You can ask questions of the candidates, or read the many questions and answers that have already been posted, here. Voting will start next week, and will be advertised via sitenotice; people with a certain number of edits on the Wikimedia projects are eligible to vote.

Elections for the Funds Dissemination Committee, a community committee that reviews budgets for the WMF and Wikimedia organizations, and the FDC omsbudsperson are also happening. This is the first time we’ve done elections for this committee; there are several great candidates, and you can also ask them questions (and I encourage you to, if you have interest in the process!) Find out more about all the elections here.

For the record, such as it is, here is my statement. I’m happy to answer informal questions as well.

—-

During the past ten years, I have edited, taught, spoken on and written about Wikipedia. I’ve helped run Wikimania for many years and have been involved with the research, education and GLAM communities. I have also reported for the Signpost, planned local events, and worked on strategy. I served on the Board of Trustees from 2010-12. During the day, I am a science and engineering librarian at the University of California, Davis.

The next Board will have much to do. The Board must hire and guide the next executive director; develop both annual and long-term strategic plans; decide whether to pursue an endowment; and evaluate the FDC. The Board must also assess the WMF’s overall direction, and, with the community and staff, decide whether WMF activities are effective in keeping the projects and their communities healthy and growing. I believe the Board’s most important role is ensuring the long-term future of Wikimedia’s projects and mission. We can achieve this through forward-looking financial and technical planning, and with open internal processes that aid in developing community leadership.

I can help keep the Board on track. I’m familiar with how the Board, WMF, and community work, and can organize and lead discussions, build consensus, and communicate decisions. I can help manage the limited time of the Board effectively, and if elected, will do so to get the Board to tackle the hardest issues well.

—–

You may also be interested in this statement from last year’s elections, where I went into depth about the qualities I bring to the board (and those I do not).

 http://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Presentation_clinic

I’ve been toying around with the idea of running such a workshop at Wikimania for many years, but this year I think I may have the resources to organize such a thing. I’m not really sure how to frame the format, though. One on one sessions with as many experienced presenters as I can round up? A many to many session, where people critique each other? A round-table discussion and demo session about best practices?

I am not a genius presenter, but I’m a pretty ok one. Most of my advice is commonplace: stand up straight, address the audience, don’t overload your slides. But I know, both from personal experience, having had to learn how to give a talk through trial and error, and from talking to many other people, that giving a Wikimania presentation can be especially tough: You’re in front of your peers, who know as much or more than you do; you’re probably presenting in a second or third language, to folks who also aren’t native speakers; and you’re undoubtedly jetlagged as all hell.

I also know — or suspect, anyway — that a presenter can gain a lot of confidence from simply giving a dry run in front of an audience of a few folks, or from thinking about delivery for a few minutes. And that’s what I’d like to do: give a venue for those who are nervous to practice or gain information, and help make the process of presenting more enjoyable and fun for everyone. We all really, really want to learn from each other — that’s the point of Wikimania. So let’s make that process smoother.

If you have any feedback or ideas at all, please let me know here or on the talk page of the submission. Thanks!

Anyway, let me know if my blog starts trying to sell you viagra or cigarettes or anything. Thanks to Sage R. for discovering it in the first place.

What have I been doing with myself? Library-ing, mostly. Some Wikipedia-ing, though mostly as an editor, which is delightful. Combining the two, occasionally. Discovering and participating in the ultra-cool Wikidata as it hatches out into the world. Not too much travel…. except for those two trips around my birthday and Christmas (I always try to crash library conferences for my birthday, don’t you?), and don’t forget that I always have a good scheme up my sleeve for the future. I’ve been exercising and trying to eat less, and then procrastinating on exercising and eating the same amount, then back to trying (you know, as you do). I’ve been half-heartedly shopping for a house but getting nowhere, because this is California, and I don’t know who can afford to buy around here but it’s not me. And as ever I’ve a long list of ideas to write about percolating away. In other words not all that much has changed. I have been on a pretty even keel day to day, week to week, which is probably a good thing.

For this moment, though, here is what I’m doing: I want to shake this sore throat. I’m re-watching Veronica Mars. I’m thinking about cleaning the house before my dear friend Echo visits in a couple weeks (note that I’m thinking about it, not doing it). I’m reflecting on the things I learned at ACRL (datadatadata). I’m trying not to think too much about Boston, or any of the other tragedies in the world that mark our days. I’m enjoying my bicycle. I’ve been eating strawberries and asparagus and artichokes like they are going out of style, and for once, the weather in Davis is completely delightful. Happy Spring.

I am interested in doing something about Wikipedia’s and the WMF’s archives. These are in several parts:

• our on-wiki project archives: the long-standing pages, proposals, essays and discussions that make up our history. Some pages are marked “historic”; some are going full-steam; some are only in our collective memory these days (BJAODN?)
• our on-wiki meta archives: as above, discussions over the years about how the organization and movement should grow, including mailing lists. Again, while most of these pages still do exist (nothing ever really goes away on the wiki…), much of the memory of how each piece developed and was implemented is held by individual participants who were ‘there at the time’.
• our corporate archives: the WMF (and each chapter and organization, though I am personally most familiar with the WMF) has internal documents that trace both our essential history (incorporation documents, hiring records) and the more informal history of our discussions and decisions, both by the Board, staff and community. Many of these documents are public, but many more are not; while some are safely filed and findable, many records of discussions are held by individuals, from private documents to email threads. (It should be noted that there are accepted corporate archiving and record-keeping policies, some of which we have in place and some of which we could implement; I’m more interested in archiving of those informal things that otherwise would fall through the cracks).
• Wikimania (and other get-together) archives: everything from t-shirts to receipts to amazing photosets, the records of these extraordinary events are in a myriad of organizer closets and various websites.
• our physical archives: from printed WMF annual plans to schools WP cds to outreach fliers in Arabic, we have a huge range and diversity of physical artifacts from our 10+ years. Again, many of these things are in individual closets, or stashed in boxes in offices, or in souvenir collections.

Unsurprisingly I also personally have a great deal of physical artifacts in my own closet: project notes, Wikimania organization notes, chapter publicity material. It’s all a bit haphazard and I am hesitant to throw any of it out.

So I’m starting small: organizing my own stuff, my own personal archives. I’ve got a pile for the Board, a pile for Wikimania, and a pile for miscellaneous other Wikimedia-related stuff. We’re talking everything from a flier about the Library of Alexandria to meeting notes. How would you go about it?

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.

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.

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.