Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-27/Board elections/Gerard Meijssen

• How did you become involved with the Wikimedia community? What contributions are you most proud of?

I read about Nupedia and Wikipedia at the Oreilly website and looked into it..

There have been several things I am fond off. Writing articles about all the fresh water fish of the Benelux, the templates for Wiktionaries, recording thousands of pronunciations, the proof of concept project for a multilingual Commons..

• What do you see as the role of the Board of Trustees?

The Board of Trustees is responsible for the strategy of the Wikimedia Foundation. In addition it is the Board of Trustees that the Managing Director reports to.

• If elected, what would you bring to the board that it currently lacks?

I am known as a practical champion for language support, I am a champion of our restorationists and I am involved in enticing GLAMs to partner with us and share with us our mission. I have been deeply involved in several projects and I aim to grow the Wiki movement. I would like to see that I bring this to the board and I hope that when I become a board member that it offsets the qualities of the person I replace.

• What specific goals would you have as a trustee?

The first priority would be the Foundation, its communities and its projects. I want us to support all our existing projects adequately.

• The Wikimedia Foundation is beginning an organized effort at strategic planning, in which the board will play a major role. What are the key elements you would like to see prioritized in Wikimedia's strategy for the coming years?

Once all our projects are adequately supported I want to improve the availability of information. I want to do this by partnering when appropriate and by developing missing functionality when needed. In this way I hope to make Commons searchable in many languages.

• What do you think the Wikimedia Foundation isn't doing that it should be? What is it doing that it shouldn't be?

I think there should be a more equitable division of attention over the projects. The "other" languages are half of our traffic and they do not get the attention that they need. By partnering with ANLOC for instance we will learn what we need to do to support African languages. Issues like the special:preferences in Arabic needs to be fixed on Commons and they need to be fixed in a systematic way. I am happy that the LocalisationUpdate extension is getting attention because it will provide the timely delivery of localisations. Saying that there is too much politics is strange coming from someone who put himself forward as a candidate...

• The English Wikipedia community is increasingly concerned with questions of project governance: who has authority to set and reshape policy, and who should?; how can a project so large, with so diverse a community, make collective decisions?; does consensus scale, or will some form of democracy be necessary to address the project's problems?; and many others. What role, if any, do you think the Board of Trustees can or should play in addressing governance and policy problems on individual projects?

My concern is much more by the lack of project governance of our smallest projects. The English Wikipedia has for all its drama been able to look after itself. There are many people really involved in its governance and it works as well as can be expected. The issues for the board are imho strategic and largely outside the projects.

• Wikimedia's partnerships with outside organizations--including for-profit companies like Kaltura and Orange as well as non-profits and public institutions like Mozilla Foundation and various archives and museums--have becoming increasingly prominent. What sorts of partnerships should and shouldn't the Foundation pursue?

I am firmly in favour of partnering with organisations. We have exising relations with several organsiations but imho we fail to make them visible. Our aim is served by partnering with educational and GLAM organisations and I am involved in both. Organisations like the World Language Documentation Centre and the Concept Web Alliance are also likely candidates for a WMF partnership.

• Over the last three years, the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation has expanded rapidly, with a budget growing from $3.0 million in fiscal year 2007-2008 to a planned $9.4 million in 2009-2010. What strategy should the Board of Trustees pursue in planning for future financial growth? What is your view of the current financial plan?

In my opinion the scope has not grown, but the size of the projects has. Our office has become more professional and this is evident in the quality of the governance of our organisation. Our first development projects are planned and delivered in a timely manner. With improved usability we will be technically more inviting and, this is of particular importance to our smaller projects. In my opinion, the budget is justified by the quality and the quantity of what is delivered. We are grossly underfunded in that we still do not have a baseline where all the projects have an equal opportunity to grow their project. The technology around us evolves and we have to make sure that we remain viable, relevant and able to work towards fulfilling our aims.

• What role would you like the board to play in fostering the initiation, growth and viability of local Wikimedia Chapters? What role do chapters play in your strategic vision for Wikimedia?

Chapters are diverse and a chapter is an organisation loosely affiliated to the Foundation. It is mostly country based while our projects are language based. Historically new projects and chapters organised themselves, once they comply with requirements they are confirmed as such. Give the large number of potential chapters this self organising aspect is essential. Chapter meetings and Wikimania are where many people meet, people who have an interest in our aim.

Chapters are an obvious vehicle for the day to day contacts with our partners they however need some kind of maturity or p

• How does the Wikimedia Advisory Board fit into your strategic vision for Wikimedia? Are there any specific tasks you would ask of them as a trustee? Are there critical areas of expertise that are not represented on the Advisory Board and you think should be?

Advisory boards are a great way of providing people who are in affiliated organisations and can help us with their advice and connections. An advisory board has the potential to be a great space for brain storming. People who are in the advisory board often function as ambassador for us.