Archive:Former Board of Trustees members
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This page has been archived.
Its content is no longer being maintained, is likely out of date, and may be inaccurate. This page can be relocated to Meta-Wiki. |
This page lists former Board of Trustees members.
Angela Beesley
 Angela Beesley
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| Term | June 2004 – July 2006 |
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| From | UK/Australia |
Involved with Wikimedia projects since February 2003, Angela Beesley was one of the first members of Wikimedia's Board of Trustees, and currently serves on our Advisory Board. A co-founder and Vice President of Community for wiki hosting service "Wikia", she is one of the authors of the book Wikis: Tools for information Work and Collaboration (2006). Prior to her involvement with Wikipedia, Angela was an educational researcher and developer of student assessments. Angela was born in England and has lived in Germany and Australia.
- Angela was on the Board of Trustees until she resigned from the post; her successor was elected 26 September 2006.
- More about Angela: Biography on Wikipedia, Userpage
Michael Davis
 Michael Davis
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| Term | 2003 – November 2007 |
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| From | United States |
Michael Davis is a graduate of Williams College and the University of Chicago. Before joining Wikimedia, Michael was the CEO of Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago. Michael currently resides in St. Petersburg, Florida, as the Chief Operating Officer of community-focused wiki hosting service Wikia, Inc.
Erik Möller
 Erik Möller
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| Term | July 2006 – December 2007 |
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| From | Germany |
Erik was the Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation until 2015, a position he assumed in January 2008, stepping down from the Board of Trustees. Erik Möller has been an active editor of Wikipedia since 2001 and has also contributed to the underlying software, MediaWiki. Möller developed the proposal for Wikinews, a Wikimedia project, and organized the vote that implemented it. Before joining Wikimedia as an employee, Erik was a freelance journalist and author (Die heimliche Medienrevolution: Wie Weblogs, Wikis und freie Software die Welt verändern), as well as a manager of wiki-related software development projects. He holds a degree in computer science. Beyond Wikimedia, he seeks to promote Free Content, Free Software, and balanced intellectual monopoly rights legislation. Until taking the position at the Wikimedia Foundation, Möller lived in Berlin.
- More about Erik: Userpage
Tim Shell
 Tim Shell
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| Term | 2003 – November 2006 |
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| From | United States |
Tim Shell is an Internet entrepreneur with an interest in self-organization, and decentralized order, as exemplified by Wikipedia. In 1996 he was pursuing his degree in computer science when he decided to chuck it and go into business, joining up with Jimmy Wales to start Bomis. Tim has lived in Chicago, Florida, and San Diego, and currently resides in Las Vegas. On December 15, 2006, Shell stepped down from the board.
- More about Tim: Userpage
Oscar van Dillen
 Oscar van Dillen
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| Term | November 2006 – June 2007 |
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| From | the Netherlands |
Oscar is an editor and bureaucrat for the Dutch-language Wikipedia and other Dutch Wikimedia projects. He also holds the role of steward since May 2005, helping and advising many projects in many languages. Van Dillen is a member of the Special Projects committee, which helps the Foundation pursue grants, oversee expansion efforts, and encourage partnerships between the Foundation and other organizations. Professionally, Van Dillen is a musician and composer, teaching World music composition as well as music theory in the jazz, pop and world music department at the Conservatory of Rotterdam.
- More about Oscar: Userpage
Florence Nibart-Devouard
 Florence Nibart-Devouard
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| Term | June 2004 – July 2008 |
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| From | France |
Florence was the Chair of the Wikimedia Board from October 2006 until July of 2008. She served as one of the elected representatives to the Board starting June 2004. Florence was born in Versailles (France). She grew up in Grenoble, and has been living since then in several French cities, as well as Antwerpen in Belgium and Tempe in Arizona. She holds two masters, one in Agricultural Sciences (a 5-year degree in agronomical engineering (Diplome d'Ingénieur Grande Ecole) from ENSAIA and the other a postgraduate degree (DEA) in Genetics and Biotechnologies from INPL.She has been working in public research, first in flower plant genetic improvement, and second in microbiology to study the feasibility of polluted soil bioremediation. She was employed until 2005 in a French company, to conceive decision-making tools in sustainable agriculture. She is now a consultant in Internet Communication Strategy. She joined the Wikipedia adventure in February 2002 and is known as a contributor under the pseudonym Anthere. Florence is 39, and lives in Clermont Ferrand with her husband Bertrand and her three children, Anne-Gaëlle aged nine, William eleven and Thomas two.
- More about Florence: Biography on Wikipedia, Userpage
Frieda Brioschi
 Frieda Brioschi
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| Term | July 2007 – September 2008, August 2014 – June 2016 |
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| From | Italy |
Frieda (born in 1976, Italian) joined the Wikimedia Board in July 2007. She has been involved in Wikipedia and other WMF projects since May 2003. In June 2005 she helped found Wikimedia Italia, a local chapter organization associated with Wikimedia, and was president of that organization until September 2007. She currently lives in Milan where she works as a programmer. She resigned from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees in September 2008 after being re-elected again as board member and president of Wikimedia Italia.
- More about Frieda: Userpage
Frieda Brioschi is a Wikimedian, computer scientist and digital communication consultant working on tech projects, web strategy, community creation and management, and social media. She has been working with startup companies since 2012, acting as coordinator of Kublai, a community for startup entrepreneurs hosted by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development. Currently she is teaching courses in startup entrepreneurism at IED (the International Higher Educational Network in Design, Fashion, Visual Communication and Management of creative industries), both in Italian and English.
She started contributing to Wikipedia in May 2003, and was one of the first members of the Italian Wikipedia community. She subsequently gained administrator and bureaucrat status on several projects, including Italian Wikipedia, Wikinews, and Wikisource. She was also a Wikimedia OTRS admin and a regional press contact for the Italian Wikimedia projects.
In 2005 she was one of the founders of Wikimedia Italia, the official Wikimedia chapter in Italy. She is the first and the longest running president of Wikimedia Italia, and played a key role in turning the small chapter to a solid, structured and well-known organization. She also served in the role of interim chapter Executive Director.
From 2007 to 2008 she was a member of the board of Wikimedia Foundation. She took part in hundreds of congresses to share both her professional Wikimedia community experience. Frieda has given three TEDx talks, two about Wikipedia and one about lateral thinking applied to problem solving (I and Wikipedia, Wikipedia and me, Captain Courageous).
She studied computer science at Università di Milano and is proud mother of Celeste. Frieda lives and works close to Milan in Italy.
She re-joined the Wikimedia Foundation Board as a member selected by chapters and thematic organizations in 2014, lasting until June 2016.
Domas Mituzas
 Domas Mituzas
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| Term | February 2008 – July 2009 |
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| From | Lithuania |
Domas joined the Wikimedia Board in February 2008. He has been involved with Wikipedia technology since 2004, and has worked on site performance and operations since then. He also works for MySQL AB (recently acquired by Sun Microsystems) services division. Before that he built network services in Lithuania and other Baltic States. He was born and lives in Vilnius, Lithuania.
- More about Domas: Userpage
Michael Snow
 Michael Snow
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| Term | February 2008 – July 2010 |
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| From | United States |
Michael was Chair of the Wikimedia Board from July 2008 until July 2010. He joined the Board in February 2008, after participating in Wikimedia projects since 2003. One of his contributions was the creation of The Wikipedia Signpost, a community newspaper for the English-language Wikipedia. Born in Pfullendorf, Germany, he now lives in the Seattle area. Michael is an attorney and earned his J.D. degree from the University of Washington.
- More abut Michael: Userpage
Arne Klempert
 Arne Klempert
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| Term | May 2009 – July 2012 |
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| From | Germany |
Arne Klempert was born in 1972 and studied social sciences at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. He has 15 years of professional experience in traditional and digital communications. He's now working as Director Digital for Fleishman-Hillard Germany.
Arne joined Wikipedia in 2003 as an editing community member. A few months later he became press spokesman of the German Wikipedia (2004-2008). Arne was co-founder and Vice President of Wikimedia Deutschland (2004-2006), co-organizer of the first Wikimania (2005), and the first employee of a Wikimedia chapter - as Wikimedia Deutschland's Executive Director from 2006 to 2008. Following the appointment by the Wikimedia Chapters he joined the Board of Trustees in May 2009 and was reappointed in July 2010.
Phoebe Ayers
 Phoebe Ayers
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| Term | July 2010 – July 2012, July 2013 – July 2015 |
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| From | United States |
Phoebe was selected as a trustee by the Wikimedia chapters in 2010, and served a two-year term. She was selected to serve as Board Secretary in 2011. After her term ended in 2012, she ran for a community-elected seat in 2013 and was re-elected for a two-year term. She was elected Vice Chair of the Board in August 2013, serving until August 2014.
Phoebe Ayers is a reference, instruction and collections librarian at the University of California, Davis, specializing in computer science, physics and engineering information resources. Her interests include open access and access to scientific knowledge, the effective use of collaborative tools (such as wikis) within communities, and how trustworthy information and knowledge is created and used both on- and off-line. She has been at UCD since 2005, and has served in UC-wide, regional and national library organizations. She has a BA in English literature and history and a MLIS from the University of Washington, Seattle.
Phoebe has been a Wikimedian since 2003, when she made her first edits on the English Wikipedia. Starting in 2006 she has been heavily involved in the planning of the annual international Wikimania conference, assisting with organization and facilitating the jury that chooses the conference location. She was also a member of the Special Projects Committee in 2006, has been a contributing writer for the English Wikipedia newsletter "The Signpost", has organized local meetups and events, and has given many talks about Wikipedia for library groups and others. She has also been involved in the wiki research community, chairing WikiSym 2010. Most recently she's been involved in efforts to help libraries work effectively with the Wikimedia projects, including founding a mailing list devoted to the topic, planning training workshops, and sitting on the North American Glam-Wiki advisory board. She continues to be an active editor, contributing to the English Wikipedia and other projects.
In 2008, she co-authored a book about the English-language Wikipedia titled "How Wikipedia Works: and How You Can be a Part of It" (No Starch Press). The book covers using, understanding, and contributing to Wikipedia; it is freely licensed and is only the second book in English to be published about the site.
Matt Halprin
 Matt Halprin
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| Term | August 2009 – December 2012 |
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| From | United States |
Matt Halprin is a native of Menlo Park, California in the United States. He has lived in Evanston, Illinois, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Tokyo, Japan. He is married and the father of four children. Halprin graduated with High Distinction as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School and holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.
He has more than 25 years of business experience and has served on an array of boards of directors, both non-profit and for-profit. He currently serves on the board of Management Leadership for Tomorrow (which supports the next generation of minority leaders in the United States) and on the Advisory Board of Stanford's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (iRiSS).
Professionally, Halprin was a Partner and Vice President at the Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with technology clients on issues of strategy and corporate development. Subsequently, he spent six years as Vice President, Global Trust and Safety at eBay, where he led a team of 90 statisticians, policy managers, and product managers. Halprin was also Partner at Omidyar Network, the founder of eBay's philanthropic investment firm. There he led the firm's investments in technology platform organizations in Social Media, Marketplaces, and Government Transparency. After Omidyar Network, Halprin returned to an operating role leading Strategy, Corporate Development and Analytics at Ning, which was sold to Glam Media in late 2011. Currently, he leads Business Operations and Analytics at Yelp (NYSE).
Halprin was appointed to the WMF Board in August 2009 and was re-appointed twice.
Halprin worked on the board to promote effective Board Governance and served of Chair of the Board Governance Committee for more than two years. In this capacity, he helped introduce a Trustee peer evaluation process, effective Board Committee processes and transparency in board voting. In addition, he attempted to champion a more independent board and greater user choice via an opt-in image filter to help parents and educators. His term expired in December 2012.
Ting Chen
 Ting Chen
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| Term | July 2008 – May 2013 |
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| From | Germany |
Ting Chen was born in Shanghai, China in 1968. He grew up in Harbin, in the northeast corner of the country, where he attended elementary school and middle school. In 1989 he went to Braunschweig, Germany and began his study of Electrical engineering. He was especially interested in semiconductors and their physics. He graduated in 1993 with a diploma and now he works as an IT specialist in Mainz, Germany. He can speak Chinese, German, English, French (un peu), and he reads Japanese.
His first experience with a virtual community was during his university time in the German Fido-Net, where he moderated a forum about science and knowledge for many years. He learned of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects through a 2003 news article about a German Wikipedia milestone. From then on Wikipedia became a new hobby. He started on the German Wikipedia and changed soon to Chinese Wikipedia, which was at that time still a young project.
Chen attended the first Wikimania (Wikimania 2005) in Frankfurt, where he took part on a panel discussion and introduced the Chinese community. He also helped organize the third Wikimania (Wikimania 2007) in Taipei. After Wikimania 2007, he and his peers decided to put a Chinese community member up for election to one of the vacant community selected board seats.
Chen was elected as Trustee by the Wikimedia Community on June 26, 2008, with his term officially starting in July 2008. He was re-elected in 2009 and again in 2011, and he was named as Chair of the Wikimedia Board in July 2010. He has served on the Audit Committee since 2010, as well as Board Governance Committee, both as part of his ex oficio duties.
While on the Board, Chen focused his time on the growth of the Wikimedia movement. He is proud that the Wikimedia Foundation and chapters have become so successful in fundraising and that the Foundation has succeeded in meeting its obligations under several financial audits. He also considers the 2012 Recognizing Models of Affiliation resolution to be an important step in embracing the growth and diversity of the Wikimedia movement. Finally, he advocates for openness throughout the community and he is pleased the Board adopted its 2011 Openness resolution.
Chen believes his multicultural and multinational life experience give him a unique perspective within the Wikimedia community. He traveled extensively to visit local and regional Wikimedia communities, where he hoped he made them feel important to the movement and well-represented on the Board.
Chen has user accounts on numerous Wikipedias, including Chinese (95000 edits), German (2600 edits), English (330 edits), French (130 edits) and Dutch (110 edits). He is a bureaucrat on, and serves as an ambassador for, Chinese Wikipedia, and he also contributes to Wikimedia Commons and Meta-Wiki. His first edit was on German Wikipedia on January 21, 2003.
Kat Walsh
 Kat Walsh
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| Term | December 2006 – August 2013 |
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| From | United States |
Kat Walsh is an attorney and Wikimedian in the San Francisco area. Her areas of focus include free content licensing, software freedom, access to knowledge, and freedom of speech. She is currently Legal Counsel at Creative Commons and was previously a technology policy analyst at the American Library Association. She is an alumna of George Mason University School of Law and of Stetson University, and is currently a member of the Virginia State Bar and the US Patent Bar.
Walsh has presented at numerous conferences on topics including privacy, copyright, volunteerism, and online collaboration. She has participated in all but the first Wikimania, and at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy, the Library of Congress, a few universities and government agencies, and the Creative Commons summit. She is also an accomplished bassoonist and violist, performing regularly in orchestras and chamber ensembles.
Walsh first became involved with the Wikimedia Foundation by volunteering on the e-mail response team, where she helped resolve some of the legal issues the Wikimedia Foundation faced. Her efforts here sparked her interest in copyright and Internet policy and led to her interest in Internet law.
Walsh was appointed to a partial term on the Board of Trustees in December of 2006 when the board expanded to seven members. She was then chosen as a community-elected Trustee in June 2007, re-elected in August 2009, and again in 2011. She served on the HR committee, and was the Executive Secretary from 2008 to 2009. In 2012, Walsh was elected Chair of the Board.
While on the board, Walsh focused her attention on strengthening the licensing policy and the updated terms of use. She was also instrumental in guiding Wikimedia Foundation messaging during the SOPA/PIPA discussions and she co-authored an important op-ed with Jimmy Wales in the Washington Post.
Walsh contributes primarily on English Wikipedia, where she has over 11,000 edits, over 70 article creations, and where she serves as a site administrator.
Ana Toni
 Ana Toni
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| Term | June 2013 – August 2014 |
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| From | Brazil |
Ana Toni is currently the CEO for GIP (Public Interest Management), a consultancy firm based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which works for foundations, non-profit organizations and businesses on social and environmental issues. Since 2011, Ana has served as the Board Chair of Greenpeace International. On July 8, 2013, she was named to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation.
From 2003 until 2011, Ana was the Ford Foundation’s representative in Brazil, during which time she oversaw the Foundation’s work in the areas of human rights, sustainable development, racial and ethical discrimination, sexuality and reproductive health, media democratization and land rights. She was also responsible for coordinating a regional Latin America Initiative on Economics and Globalization, an IBSA initiative (joint work between Brazil, South Africa and India) and the International Initiative on Intellectual Property Rights.
From 1998 to 2002, Ana was ActionAid’s Executive Director in Brazil, working to contribute in the eradication of poverty and inequality through community development projects, as well as public policy advocacy and campaigning at both the national and international levels. Ana also worked for ActionAid UK as Policy Advisor (1990 – 1993), representing the organization at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development.
Ana worked for Greenpeace from 1993 to 1997, first as the International Head of the Political Unit based at Greenpeace International in Amsterdam, and subsequently as Senior Advisor for Greenpeace Germany. She was responsible for, among other things, the work of Greenpeace on the World Trade Organization (in particular the Committee on Trade and Environment) and she also contributed in the development of Greenpeace’s work in the Amazon region in its early stage.
Ana graduated from Swansea University with a degree in Economic and Social Studies. She holds a masters degree in Politics of the World Economy from the London School of Economics and is a candidate for a PhD on Social Politics at the Rio de Janeiro State University. In addition, Ana is a member of the Editorial Board of Le Monde Diplomatique Brazil, and a Board member of the Baobá Fund for Racial Equity and the Forum of Women’s Leaders on Sustainability. Ana was the Board Chair of Greenpeace Brazil from 2000 to 2003 and a Board member of GIFE (the Brazilian Private Social Investment Association). Ana is Brazilian and lives in Rio de Janeiro.
Bishakha Datta
 Bishakha Datta
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| Term | March 2010 – December 2014 |
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| From | India |
Bishakha Datta is a non-fiction writer and documentary filmmaker with diverse, international experience. She is dedicated to disseminating women's perspectives through media, art and culture, particularly the perspectives of women who are marginal or invisible. She received a BA in Economics and an MA in English Literature from Mumbai University, as well as an MA in Communications from Stanford University.
Datta is the co-founder and Executive Director of Point of View, a nonprofit organization in Mumbai, India, that promotes women’s points of view through media, art and culture. She is also on the boards of various non-profits from around the world, including Breakthrough, CREA, Dreamcatchers Foundation, and Majlis. Her first book, And Who Will Make the Chapatis?, focused on rural women’s participation in politics, while her first independent documentary film In The Flesh explored the lives of three people in prostitution from their own perspectives. Her latest book 9 Degrees of Justice documents new perspectives on violence on women in India, while her latest film, Taaza Khabar, explores a rural newspaper run by women, many of whom are Dalit or tribal.
Datta joined the Wikimedia Board in March 2010. She was on the controversial content committee and was part of the Movement Roles project and working group, which developed the framework for new models of affiliation within the Wikimedia movement. Datta has been the Chapters Committee liaison for the Board since 2010. She served as the Secretary of the Board from July to October 2012.
She has spent a great deal of time and energy working with the growing Wikimedia movement in India, facilitating connections between Wikipedia editors in the country and the Foundation. Datta considers herself a community-oriented trustee with extensive prior movement experience outside of Wikimedia, which she used to nurture the budding community there. She helped organize the first community meetup in Mumbai and was an advisor to WikiConference India 2011, which had over 600 attendees. She is proud that her first community barnstar resulted from that conference.
Datta considers editor retention and editor growth to be the most significant challenges facing the Board and the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as the greatest opportunity to sustain the Wikimedia movement. In addition to technical solutions like a visual editor, she will continue to encourage the Foundation to focus on the priority geographies of Brazil, India and Arabic language countries, as well as smaller wikis like those in Indic languages. She also plans to continue to focus support at the Board level on work to increase the number of female editors on Wikimedia projects, while linking that work to larger strategic objectives.
Datta lives and works in Mumbai, India and edits on English Wikipedia and on Meta-wiki. Her term on the Board continued until December 2014.
Samuel Klein
 Samuel Klein
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| Term | August 2009 – July 2015 |
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| From | United States |
Sam Klein was elected to the Wikimedia Board in August 2009. He currently lives in Cambridge II, where he is a Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is an advisor for One Laptop per Child and the Digital Public Library of America, as well as a number of education startups. He has been involved in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects for many years, including work on a multilingual newsletter, translation, and special projects. He founded the Boston-area Wikipedia group, and organized the Wikimania conference there in 2006. He has also worked on offline Wikipedia distribution, including the WikiBrowse project.
Sam studied math and physics, and spent time teaching and developing software for facilitating translation and community-building before focusing on universal education. More information is available on his Wikipedia user page. He can be reached there or by email.
Jan-Bart de Vreede
 Jan-Bart de Vreede
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| Term | December 2006 – December 2015 |
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| From | Netherlands |
Jan-Bart de Vreede is from Gouda in the Netherlands. He spent most of his childhood in the Netherlands, but he also lived in Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Kenya and the United States. He studied Business Administration at the Rotterdam School of Management. He has three children: Anna (5), Matthias (10) and Ruben (13).
For the past 10 years, Jan-Bart has worked at the Kennisnet Foundation in the Netherlands, a publicly-funded Dutch organization tasked with the promotion of IT use in education to help solve some of the major challenges in the field. At Kennisnet, he is responsible for the Kennisnet communities and Wikiwijs. Most of his time at Kennisnet is spent on the Wikiwijs project within the Netherlands. This is a countrywide initiative aimed at encouraging teachers to develop and share Open Educational Resources by offering them a platform to find, create and share OER materials.
Jan-Bart has been involved with Wikimedia since 2004, through his role as a Board member and his work at Kennisnet, and he has long been involved with the community aspects of the various projects. He has attended every Wikimania (an experience he describes as both exhausting and invigorating). After attending his first Wikimania, he was quickly convinced that this was a special group of people who were doing something extraordinary. When the chance came to be a part of the movement, he jumped at it.
In December 2006, Jan-Bart joined the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. He has served as Vice-chair since August 2011, and he also held the position from January 2007 until July 2010. He was instrumental in hiring the Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director and he considers this process as an important element in transitioning from an operating board in the early days to one that could manage larger meta issues. He also notes that restructuring the Board gave them the opportunity to include chapter-selected board members, which has increased the diversity of the board as a whole.
Jan-Bart was re-elected Vice Chair of the Board in July 2012, and he was elected as Chair of the Board in August 2013. His current term will continue until December 2015.
Stu West
 Stu West
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| Term | April 2008 – December 2015 |
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| From | United States / United Kingdom |
Stu West joined the Wikimedia Board in April 2008 and served as its Treasurer from April 2008 to October 2012; he also served as Vice-Chair from July 2010 to August 2011. He brings over 18 years of financial experience, including senior executive roles at publicly-traded companies including TiVo, Yahoo!, InfoSpace, and in investment banking at J.P. Morgan. He also worked with the United States Mission to the United Nations. Stu's educational background includes a B.A. in History from Yale University, where he focused on 20th century diplomacy. He is a dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, and lives in the San Francisco bay area.
Arnnon Geshuri
 Arnnon Geshuri
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| Term | January 2016 |
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| From | United States |
Arnnon Geshuri was born in Iowa City, Iowa, and raised in small towns around the United States, and learned early the value and strength of communities. He currently serves as VP of Human Resources at Tesla Motors.
Arnnon has a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of California in Irvine and a Master of Science degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from San Jose State University.
Arnnon has dedicated his career to building and growing healthy cultures and organizations, leading innovative practices to identify, attract, and retain great people. Prior to his current role at Tesla Motors, he served as Senior Director of HR and Staffing at Google, growing the organization to more than 20,000 people in five years. He has held human resources leadership positions across a range of industries, including VP of People Operations and Director of Global Staffing at E*TRADE Financial and Senior Human Resources Programs Manager at Applied Materials.
Beyond his professional work, Arnnon has a passion for education and community learning, and regularly volunteers his own time and expertise to organizations dedicated to furthering those missions. This includes serving on the Advisory Council for the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at San Jose State University, the Board of the Silicon Valley Jewish Film Festival, and as Board Chair at Yavneh Day School in Los Gatos, California.
Dr. Denny Vrandečić
 Dr. Denny Vrandečić
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| Term | July 2015 – April 2016 |
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| From | United States |
Dr. Denny Vrandečić is a computer scientist specializing in semantic web and structured data. He is currently an ontologist at Google, where he has helped with the release of several key datasets, including releasing the collaborative curated database Freebase to Wikidata.
Originally from the island of Brač, Croatia, Denny received a degree in computer science and philosophy from the University of Stuttgart and a PhD from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He has written more than 70 publications on ontologies and the semantic web, and has worked at research projects the University of Southern California and the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, and has lectured extensively at universities around the world.
Denny has been a Wikipedian since 2003. He is the co-developer of Semantic MediaWiki and was the first administrator of the Croatian Wikipedia. In 2010, he worked with various Wikimedia stakeholders to develop the first proposal and secure funding for the structured data project Wikidata. In 2012, he became the founding project director for Wikidata, recruiting and leading the first Wikidata team out of Wikimedia Deutschland.
Denny now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, a Wikipedian whom he met at Wikimania, and their baby daughter.
Patricio Lorente
 Patricio Lorente
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| Term | July 2012 – June 2016 |
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| From | Argentina |
Patricio Lorente was born in 1969 in La Plata, Argentina. He studied at La Plata National University, where he currently works as General Prosecretary.
For several years he worked in the field of Development Cooperation, managing the implementation, monitoring and evaluation of local development projects funded by the Italian government and the European Union. He worked to strengthen local capacity as a condition for development, transcending the traditional approach of North-South cooperation by promoting South-South. He also supported decentralized cooperation by building horizontal networks of exchange between different cities and regions of Argentina.
Since 2004, Patricio has served in the National University of La Plata, first as Prosecretary of Administration and subsequently as General Prosecretary. In his current position, he manages the strategic planning and the everyday issues and conflicts of a large and restless community, including both academics and student organizations. The National University of La Plata is a public university in Argentina and the second largest in the country, measured both in size (with 100,000 students and 15,000 teachers) and by scientific production. As with all public universities in Argentina, there is no tuition and enrollment is free.
Patricio joined the Spanish Wikipedia as an editor in 2005 and he has been an admin (sysop, bureaucrat) since 2006. He is also a founding member of Wikimedia Argentina and was its President from 2007 to 2012. He was responsible for the organization of Wikimanía 2009 in Buenos Aires and has participated as an organizer or speaker in numerous conferences, seminars and workshops on Wikipedia/Wikimedia in Argentina and other Latin American countries (Colombia, Ecuador, México, Perú). He was one of the primary organizers of the first Ibero-American Wikimedia Summit, held in Buenos Aires in 2011, which helped bring together representatives from both established Wikimedia chapters and informal working groups throughout Latin America, Spain, Portugal and Italy.
Patricio has devoted his time to outreach activities in education, with particular interest in off-wiki activities. He is the author of a booklet published by Wikimedia Argentina called "Wikipedia in the classroom" and, representing Wikimedia Argentina, he was a member of the Advisory Board of Conectar Igualdad, a government program that is delivering more than three million netbooks to all public high school students in Argentina. As a result of this work, many wiki-related activities were launched and the National Ministry of Education opened a special site with tutorials, documents and guides about Wikipedia and education. There is also a special pilot program in more than 200 schools across the country -- “Escuelas de Innovación” (Innovative Schools) -- that is directly training teachers on possible uses of Wikimedia projects for their classes, not only in terms of creating content but also regarding notions of relevance, content verification and discussions on neutrality issues.
Patricio joined the Wikimedia Foundation Board as a Chapters selected Trustee in 2012, and was re-selected in 2014. His current term will continue until August 2016. In August 2014, he was elected Vice Chair of the Board.
Guy Kawasaki
 Guy Kawasaki
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| Term | April 2015 - December 2016 |
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| From | United States |
Guy Kawasaki was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is a noted author, entrepreneur, and internet evangelist. He currently serves as chief evangelist of Canva, an online, graphic-design service, and as an executive fellow of Haas Business School at the University of California, Berkeley.
Prior to joining Canva, Guy served as special advisor to the CEO of the Motorola business unit of Google. He is perhaps most widely known for his time at Apple, where he developed and popularized the concept of “secular evangelism” for Apple’s brand, culture, and products. At Apple, he served first as chief evangelist for Macintosh software, and later as an Apple fellow.
Guy left Apple to start Garage.com (Garage Technology Ventures), now a venture capital firm for direct investments in early-stage technology companies. Guy has started several other companies throughout his career. In 1987, Guy formed a Macintosh database company called ACIUS, which created the 4th Dimension database. In 1989, Guy co-founded another software company called Fog City Software, which produced an email product called Emailer and a list server product called LetterRip.
Guy is passionate about writing, speaking, and consulting on topics in which he believes. He is the author of The Art of the Start 2.0, The Art of Social Media, Enchantment, and ten other books about change, innovation, marketing, and disruption. He gives more than fifty keynote speeches a year and is a frequent public commentator on subjects such as innovation, enchantment, social media, evangelism, and entrepreneurship.
Guy holds an MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles, a BA from Stanford University, and an honorary doctorate from Babson college. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Guy is an American who resides with his family in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Alice Wiegand
 Alice Wiegand
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| Term | July 2012 - July 2018 |
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| From | Germany |
Alice Wiegand leads the open data project for the city of Düsseldorf, Germany. The project is designed to be a modern administrative approach to increasing transparency of the government for Germany's seventh most populous city.
Alice originally studied economics, became a tailor, learned and practiced software development, and studied science of public administration. Prior to her current role, Alice led the city administration’s IT department in Meerbusch before she was the personal aide to the mayor of Meerbusch, Germany. Her work is dedicated to modernize, digitize and open public administration.
Alice started editing German Wikipedia in 2004, where she has also served as administrator and bureaucrat. She has extensive experience as a board member of Wikimedia Deutschland — the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement — which she joined in 2008. At Wikimedia Deutschland, she served as secretary and vice president, and she was involved in strategy development, organizational structuring and executive accounting and assessment.
A staunch supporter of the free-knowledge movement, she has organized several workshops and skills trainings for contributors, for the volunteer response team (OTRS), and for Wikipedia administrators.
Kelly Battles
 Kelly Battles
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| Term | January 2016 - July 2018 |
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| From | United States |
Kelly Battles grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and currently serves as Chief Financial Officer of Quora, a question-and-answer website based in Mountain View, California.
Kelly holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in Operations Research and Systems Management from Princeton University. She also received her Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.
Prior to her current role at Quora, Kelly served in several executive level positions, including Chief Financial Officer at Bracket Computing and Host Analytics, Vice President of Finance at IronPort Systems, and Director of Strategy and Corporate Development at Hewlett Packard. Kelly has an extensive background in financial management and strategic organizational development in both the private and nonprofit sectors.
Kelly has received numerous accolades for her work, including the YWCA TWIN Award for Women in Business and the Best in Biz Gold Award. She was also a finalist for both the Stevie Awards for Women in Business and the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal CFO of the Year Award.
In addition to her professional work, Kelly has dedicated herself to advancing education and improving the lives of others. While at McKinsey & Company, she worked extensively with Habitat for Humanity, collaborating with founder Millard Fuller and key executives to improve domestic operations and develop international growth and governance strategies. From 2006 to 2011, she served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Bowman International School, a non-profit Montessori school focused on inspiring children to love learning. She currently serves as President and Board Member of the Bodnar Foundation, a private charitable foundation.