that as institutions our services are also threatened by these bills.

– Phoebe Ayers

1. see for instance: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/13/how-sopa-will-hurt-the-free-web-and-wikipedia/, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech, http://www.cdt.org/paper/sopa-summary, http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57344028-281/vint-cerf-sopa-means-unprecedented-censorship-of-the-web/
2. http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/01/16/wikipedias-community-calls-for-anti-sopa-blackout-january-18/
3. http://www.acrl.ala.org/acrlinsider/archives/4574, http://www.librarycopyrightalliance.org/bm~doc/lca-sopa-8nov11.pdf
4. http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rogue%20Websites/List%20of%20SOPA%20Supporters.pdf

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

Tuesday. In the past four days I have discovered something about what it is like to be a part of a community in sudden crisis, to have your campus put squarely and nearly instantaneously on the map of vast public consciousness,  and to have that crisis turned into 24/7 news, a wickedly funny recursive internet meme and a symbol of vast outrage right before your eyes.

It means that you look to other people in that community for comfort, and talking, and an uncertain but very real need to come together.

General Assembly, 11/21/11, UC Davis Quad. Credit Jonathan Eisen, cc-by.

More pictures from Dr. Eisen here

And it means that you find yourself in the unenviable state of having your campus be the centerpiece of the facebook updates and twitterstreams of friends and the discussion topic of strangers’ cocktail parties, and of hard discussions in every department and email list and water-coolered hallway, for an event that you wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Working for a university is a different kind of thing than attending one. I do not feel the same kind of alma mater loyalty that makes people nostalgic, or wear collegiate sweatshirts. Instead I realize — perhaps slightly queasily at times — that I do support this school, and have certainly affiliated myself with its success and prosperity, because I have put my labor and my best efforts (and perhaps my best years) into making it so. I have always believed that it matters where you work; that, given the privilege of choice (and it is a privilege, a deep one, to be able to choose) one’s labor shouldn’t go to something you don’t truly believe in.

The nature of protest is that you care enough to act — that you believe that some part of the system you take part in can be made better. There have been dozens of commentaries the last couple of days on police brutality in America and on college campuses; there have been eloquent essays about the nature of protest. Many pieces of advice have been given to our suddenly-embattled chancellor; many eloquent letters from our faculty have been published online, some calling for resignation but many calling for support and strength. A piece that has stayed with me is one by Cathy Davidson, pointing out that really student protestors are on the side of everything university leaders should be on the side of; that these students are the best allies for going to a state legislator and an unwilling populace to ask for support. The students, in other words, care enough about the system they are in to act.

At UCD last night, some enterprising students built a 30-foot steel-framed geodesic dome to stand where the razed tents had stood (and where they reappeared last night). Whose education does this help? All of ours, we can hope.

Geodesic Dome, UC Davis quad. Credit Jonathan Eisen, cc-by.

tents on the UC Davis quad. Credit Jonathan Eisen, cc-by.

ETA: Katehi’s speech last night.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

Today there is a hearing in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on a bill that is being called the “Stop Online Privacy Act”, or SOPA. It is the House companion to the PROTECT IP bill that came through the Senate earlier this year. Both bills are fundamentally flawed, and dangerous for all kinds of Internet platforms and networks.

The House bill is notable for who supports and who opposes it. On the supporting side — and, with one exception, the only people who are going to be allowed to testify on the bill this morning — are the MPAA, several unions with job ties in the motion picture industry, Pfizer, Mastercard, Chanel, and other organizations with a stake in current copyright (list). Opposing the bill is a growing coalition including:

• Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, eBay, Mozilla — all companies that have made a fortune thanks in large part to the Safe Harbor provisions in the DMCA, which this bill threatens to overturn (letter)
• The American Library Association and Association of Research Libraries– the largest library organizations in the US (letter)
• Creative Commons, EFF, The Free Software Foundation, Public Knowledge, and the Wikimedia Foundation — free-culture and open access tech advocacy organizations
• Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, PPF — open government organizations (letter)
• Renowned law professors from across the land (letter)
• Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, US PIRG (letter)
• Human-rights organizations from around the world (letter)

This bill threatens user-generated content sites — sites like Etsy, or Flickr, whose users may post infringing material without the site’s knowledge. Although both of these sites comply with the DMCA provisions of seeking removal when such material is posted, these bills make it possible for private corporations to demand and achieve takedown by targeting site funding — search engine results and payment and ad networks.

These bills make it possible for the US. Government to censor the Internet — sending a clear message around to the world, including to dictatorships and repressive regimes, that it is actually ok to do so. The bills include far-reaching provisions that would require changes to DNS, changes that would endanger Internet security, and are so broadly written that although they target foreign file-sharing sites they could target just about any American website as well. There are also provisions about willful infringement and public performance that seek to rewrite current copyright law, putting libraries at risk (which means that this bill has the dubious distinction of endangering both my day job and my volunteer work). This set of bills, if passed, would surely have a chilling effect on one of the most vibrant sectors of our economy — and, in the case of Wikimedia, one of the largest and broadest-reaching educational projects in the world, which is why we have officially come out against the bill as well. One of the things that I have been slow to learn — and that not many people know — is that organizations like Wikimedia, or like many of the largest tech firms listed above, depend entirely for their continued safe existence on certain provisions of US copyright law. Take those away, and the Internet as we know it is at risk.

But don’t take my word for it — read that letter from law professors above. These bills must not pass.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

This week marks, more or less, the sixth anniversary of my move to Davis in order to take a job in a library. Six years! I moved in mid-October and started work on November 1. My initial nervousness was quickly extinguished in a rush of things to do and to learn. That first month was all training and shadowing colleagues, frantically taking notes on our resources and how to do things. “Take advantage of this year,” my boss told me at the time, “because this is when you will learn how to do your basic job, and have the luxury to concentrate on it. Later, you will be juggling many other things.” Six years on, I certainly know what she meant. The core parts of my job — the collection development, reference, instruction — are still my favorite parts of the work, and still challenge and inspire me, but they often seem to get done now in the small spaces in between other projects.

Six years. This has been an interesting, challenging and deliberate period of my life. I have taken this time — and I feel like I have needed all of this time — to figure out how to be self-sustaining; to figure out myself. Sometimes this kind of self-inquiry is a midlife experience for people. I took my late twenties for it, instead of having a child or being hedonistic or going to grad school or I suppose any of a number of other possibilities. I do not know if I will regret this choice later on in life, or be pleased at my own deliberateness. I do not know if I am just being pretentious about something everyone goes through anyway. In the Eighties I would have been a new career woman. In the Oughties I just feel lucky to have gotten a job in the first place. Time will tell.

Space for reflection is important. I have lived in one house since I moved here. I have made it my own. I have hung pictures. I have assembled bookcases. I have learned to live with my own lack of housekeeping, which never pleases me. Before Davis, I have always had housemates or partners, roommates or parents to keep me company. Here I have lived alone, aside from a month or two here and there when a friend stayed with me, and frequent visitors. But this is my house (though I don’t own it, I have claimed it). I have spent a lot of time inside it. My genetic lineage is to be a homebody, I suppose; like my father before me, I feel comfortable when I am at home. I love to travel but do not like to move. The thought is mildly horrifying to me.

I have kept myself to myself here. A good friend only became that way because she pestered me. “You’re hard to get to know, Phoebe” she said. Since then we’ve traveled together, lived together, I went to her wedding the other month. I guess persistence pays off.

Not only am I hard to get to know but I don’t put much effort into it, either. I am not especially social. I have not dated seriously in six years (an occasional cause of angst, but not something, if I am honest with myself, that often actually worries me). I’m pleased in fact that I have managed to figure out how to take care of myself, in all of those elaborate planning-for-emergencies ways that single people do and that people with a strong social network don’t have to think about as much. I think it is fair to say that this is my personality showing through at this point rather than the hardship of moving to a brand-new place and starting from scratch; I have a number of good friends here that I love spending time with, a number of communities that intersect in pleasing ways. I am even occasionally internet-famous in a small way here; I once sat at a table of people at a cocktail party in SF and people started talking about my book. They didn’t know I had written it. I was cool with that.

I suppose it is more conventional to take a look back when you reach five years, but aside from a mention at work I didn’t pay much attention to that anniversary last year. I was busy. That’s perhaps the most notable thing about my time in Davis: I’ve done a hell of a lot. I co-wrote a book (though I am still working on that impossible goal of writing well). I have done a different big project at work every year. I have gotten to be known as someone who is pretty good at planning and facilitating events, which wasn’t true when I started. I’ve also learned how to give a talk comfortably in front of just about anyone — also not true when I started.

And then there’s Wikimedia. That first winter here, lonely and a bit bored, I volunteered to help plan a conference in Boston, threw myself into it, and haven’t looked back since. I have made many of my closest friends doing this work, and have been absorbed pretty much continuously in what I think is the most exciting project of our generation. I could not have dreamed back in 2006 that I would end up on the Board this year; but my interest in it has actually grown since then in a fairly linear way, as I became interested in community governance and what that means. This Board service is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do for Wikimedia; I am full of self-doubt and often exhausted. But I cannot imagine anything more important, either.

Over the last six years I have also learned, simultaneously and in large part because of Wikimedia, most of what I know about copyright politics, and free knowledge as a movement, and open access. They did not focus on these things when I was in library school. I hope they do now; I think these are also the core issues of our profession. I’ve thought that I wouldn’t mind becoming a full-time scholarly communications librarian, but I think I would miss science and engineering if I did that. At any rate, it is fair to say that after six years of being a professional librarian — which means that I’ve worked in libraries now for a decade! — I know how the field is shaped, and I know what I am interested in, and that is valuable as well.

But all of that aloofness aside I’ve worked hard since moving here to keep up with my friends, who are neatly divided between the northwest, the east coast, my hometown and the rest of the world (which is problematic for deciding where to go on long weekends). I rely a lot on those friendships; I am grateful to them. My best friends would say that the above about being self-reliant is all rot and that in fact I need them for validation and shoulders to cry on all the time, as if I were homesick, which perhaps I am. It is unclear where I would call truly home at this point. I sometimes feel like I am a tiny pioneer; a pioneer with IM and facebook. What is this land of aged hippies and college students that I have found myself in? Are they savage, or kind? Shall I investigate, and report back?

I like to practice having a detached eye, it seems. I wanted to go to every continent before I was 30. I came close. I am missing Australia and Antarctica. I could really care less about Antarctica so basically it’s just Australia. Also sub-saharan Africa, to be fair. And also I have never been to either India or China, which are practically continents; at any rate my list won’t be complete without them. And I haven’t really spent enough time in South America, and hardly any at all in Latin America. Suffice it to say I still have a lot of places to go. But I have flown a lot in the last six years; for quite a bit of the time I’ve lived here I’ve averaged a trip a month somewhere. I know it makes me kind of an asshole considering all the poverty and climate change and inequitable resource distribution in the world, but I really love to fly. I don’t think that was true before I moved here. Now there’s something about the takeoff of a plane that thrills me every time.

Which means I suppose that the last six years have been as much about learning how to leave as learning how to stay. I have gone places, and discovered things, that I only dimly imagined six years ago, and some things that I didn’t imagine at all — and those have been the best.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

Followup: Thanks Brad, Delphine, Anthere, SebMol & Ilario for your responses. Everyone else: post yours too (I like starting a discussion on blogs, btw; it is less immediate than mailing lists but it feels more personal in a way, and gives everyone a chance to really expand and explore their own thoughts).

Anthere raises great points about what actually happens now for small chapters. I have been thinking the last few days (actually much longer than that, but I have been reminded of it recently) that I have no real idea how the current non-fundraising chapters feel about fundraising. If you’re in a smaller chapter, what do you think: would it be helpful to have base operating expenses funded with grants every year? Would it be helpful to get some other kind of guidance, or only project-based grants? What would make it more possible to do more projects in your home country (the end goal!)

Lots of people bring up controls and better controls. I think it is likely that we will all be on the same page about a few ideas (phrased here in my words, not Stu’s):
* We (everyone) have a responsibility to manage donor’s money well, legally and transparently
* Every group that handles money should be able to give assurance to every other part of the organization that it is doing so well and legally, with good documentation and reporting

In other words: we are accountable to the donors first and foremost, to each other, and to responsible stewardship of the projects. (And if we can’t agree on this, why not?)

Delphine talks about fiduciary duty. As I wrote below, here’s my layperson (non-accountant) understanding — the WMF board is not the only entity that should be worried about financial controls, but we have a specific and clear duty to do so, and to make sure that money that comes in through Foundation-run projects (i.e. project banners) is handled well. Our “duty” is corporate — to the organization and to the donors.

Part of this is a moral duty. We are a serious organization; we want to be around for a long time; we believe in information transparency; and we need to get it right. That duty remains regardless of organizational structure (i.e. whether there is a US chapter or an international audit committee or whatever), and whatever structures are set up should make sure that it is addressed.

I like ideas about increased international reporting structures. I am still trying to sort out what the best ideas would be, both philosophically and practically. Delphine is right: the WMF is totally worried; we take the fundraising seriously and want to get it right, as we all do. As for why these questions are still/again on the table — things have changed since the beginning. We’re raising 2-3x more money now than just a couple years ago; there are way more chapters; and priorities for the WMF have changed (taking on mission-based work like the global south). We’d be fools not to revisit the question of funding.

All that said, I personally think the principles of good process and good communication are very important; we shouldn’t have this conversation in a closed room. (Either the board room or WMF office or the chapters list!) I’m grateful that Stu started this blog conversation; and I will try my best to make this an open process as we go through this round of discussion.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

A new part of the WikiSym conference launched yesterday — the first ever WikiViz visualization contest. This is super cool — details below or here. If you know any great viz teams encourage them to participate!

WikiViz 2011: Visualizing the impact of Wikipedia

What is WikiViz 2011

How to participate

Important dates

Awards

The Jury

Contact

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

This editorial of mine appeared in the Wikipedia Signpost this week. Feel free to translate/repost.

—–

Time to vote

Phoebe Ayers has been a Wikipedian since 2003 and is a science and engineering librarian at UC Davis; she was appointed to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees in 2010.

It’s time again for the Board of Trustees elections for the Wikimedia Foundation. This year, 19 candidates are running for three open seats. If you are an active editor (with more than 300 edits before April 15, and 20 recent edits – a threshold determined by the independent elections committee) you are eligible to vote, and can do so from whichever wiki you edit most; directions are here. You can vote up until the end of June 12 (UTC), so do so soon.

But wait, let’s back up. Elections for what now? And why should you vote? What’s going on?

The Board of Trustees is the governing body for the Wikimedia Foundation. Here’s what that means: the Board is entrusted with the ultimate legal responsibility for and authority over the Foundation’s $20 million annual budget, and with setting the direction for the Foundation along with the Executive Director, Sue Gardner. The Foundation provides the hosting and technical infrastructure to run almost 300 Wikipedias, plus Wiktionary, Commons, Wikiquote, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, Wikispecies, and MediaWiki projects; the Foundation also provides press, legal, financial, and outreach support for these projects.

The Board of Trustees annual Q&A panel at last year’s Wikimania. I am standing and introducing myself to the attendees, shortly after being appointed and announced.

Does the Board intervene in Wikipedia editorial decisions? No. Do we have much to do with daily decisions on the projects? Not really. It’s much more high-level than that. If you’ve seen the fundraising banners on the projects – well, the Board doesn’t design or approve the banners. We don’t specify in what manner the banners are rolled out. We don’t even hire the fundraising staff, or say that the fundraiser should start in November. All of that comes under the authority of the Executive Director. What the Board does do is give the Executive Director the authority to raise and spend this money in the first place.

The Board is also the body ultimately responsible for taking the long view of all the projects: where are we going to be in ten, twenty, a hundred years? What’s our mission, and will it stay the same? What kind of a body do we want the Wikimedia Foundation to be, and what direction do we want the Wikimedia movement to go in?

There are ten Board members, all with two year terms. Three members are directly elected by the editing community, two are appointed by the chapters, one is the “founder” seat occupied by Jimmy Wales, and the remainder are appointed by the Board itself to ensure we have a good mix of expertise. Having half of the seats community-selected (community-elected and chapter-appointed) helps to ensure that the Board always has a community perspective and orientation.

It’s important to note, however, that Board members aren’t direct representatives. I was put on the Board last summer through the chapter-appointment process, but I don’t specifically represent the chapters in Board discussions; although I’m a long-time Wikipedian, I’ve never even belonged to a chapter myself. The point of the Board is to keep all of the interests of the Wikimedia Foundation – including our mission, our projects, and our global community – central to what we do. So the people elected to the Board should possess general qualities (some of which are laid out in the Board manual), as well as an understanding of Wikimedia and the challenges we face, and relevant skills and experience that can be brought to the table. And Board members should be dedicated: this is a demanding position that requires a serious commitment of time and energy, an occasional thick skin, and belief in Wikimedia’s mission.

That commitment isn’t necessarily visible. For one thing, the Board is international, and the position requires a fair amount of travel: three to four in-person meetings a year, held in San Francisco and in other countries with the Chapters meeting and Wikimania. Added to that is a time commitment for online meetings, reading emails (there’s a lot of reading – and writing!) and generally staying abreast of the movement. But the commitment of energy is substantial as well: the questions the Board faces aren’t easy and don’t have pre-determined outcomes, and figuring out the future of the most important online project of our time is not something that has been done before. Thankfully, it’s a collaborative position: the Board is supported by the hard work of the staff, the Executive Director, and the many Wikimedians who hash out difficult questions of projects, languages, chapters, outreach, and development. And we rely on each other, as colleagues, to approach our task with good faith and good judgment.

“Huh,” you might be thinking to yourself. “So who’s running then, exactly?”

Of the 19 people running for those three community-elected seats, three are incumbents (Ting, SJ and Kat), who were voted in two years ago. Some candidates have held or currently hold community-elected positions in chapters; a few have helped found chapters. Several of the candidates have had long-standing involvement in Wikimedia committees and governance activities, and some long-term editors are running. In other words, this year there’s a great field of devoted Wikimedians.

“Ok, that’s all fine and good,” you might say, “but I don’t know any of them. Who should I vote for? How do I decide?”

Each candidate has a statement up here, and each has answered questions (you can still ask further questions). Here’s my advice: look for traits of outstanding leadership, good judgment, and collaboration. Has the person shown evidence of being able to thoughtfully consider issues, to listen to diverse views, and to build consensus in a small (and a large) group? Have they done cool projects? Do they have outside skills or an important perspective they can bring to the board? Do they understand the job of a Board member, and the Wikimedia Foundation? And finally, do you agree with where they think Wikimedia should go, and with what issues they consider important?

Once you decide who you want on the board, you can vote by ranking candidates; make sure you rank all of the candidates you want to see elected higher than those you don’t want (1 is highest). Only around 1,500 people or so have voted so far, compared with around 3,000 to 4,000 in years past. But there’s still time to vote! You have the chance to help shape Wikimedia governance, and I encourage you to take advantage of it.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

It is Whole Earth Festival weekend here in Davis and it’s a good weekend for it — not blazingly hot as in some years, overcast in fact, which is a rarity this late in the year. I got to sit out on the quad during my lunch break yesterday, getting some sun and listening to a local band and checking out all the vendors and people-watching, and it was a pleasant slow-motion moment, but it was enough; I haven’t been back yet this weekend.

I have been home now for five weeks, without traveling anywhere except for a day trip up to the coast, but for five weeks I have slept every night in my own bed — a period of time that is both delightful and impossibly long. This is a first in three or four years, I think; it’s not that I have to travel so much for my day job, but I like to take precipitate weekend trips to see friends and family, and between that and vacations and conferences and Wikimedia events I just end up away on a pretty regular basis. I know the airline safety speech by heart, for instance.

So  I don’t really know what to do with myself at home for such a long uninterrupted period. Oh, I have big plans — when have I ever not? — but I find myself at the end of the month with much undone, with an office that’s still a mess, with friends unseen and gyms not gone too and projects untouched, just like normal.

Here are some things that I have done in the past month.

• I started a pottery class, which earned me a bit of derision from a friend who claimed that being a potter in northern California was about as stereotypical as I could get. But I’m not devoting my life to it, and it’s soothing. I went through a period in my very early twenties of filling my time with art and art classes, and I did a fair amount of handbuilding then, but I never threw on the wheel; this is a wheelthrowing class.  I haven’t made anything I thought was worth keeping yet. But the rhythm of learning how to form a simple cylinder: cone up, back down again — is addictive and is a kind of tactile knowledge that it does my brain good to try and learn. I needed something less think-y in my life.
• I have been working. (It helps to like to multitask in this job, which is one of the things that I find pleasing about it, and it also helps to enjoy the sensation of having an endless amount more you could be doing.) Most notably this month I have been beefing up on the NSF data mandate. I know this sounds like a deathly dull bit of big-science bureaucracy (which it is); but it’s also actually fairly groundbreaking and cool — do science on the public dime and you have to share your results (not just your publications) with others. No one is quite sure what this means yet, so there’s much discussion in my corner of the library world, and I have been doing a fair bit of reading, spoke on a panel, put together a webpage for the library, etc.
• Along with the rest of the Wikimedia Board I helped craft our first-ever resolution about the community.
• I just got done hosting a program for our local SLA chapter, which I am the president of this year — the national president came to visit us — and I put together a new website for our chapter, which I am pleased with. I didn’t design the template, but I did learn a lot more about WordPress in the doing, which is useful.
• I went to see some roller derby! Our local girls the Sacred City Derby Girls, who I am becoming a big fan of. They were awesome, of course.
• Miscellaneous domestic junk, like cleaning out my closet (though in truth I abandoned the effort halfway through). Also, tearing up the lawn. Don’t ask. (We’re mulching it).
• Aforementioned trip to the coast, which was awesome.
• I’ve been watching a fair amount of tv and reading a lot too, online and off — nothing very notable on either front, but I don’t seem to quite have the brainpower to tackle anything very hard. I feel like I’m in recovery from something, though I’m not quite sure what.

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I have not been writing much, which makes me feel like a fool; all this time, and I have my hands on a keyboard 9 hours a day or more, but I haven’t written much meaningful lately (haven’t even kept up with a diary or the blog). The lack makes me itchy and depressed in a way I find hard to diagnose until it’s too late, too persistent and too obvious. I’m afraid of starting to write seriously (rather than just incidentally), in a way; like it will all be too much and I won’t be able to write anything, or else like I won’t ever stop. Clearly I need to put my mind to it and try harder, or else I really will feel like I’m just marking time, which is something that threatens during long stretches when I’m prone to boredom.

You know what I read that was inspirational the other day? A writer’s biography, of all things. I read this mystery author named Elizabeth Peters, who you have probably heard of if you work in a library because her books are in with all those other awful bestsellers where the author’s name is larger on the cover than the title. (The kind of author that, as a young page in a public library, I used to mentally measure in shelf-feet — Daniel Steele is one of the worst offenders, as a three or four shelfer). My excuse for reading Elizabeth Peters is that her books are funny and smart and fun, especially the Amelia Peabody series, which is the only one I’ve devoted myself too — it’s about a Victorian lady archeologist in Egypt, and since the author was trained as an Egyptologist it’s all spot-on and accurate so I can claim I’m learning things too.

But here’s the thing; her name isn’t Peters, that’s a pseudonym. Her name is actually Barbara Mertz, and Barbara Mertz in turn writes under the name Barbara Michaels, who I know you have heard of if you work in a library because her books not only have the author’s name larger than the title but there’s about a million of them. In fact, all told, Mertz/Peters/Michaels has written some 70-odd books, including two scholarly books about Egypt. 70! Sure, a lot of the novels are formulaic, and I can’t really speak for the Michaels books because I’ve never read any of them, but at least the Peters books are pretty damn good, too (which is not just something I’m just saying because I like them; Mertz was awarded a MWA Grand Master in 1998). And you know what the kicker is? She wasn’t published until she was 37. 37! Before she wrote her first book, Mertz got a doctorate (in Egyptology), raised a couple of kids, lived abroad, etc.  She is 83 and just published her latest books last year.

Now personally, I am under no illusions that I’ll become a best-selling novelist; I’m not prolific enough, nor am I interested in writing genre fiction, as much as I love to read the stuff. Nor have I even done the things Mertz managed in the first half of her life. But that’s not really the part I find inspirational; it’s the sheer undaunted vitality that is clear in her life and works, the energy of doing it all and spending forty years writing after already living what most people would call a full life. I will read her books with new appreciation in the future.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

I am fond of a good manifesto, of documents that are a call to arms, an inspiration.

Serve your country food! from the Greenhorns project, is a great manifesto. It proclaims support for young farmers, for the next generation of the network that keeps us all alive.

Call to arms

Arms strong and hands calloused, eyes open to the beauty of every morning. Our spirits are prepared for the long row still to hoe, our hearts full with the support of family and community. Let us unite, young farmers! Let us fight for the right to farmable land! To the pursuit of an equitable marketplace, and for recognition from society. We are here, we are indispensable, we are a cornerstone of the future of food. Let us welcome many new entrants into agriculture, striving to share our lessons, seeds and stories with generations to come. Now is the time for action.

What I especially like about this document is that its list of goals takes into account all sides of the story — the practical and spiritual, the huge and the small. I particularly appreciate this goal:

“A cultural revaluation of farming as an ambitious, worthwhile life-venture, celebrated by family, church, and society”.

I live in one of the core agricultural areas of the country, and I have dear friends who farm. And of course I grew up in a rural area, too; and still, this goal is a long row to hoe. Farming is incredibly difficult, brain-intensive, and absolutely vital: but basically unrecognized as a pillar of our society. But we, the hipster avant-garde — yes, even the urban, the technocratic, the cognoscenti, the fashion-forward — we can change things, and we must. Have I mentioned that some of the coolest people I know are farmers?

The longer I live here in a farming community, and the more fashionable it becomes to know about food politics (thanks, Michael Pollan) and the more that the issues of farming and food become common topics (Jamie Oliver, anyone?), the more convinced I am that really working on the infrastructure of farming — the problems of health care and access to land and federal subsidies and everything else that the Greenhorns mention — is a core issue, something we must work on — right here, right now, literally in our backyards — to see a bright future and the world we want. School lunches, rural land preservation, safe water and a healthy. delicious diet — these are things that we cannot take for granted, this day or any other. Visit a farmer’s market; eat a local vegetable, and rejoice. Happy Earth day.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.

The National Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, is a big fan of Wikipedia. And as he recently wrote on the National Archives blog, “With 42 percent of the American public relying on Wikipedia, it makes sense for the records and resources of the National Archives to be present in this space.”  That enthusiasm has translated into support for the local D.C. Wikipedia group — the National Archives hosted their fabulous WikiX conference in January, where Ferriero spoke — and now, the Archives has announced that they are seeking a “Wikipedian-in-Residence”:

The National Archives seeks applicants for a Wikipedian in Residence for Summer 2011. The Wikipedian in Residence is a student intern role. The Wikipedian in Residence will work as a community coordinator and strengthen the relationship between the Archives and the Wikipedian community through a range of activities.

Find out more and apply here.

I am beyond thrilled that this partnership is occurring. The National Archives deserves much praise for being a progressive leader among archives and libraries and for being willing to experiment and work with our volunteer community. And the Wikimedia D.C. group deserves a shout-out for making this happen!

The Wikipedian-in-Residence model was pioneered by Liam Wyatt at the British Museum, and this and other initiatives are just some of several projects with cultural organizations (or GLAMs: Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) and Wikimedia in recent months.  A similar exciting partnership was also just recently announced between Wikimédia France and the Palace of Versailles, who are sponsoring a French Wikipedian to be the Wikipedian-in-Residence at Versailles.

I certainly hope that many more cultural institutations will follow in the footsteps of these innovative organizations. There is much still to be done in thinking about how best to combine the deep knowledge and resources of traditional libraries and museums with the dramatic reach and size of Wikimedia projects in making knowledge freely available online for all.

More information on projects like this can be found on our outreach wiki, including resources for developing a new project; while specific advice for cultural institutions wanting to work with Wikipedia can be found here.

Originally published at No maps for these territories. You can comment here or there.