AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

Wikimedia Foundation
Executive Director

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
That's our commitment.

Wikimedia Foundation vision statement
Over half a billion people use Wikipedia and its sister projects every month. As a top five web property and the only donor-supported site in the top 100, the Wikimedia Foundation enables a global community of volunteers to collect, develop and make freely available the sum of humanity's knowledge. The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking an Executive Director to guide the organization through its next phase of innovation and growth.
BASIC FUNCTION
Reporting to the Board of Trustees and acting in partnership with the global volunteer community, the Executive Director (ED) will provide the leadership and set the strategy for the Wikimedia Foundation while managing its day-to-day operations and activities. First and foremost, it is the Executive Director's priority to modernize Wikimedia's user experience and to nurture, grow and diversify the community of Wikimedia contributors. Secondarily, the ED will ensure that the Wikimedia Foundation's grantmaking program supports innovation across the Wikimedia movement, and enables contributor growth in underrepresented demographics and geographic areas.
The Wikimedia Foundation is the most influential and respected organization in the free knowledge movement. Its purpose is to enable as many people as possible to develop, grow and disseminate free multilingual content using open source software. The Foundation provides the technical, operating and managerial infrastructure for Wikipedia and Wikimedia's other free knowledge projects. This includes the continuous delivery of technology improvements that enhance the user experience, enable new forms of collaboration, and adapt the Wikimedia projects to the changing technological environment (e.g. the rapid global adoption of smartphones and tablets).
To advance these priorities, the Wikimedia Foundation is focused on:
Sustaining a robust, resilient, secure and scalable infrastructure for hosting Wikimedia projects

Supporting a vibrant, diverse and international community through iterative and continuous deployment of simple and powerful software that enables anyone to easily read and contribute to Wikimedia projects across diverse platforms and operating systems

Helping other Wikimedia movement organizations in their work towards the mission by providing them with financial and organizational resources; and

Advancing the proposition that knowledge, and open source tools used to share and access knowledge, should be free and freely available to everyone globally
Key to the success of the Executive Director will be a commitment to understand and advance Wikimedia's core values. The Executive Director will need to have the technology management and product development skills to effectively lead a high traffic website, and experience designing and implementing planning processes with a high built-in assumption of fast and iterative change. He or she will need to have exceptional communication skills, and to possess both a drive to achieve transformative results and a deep respect for collaborative processes. The ED's ability to effect change in partnership with Wikimedia's community will be decisive not just to their success, but to Wikimedia's lasting impact in the 21st century.
The Wikimedia Foundation commits itself to the principles of equal opportunity and does not discriminate on the basis of ethnic origin, nationality, religion, political perspective, gender, age, disability or sexual identity or orientation. Wikimedia also values past international experience and fluency in languages in addition to English.

For more information please contact:
Lisa Grossman
+1(650)323-3565 or LisaG@mOppenheim.com
Mark Oppenheim
+1(415) 762-2640 or MarkO@mOppenheim.com
m/Oppenheim Associates
221 Main Street, Suite 540
San Francisco, CA 94105
Serving Nonprofits and Nonprofit Leaders
web: www.mOppenheim.com / media: www.mOppenheim.TV3
Wikimedia Foundation
Executive Director - Addenda
The Wikimedia Foundation is a radically transparent organization, and much information can be found at www.wikimediafoundation.org. That said, certain information might be particularly useful to nominators and prospective candidates, including:
Announcements pertaining to the Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Search
Kicking off the search for our next Executive Director
by Wikimedia Foundation Board Chair Kat Walsh
An announcement from Wikimedia Foundation ED Sue Gardner
by Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner
Video Interviews on the Wikimedia Community and Foundation and Its History
Some of the values and experiences of the Wikimedia Community are best described directly by those who have been intimately involved in the organization's dramatic expansion. The following interviews are available for viewing though mOppenheim.TV.

2013 Interview with Wikimedia Board Chair Kat Walsh

2013 Interview with Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner

2009 Interview with Wikimedia Executive Director Sue Gardner

Guiding Principles of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Community
The following article by Sue Gardner, the current Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, has received broad distribution and summarizes some of the core cultural values shared by Wikimedia's staff, board and community.

Topics covered include:
Freedom and open source

Serving every human being

Transparency

Accountability

Stewardship

Shared power

Internationalism

Free speech

Independence

from LA Culture Net