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Wikimedia press releases/Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees election results 2007

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Note: This press release is being drafted now, hence unready to translate/distribute/etc.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the charitable foundation behind the famous Internet collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia, has concluded its 2007 Board of Trustees election, to select three community-elected positions. The winners are Erik Möller, Kat Walsh and Frieda Brioschi. Ms. Brioschi is new to the board and Mr. Möller and Ms. Walsh are incumbents continuing to serve on the board. Ms. Brioschi joined the board as of July 12, 2007. The winners' terms will end July 14, 2009, with the regular 2009 election.

  • Erik Möller is 28 years old and lives in Berlin, Germany. He has been an active editor of Wikipedia since 2001 and has also contributed to the underlying software, MediaWiki. He is a freelance journalist and author (Die heimliche Medienrevolution: Wie Weblogs, Wikis und freie Software die Welt verändern) and also manages 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.
  • Kat Walsh, 24, lives in the Washington, DC area, and is a student in the technology law program at George Mason University School of Law, and currently working with the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction. She has been involved with Wikimedia since 2004, focusing on communications, dispute resolution, and free content issues. Kat is also a classical bassoonist, holding a bachelor's degree in music from Stetson University.
  • Frieda Brioschi (30, Italian) 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 has been president of that organization since. She currently lives in Rome where she works as a programmer.

The Wikimedia Board of Trustees manages the Foundation and supervises the disposition and solicitation of donations. The Board of Trustees are the ultimate corporate authority in the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

In total, 4170 valid single ballots were cast and accepted. The results were:

  1. Erik Möller 1671 votes
  2. Kathleen Walsh 1427 votes
  3. Frieda Brioschi 1254 votes
  4. Oscar van Dillen 1234 votes
  5. Michael Snow 1229 votes
  6. Danny Wool 1217 votes
  7. Yann Forget 1153 votes
  8. Kim Bruning 1124 votes
  9. Steve Dunlop 1047 votes
  10. River Tarnell 889 votes
  11. Stephen Kennedy 864 votes
  12. Paweł Dembowski 693 votes
  13. Michael "Chad" Horohoe 672 votes
  14. Artur Jan Fijałkowski 571 votes
  15. Jason Safoutin 495 votes

Voting was conducted by approval voting, where a voter could vote for any number of candidates from the list. Eligible voters were those who had contributed for at least three months on any individual Wikimedia project, with more than 400 edits on any individual Wikimedia project.

The Board thanks the Election Committee, volunteers Kizu Naoko, Philippe Beaudette, "Newyorkbrad" and Jon Harald Søby, adviser Benjamin Mako Hill and WMF employee Tim Starling; the candidates; the voters who participated in this election; and the developers, translators, and others who supported and promoted the election.

The Board further wishes to thank Software in the Public Interest for hosting the election website, and particularly Michael Schultheiss, Vice President, who took responsibility for tallying and reporting the results to the Election Committee.

The current Board members are:

For more information, see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2007 .

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a US-registered 501(c)(3) tax-deductible nonprofit charity, dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. Its projects include Wikipedia (the popular Internet encyclopedia), Wikimedia Commons (an image and media collection), Wikinews (citizen journalism), Wikibooks (textbooks), Wikisource (a collection of source texts), Wikiquote (a quotations database), Wikiversity (free learning tools) and Wikispecies (a species database). It also sponsors the development of the open source MediaWiki collaborative wiki software used on these projects and by many outside organizations. For more information on the Wikimedia Foundation, visit http://www.wikimediafoundation.org/ .

Software in the Public Interest was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1997 in the state of New York. Since then, it has become an umbrella organization for several free software projects including Debian, PostgreSQL, and Openoffice.org. For more information on SPI, visit http://www.spi-inc.org/ .

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