Re: [Wikimedia-l] Cc-by-sa 4.0, Wikimedia logos
Kat, Thanks for the comments. You say that CC has its struggles but this is not something I currently see as a major concern. Would you be able to encourage CC to post more recent 990s and audits so that others can evaluate for ourselves? If CC published a rehabilitation plan, that would be helpful too. Thanks, Pine On Feb 13, 2015 10:29 PM, Kat Walsh k...@mindspillage.org wrote: I guess I am in as good a place as any to try to answer this question (and I'm speaking only for myself, here). I think only the barest sliver of the organization needs to exist for the licenses to exist--that is, someone willing to carry on the name and core mission, even if the org can't itself pay anyone's salary to work on it full time. Much of the other work CC does is more resource-intensive, especially if it wants to take on the long-term issue of policy change, but let's say we're only concerned with the immediate scope of your question. For your particular concern to be addressed, someone needs to be willing to undertake needed maintenance of some canonical version of the licenses. The vast majority of the time, this means simply keeping the servers running so that they remain accessible; on rare and what I hope are increasingly infrequent occasions, it means revision of the license suite. (I have joked that I will be happy to consult on the 5.0 revision from my retirement home.) The main resource this takes is time, from people with the necessary knowledge and commitment to do it. This rare process benefits from an organization that can support paying for full-time work on it, but does not strictly require it. So the organization and the licenses are tied together in that someone needs to be the license steward, but not necessarily the organization in its current form. (The real requirement is that the license steward have the trust of the license-using community, so that people will still use the CC licenses as stewarded by whoever does it. It is possible to have competing forks of the licenses and this is a bad idea for the same reason forks of many types of standards with network effects are a bad idea.) CC currently has seen better times--in an attempt to make its financial situation sustainable many staff were recently let go, which is why I am no longer there. But it is not yet down to bare bones, and I think there is a much greater likelihood that support would continue to exist for that bare bones work (and if I'm putting my speculative hat on, paths for such support could include getting taken under the wing of a law school, for example). tl;dr: CC has its struggles but this is not something I currently see as a major concern. -Kat waving hello to the CC staff who lurk on this list... On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 9:34 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Hi. On the subject of Creative Commons... How stable is the Creative Commons organization lately? How tied together are Creative Commons the non-profit organization and Creative Commons the licenses? Or perhaps more bluntly: if Creative Commons the organization collapses, what's the likely short-term and long-term impact to Wikimedia wikis? MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Engineering Community
Personal opinion: as I recall, a big chunk of that scorn came from WMF engineers. I appreciate it wasn't your intent, but the way you're phrasing things here makes it look very much like you're saying 'hey, I bumped your salary, throw some of your time my way' - which is not how it works. Ideas should be worked on or not based on whether they can stand on their own, not whether or not the writer thinks people owe them. I agree that this is something that should be worked on: I disagree that the idea, or your request for engineer time, has anything to do with the question Rachel actually asked, which was (to rephrase it): 'community people, what ideas do you have for better ways for us to communicate around software?' 'Work on my thing' does not answer that question. On Saturday, 14 February 2015, James Salsman jsals...@gmail.com wrote: Rachel diCerbo wrote: ... Community Engagement is continuously considering effective ways of interacting with you around product development and would love your suggestions. What kinds of communications from WMF would you like to see? Please volunteer to co-mentor my GSoC proposal: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review There is absolutely no way I can possibly do this without a co-mentor from the WMF or WEF. It's not a hard task, and one of the major benefits I just learned yesterday is a robust implementation of per-word text attribution, which amazingly still hasn't been available to the wider community in a way that handles reverted blanking and text moves since WikiTrust went offline. Maribel Acosta, Fabian Floeck, and Andriy Rodchenko did a suitable replacement algorithm in 2013, but it hasn't been folded back into the Wikimedia Utilities distribution. Please, WMF engineering staff, remember 2.5 years ago when I was literally the only one publicly arguing that you should be paid market rate for tech workers instead of lower nonprofit worker salaries? I took so much public abuse and scorn for that for over a year until it happened. Please consider giving back by co-mentoring the accuracy review GSoC proposal. It shouldn't take more than a few hours per week over the summer. Best regards, James Salsman ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org javascript:; ?subject=unsubscribe -- Sent from my mobile computing device of Lovecraftian complexity and horror. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Cc-by-sa 4.0, Wikimedia logos
See also https://creativecommons.org/board , https://creativecommons.org/tag/ceo It's important to note that CC has dozens of independent national chapters (affiliates https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Category:Jurisdictions ), many of which are university centres/departments; some are rather big and do international work as well, like NEXA ( https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Italy ). It's impossible for them all to collapse at once; in case of fatal emergency, it would probably be comparatively easy to transition the barebone CC infrastructure (main trademarks and website) from one org to another. Nemo ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements] Wikimedia Foundation Quarterly Report, October-December 2014
Hi all, As Erik announced in November [1], the Foundation has changed its reporting from the monthly cycle that has been in place since 2008 to a quarterly rhythm. A main reason being to better align it with the quarterly planning and goalsetting process that has been extended to the entire organization since Lila took the helm. The first of these new quarterly reports has now been published here, in the format of a slide deck suitable for a 90 minute presentation: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Quarterly_Report,_FY_2014-15_Q2_(October-December).pdf As discussed before [2], the main objectives and design principles for this report were: * Accountability: Help our movement and our supporters understand how we spend our effort, and what we accomplish. * Learning together: Highlight important internal external data, trends and lessons. * Presentable: Anyone, from volunteer to the executive director, should be able to present the work of the WMF using this report. * Reasonable effort: Pull as much as possible from existing sources, e.g., quarterly review slide decks minutes. Please refer to the linked PDF for the full report (I will see to provide a wiki version on Meta in the next few days, exploring the best technical process for this kind of conversion). But to offer an excerpt from the “Key insights and trends” part (slide 5): -- * Readership: Globally, pageviews are flat. Mobile is growing, desktop is shrinking. Given a growing global potential audience, this means we need to invest in the readership experience, with focus on mobile. We have learned that we can move at highest velocity on mobile apps due to their self-contained nature. * Beyond editing: Inviting readers to perform classification tasks on their smartphone is showing promise; response quality is exceeding expectations. * Performance: The implementation of HHVM across Wikimedia sites is an engineering success story and demonstrates that dedicated focus in the area of site performance can pay off relatively quickly. * Fundraising: Mobile matters -- thanks to focused effort, we were able to increase the mobile revenue share from 1.7% to 16.1% (2013 vs. 2014 year-end campaign). -- Be aware that in the interest of readability, the report focuses on the work done on a number of key priorities rather than attempting a comprehensive list of every team’s goals - for a more detailed view, consider referring to the documentation of that team’s quarterly reviews [3]. This being the first report in this new format, we will surely tweak format, content (including the choice of key metrics) and process for the subsequent issues. Comments continue to be welcome at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_reports . Regards, Tilman [1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2014-November/001005.html [2] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2015-February/076747.html [3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMF_Metrics_and_activities_meetings/Quarterly_reviews -- Tilman Bayer Senior Analyst Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB ___ Please note: all replies sent to this mailing list will be immediately directed to Wikimedia-l, the public mailing list of the Wikimedia community. For more information about Wikimedia-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l ___ WikimediaAnnounce-l mailing list wikimediaannounc...@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaannounce-l ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Love on the wikis
Thanks for your feedback, MZ, Pine, Emily and John, I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed this content collection about love. We’ll review the impact of this curation experiment at the end of next week and share our findings afterwards. I like Pine’s suggestion of hosting an office hours on this general topic. We’re planning a community outreach about the Wikimedia Blog next month, to learn how it and related media can best serve the needs of our movement. This seems like a good way to continue the conversation and I will propose a date here in coming weeks. In the meantime, we welcome more feedback in the comments of this blog post: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/13/love-on-the-wikis/ To be clear, when I asked ‘should we do this more often?’, I didn’t propose to restrict these experiments to just the topic of ‘love’. There are many other interesting topics for which we could surface great wiki content together: freedom, education, diversity or civility come to mind, for example. Or major news stories throughout the year. Other ideas welcome. If these experiments turn out to be useful and cost-effective, we might consider hosting them monthly or quarterly, as needed. Thanks again to everyone who participated in this quest for the many meanings of love. I look forward to continuing this discussion in coming weeks. :) Fabrice Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2015 09:09:55 +1100 From: John Mark Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Love on the wikis Message-ID: cao9u_z7t-x1ukaw5prj69rz9jrzyehoewfecqbvq+uyjjsd...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 4:13 AM, Emily Blanchard eblanch...@wikimedia.org wrote: Thanks Fabrice! This is pure sweetness. St. Valentine's Day comes but once a year! Actually ... It is celebrated at different times in the year, in various parts of the world. And the Eastern Orthodox Church officially celebrates it twice. ;-) -- John Vandenberg Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2015 09:13:14 -0800 From: Emily Blanchard eblanch...@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Love on the wikis Message-ID: 7550866904249160570@unknownmsgid Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Thanks Fabrice! This is pure sweetness. St. Valentine's Day comes but once a year! Emily Blanchard On Feb 13, 2015, at 9:38 PM, Pine W wiki.p...@gmail.com wrote: Thanks Fabrice. I would be interested in an office hour about social media strategy in general. Do you think that an office hour could be arranged? The office hour discussion could inform future curations, as well as editor engagement and reader engagement efforts. Thanks! Pine On Feb 13, 2015 9:23 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Fabrice Florin wrote: Many thanks to everyone who contributed to our community-curated love collection! All your fine suggestions broadened our perspectives about love. Together, we found some really well-written, factual and nuanced articles, as well as many humorous, dramatic or beautiful images, which gave us a better understanding about love and why it matters. Thanks for putting this together! I really like when we can highlight some of the beautiful content we have, particularly media on Commons. :-) What do you think about this curation experiment? It's cute, but probably as a once a year kind of thing. MZMcBride ___ Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2015 18:14:31 -0800 From: Fabrice Florin fflo...@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia List Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Love on the wikis Message-ID: 21c17610-7315-431d-bc32-535ba9147...@wikimedia.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Hi folks, Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we’ve published two new stories on the Wikimedia Blog, for your enjoyment: Love on the wikis Here are our favorite articles and images about love, collectively hand-picked by community members. https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/13/love-on-the-wikis/ A WikiLove story How two Wikipedians fell in love while volunteering in Israel, thanks to a shared passion for knowledge. https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/02/13/wikilove-story/ Many thanks to everyone who contributed to our community-curated love collection! All your fine suggestions broadened our perspectives about love. Together, we found some really well-written, factual and nuanced articles, as well as many humorous, dramatic or beautiful images, which gave us a better understanding about love and why it matters. What do you think about this curation experiment? Did you learn anything new? Should we do it again? If so, what themes should we focus on next? Please chime in the comments of the first story above, with your ideas and suggestions. We hope that
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Cc-by-sa 4.0, Wikimedia logos
It appears to me from my surface-level review that there are some long-term finance and governance troubles at the main CC org. Now seems like a good time for WMF and other relevant orgs to develop a contingency plan in case the main CC org continues to have problems or ceases to be functional. I hope that the CC chapers have contingency plans, and I hope that we on this list will hear directly from WMF Legal that they are watching this situation carefully and are making appropriate plans based on what they learn. Thanks, Pine On Feb 15, 2015 12:40 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemow...@gmail.com wrote: See also https://creativecommons.org/board , https://creativecommons.org/ tag/ceo It's important to note that CC has dozens of independent national chapters (affiliates https://wiki.creativecommons. org/Category:Jurisdictions ), many of which are university centres/departments; some are rather big and do international work as well, like NEXA ( https://wiki.creativecommons.org/Italy ). It's impossible for them all to collapse at once; in case of fatal emergency, it would probably be comparatively easy to transition the barebone CC infrastructure (main trademarks and website) from one org to another. Nemo ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Accounting software for thematic orgs
Hi Treasurers and other finance people, I realize that we had this discussion some months ago about accounting software. I just wanted to follow up by letting you know that Cascadia decided to go with Xero as we start. Your advice was helpful and I greatly appreciate it. I hope to meet many of you at the Wikimedia Conference in Germany this year. Regards, Pine (now Executive Director for Cascadia Wikimedians User Group) On Aug 20, 2014 4:12 AM, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: Hi Pine, I started off doing the accounts at WMUK several years ago and looked at a fair few different systems, including open source. Initially we used Gnucash, I believe, but because no-one else used it - including our auditors - it was not very useful when we needed to create year end accounts. I also considered CiviCRM after viewing a talk from the Swedish chapter in 2012. However, the talk was not encouraging - CiviCRM needs a *lot *of work to be useable as an accounting system. I would not therefore recommend Gnucash or CiviCRM or any other open source system: you will find it almost impossible to find an accountant who uses them, and also almost impossible to find a CiviCRM developer who is also an accountant! Your auditors will not know how to use the data and will not have the programs to access it, so in the end you will have to pay extra for the free software. In short: open source programs are good for small charity accounts, but the moment you start hiring staff (of any sort), or have fixed assets or non-cash donations, the system does not scale and as a result you will incur large overheads trying to get it to work. You might run into a problem with CiviCRM if you need to generate invoices for a conference you run in three or four years time - will your system be able to handle it, or will you need to upgrade everything at much greater cost? We also looked at Quickbooks, Sage, and a few others. In the end, we picked Sage - not because it was cheap, or because it was ethical - but because it is the UK standard and practically all UK accountants know how to use it. It has a huge support network, and it is scalable from a self-employed person up to an organisation with many thousands of employees. Sage is not used much in the USA though, so Quickbooks may be a better idea for you. My advice to you would be: - Plan for the future - ten year's time. Your solution needs to be scalable with little fuss. - Use something that has a proven track record - don't got for anything like a startup, because you need it supported in future and you can't take the risk. - Cloud-based is good, but the Treasurer really needs to understand what's happening - things should go through him where possible. - Don't be afraid to spend money if money needs to be spent. - Don't be afraid to ask the WMF directly for their advice. They know their stuff and it'd be good if your accounts were run on a similar system to theirs - cheaper in the long run, and you've got someone to turn to if it all breaks. I hope this helps! Feel free to drop me an email if you have any more specific questions. Richard Symonds Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992 Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). *Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.* On 20 August 2014 10:57, Manuel Schneider manuel.schnei...@wikimedia.ch wrote: Hi Pine, you may want to evaluate CiviCRM. It is not perfect but supports accounting (rather than just recording donations as before) about a year. The advantage of CiviCRM is the fact that it integrates membership management, mailings, donors management and that it can be used centrally by all the committee members. The setup and customization is not so easy with CiviCRM but there are plenty of people in the movement who gathered some experience with that. /Manuel -- Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Lausanne, +41 (21) 34066-22 - www.wikimedia.ch ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
