Dear colleagues, With the transition well underway for the Foundation’s Chief Executive Officer, it is time for me to begin my own transition from the organization. I shared with our executive team earlier this month that I will be departing on 1 April 2021.
There is never a perfect time to leave an organization. It’s difficult to step away from this important work, and a community of colleagues, collaborators, and friends that I admire and appreciate. However, after successfully delivering two major strategic projects on behalf of the Foundation, notably the final movement strategy recommendations and coordinating the Foundation’s programme to combat disinformation, and with Katherine's departure as our CEO — the timing feels right. I want to afford the next chief executive the opportunity to select a chief of staff who has as close a working dynamic as Katherine and I have shared. Many of you know me from our work together in the free and open movement over many years — we’ve discussed the future of the web over a good coffee at MozFest, debated copyright reform and license terms at CC Summits, or worked to reshape our global movements in Berlin, Stockholm, Esino Lario, Tunis, and online. Over the past decade, it’s been a real joy to have so many conversations about the future we want to build together, and then to actually go out and work on it. The Wikimedia communities are at the center of the world’s most powerful collective act, and it’s been thrilling to be a part of it with you. For me, this most recent role in our open community was an opportunity to make a lasting impact on the future of free knowledge. It has been a tremendous honor to get to know our communities more deeply through the movement strategy process, and support this work to develop the strategy towards tangible actions that are now being implemented across our movement. It was exactly a year ago today that a small group of us met in New York City to finalize the draft recommendations, and today there are concrete commitments and an incredible momentum towards a new model of distributed, community-led governance that I know will reshape the movement forever. I am so grateful for the opportunity to have done this work with our movement, and for the collaboration and friendships that developed along the way. I’m also proud of our work together to combat disinformation. Wikimedians have been fighting disinformation together for 20 years — it’s a core value and approach. But this year brought unprecedented threats, and as always, communities stepped up to lead. At the Foundation, we came together with community members to make sure we had a coordinated approach to defend the projects against disinformation around COVID-19 and the US elections last fall. The experience of the disinformation taskforce taught us several valuable lessons that are informing how we understand and prepare for threats to the quality of knowledge on our projects. This is a movement built on the promise of radical collaboration. What I will miss most are the people that I have had the privilege to work with during my time here. I’m not certain what is next for me, but I have some conversations in the works and hope to have more to say soon. I will continue to be a part of this Big Open movement, and look forward to seeing you again — online or (fingers crossed) in person. With gratitude, Ryan Ryan Merkley (he/him) Chief of Staff and Board Liaison Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
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