Introductions/Bios of Task Force Members

Introductions/Bios of Task Force Members

ANDERS WENNERSTEN

My name is Anders Wennersten, 61 years of age and ex senior manager at Ericsson (Software development)

I spend 6-8 hours a day fixing weak articles and patrolling all new articles on Swedish wikipedia, doring some 30 000 edits a year. I have been the treasurer of Wikimedia Sweden, and am a member of Chapcom (and Audit committe)

I have pondered upon financial sustainability for our efeorts quite a lot and while not being an investment expert, I believe I can include into the group competence and experience from a chapter (far off country) perspective. I see a lot of potential unattempted sources of income that be be had on a (prepromised) yearly basis.


PAUL YOULTEN

I am a teacher and university lecturer in Spain. I teach post-graduate students of business different ways to sell, present and negotiate in English. I also do marketing communications consultancy - mostly writing marketing plans for companies wanting to improve the way they sell their products. Before teaching I was a specialist sales and account manager for Reuters, then I was head of training for a subsidiary of the advertising agency McCann-Erickson Worldwide.

I occasionally edit Wikipedia - I seem to spend most of my time making charts that illustrate obscure English football statistics. I spend more time contributing to OpenStreetMap.

When I lived in London I helped organise London Wiki Wednesdays and got to know a lot of wiki people through a project I co-founded with my daughter called Yellowikis (http://www.yellowikis.org).

I hope that my background in marketing and my experience of working with a few thousand editors on Yellowikis will help us as we think about how to raise funds from the "crowd" as well as the "corporation".

SANDY GALLANTER

I have been involved in legal and financial matters my entire professional career. I am a member of the California Bar and was a Certified Public Accountant. I practiced these professions until 1966 when I became the CEO of a publicly traded electronics company and a publicly traded company manufacturing and retailing shoes and work gloves. I then formed a company to develop multi-family housing for low income tenants and have remained in the real estate business until the present.

I have been involved as a board member and officer of a number on local, national and international NGO's with a concentration on financial sustainability. I think this experience would be of help to Wikimedia is maximizing its financial support activities.

VERONIQUE KESSLER

I'm Veronique Kessler, the Chief Financial and Operating Officer of Wikimedia Foundation. I have a CPA license and I started with the Foundation in February 2008. Prior to that I have worked in both non-profit and for-profit companies in financial and accounting positions.

When I took the position, I recall that I was concerned about the financial sustainability of the organization-even on a short-term basis. I was intrigued but wondered where things would be in 12 months or 18 months. One of the first things on the agenda was hiring a fundraising staff person (which ended up being a team, not just one person) and enormous strides were made in the amount of funds raised. It's great to be in a position to be thinking of long-term sustainability (knock wood that this year's fundraiser goes well).

VeroniqueKessler23:09, 18 November 2009

Thanks for posting these here, Veronique! Task force members, I'd encourage you to copy your bio over to your user page. If you need help doing this, just post here, and someone can walk you through it. Thanks!

Eekim15:59, 20 November 2009

I never posted mine:

I'm Philippe Beaudette, and I'm the Wikimedia Foundation's Facilitator for the Strategy project. Basically, that means my job is to be as helpful as possible to you folks and do everything I can to make sure the process involves the community.

My background is in fundraising and political consulting with a healthy dose of for-profit consulting (project management on Computer-Telephone Integration) thrown in.

I can be reach on my talk page or by emailing me: philippe(at)wikimedia.org.

~Philippe (WMF)01:43, 3 December 2009
 

I'm Stu West and I've served on the Foundation board as the Board Treasurer since April of 2008. I'm really excited about this task force and the questions we're trying to attack. My day job is in Silicon Valley, where I've worked for a bunch of tech startups and bigger companies in finance and operating roles. Through that work, I've spent a fair bit of time looking at different commercial / business models for financial sustainability of internet web sites, including display and search advertising. My overall impression of our financial sustainability is that we have many many ways we could raise money for our projects, but in the end we have to find something that works for and continues to motivate our community of contributors since in the end we have nothing without them.

Stu18:19, 7 December 2009