If You Have These Five Characteristics Wikimedia Wants to Hire You
Since joining the Wikimedia Foundation, I’ve hired about 25 people. That means I’ve read thousands of CVs, done hundreds of pre-interview e-mail exchanges and phone calls, and participated in about 150...
View ArticleHow to Help Wikipedia, and How to Hurt It
I stumbled recently across sociologist Gary Marx‘s documentation of tactics covertly used by external parties to hurt or help social/political movements [1]. Like for example the FBI attempts to...
View ArticleHow Wikimedia will measure success over the next five years
About a week ago, I started running a little survey asking Wikimedians how we should approach target-setting for the next five years. I did it because next month Wikimedia will finalize the targets...
View ArticleWhat Wikimedia can learn from the Quakers, Part 2
I spent this past weekend with Wikimedia trustee Phoebe Ayers at the Quaker Center in Ben Lomond, California, attending a workshop called Business Among Friends: Clerking as a Spiritual Discipline....
View ArticleMaking change at Wikimedia: nine patterns that work
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees met in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and had a long and serious discussion about controversial content in the Wikimedia projects. (Why? Because we’re the...
View ArticleBack in San Francisco
I haven’t posted here for a while because I was on a long and slightly gruelling trip, timed to coincide with Wikimedia’s 2010 fundraiser. (Which has just successfully concluded with more than a half...
View ArticleOn editorial judgment, and empathy
For the past sixteen months, the Wikimedia Foundation has been having uncomfortable conversations about how we handle controversial imagery in our projects — including, a few weeks ago, the staging of...
View ArticleThe war for the free and open internet — and how we are losing it
Below is the text of a talk I delivered Monday at the 2013 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference in Boston. Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, Icelandic member of Parliament Birgitta Jónsdóttir and I...
View ArticleWhat’s *really* wrong with nonprofits — and how we can fix it
This post requires a number of caveats and acknowledgements. They’re at the bottom. In 2008 I was interviewing a candidate for an engineering position at the Wikimedia Foundation and as we talked I...
View ArticleA little guide to working with online communities
About a decade ago I migrated into community work [1] from a non-community background. This is the guide I wish I had read back then. [1] When I say community work, I am talking about stuff like...
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