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enoughâsomeone will eventually do it, I donât have to. Thereâs plenty of committed and smart people at the
Foundation, theyâll make it happen. Heck, Erik was back then a supporter of the plan (he was the one to secure the domain wikidata.org), and he was deputy director. Things were bound to happen anyway. But that is not what happened. I eventually, half a decade later, realized that if I do not do it, it simply won't happen, at least not in a reasonable timeframe.
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And as said, Wikidata was just one step on the way. But right now I cannot take the next steps. Anything that I would do or propose or suggest will be regarded through the lense of my current positions. To be fair, I do see that I should not be both the one suggesting changes, and the one deciding on
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As many of you already know, Denny VrandeÄiÄ has announced his resignation from the
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, effective today, April 8th. On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank Denny for his service to the movement and to the Wikimedia Foundation. We wish him the best during his
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I want to send a few thank yous, in particular to the teams at the
Wikimedia Foundation and at Google who helped me steer clear of actual conflicts of interests. They were wonderful, and extremely helpful. It bears a certain irony that both organizations had strong measures against exactly the kind
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When Denny informed the Board that he was stepping down, we began to consider how we would move forward. We recognize the importance of filling the two vacancies on the Board, and would like to proceed in a way that respects the will of the community and responds to existing Board needs. The Board
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specs. Dan gave me an advise that still rings with meâto do the things worth doing that only you can do. This set me, back then, on a path that eventually lead to the creation of
Wikidataâwhich, before then, wasn't something I wanted to do myself. I used to think that merely suggesting it would be
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I find myself tied and limited in my actions and projects. In order to avoid the perception or potential for
Conflict of Interests I have to act extremely carefully in far too many parts of my life. Instead of being able to pursue my projects or some projects at workâwhich I think would align very
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But be warned that you will continue to hear from me, after a wikibreak. Expect crazy ideas, project proposals, and requests to fund and implement them. I will return to a more active role within the movement. I will be, again, free to work on things that are worth doing and that only I can do. I
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It was not an easy decision, and certainly not a step made any easier by the events in the last few months. I understand that I will disappoint many of the people who voted for me, and I want to apologize: I am sorry, honestly sorry, but I donât see that it is me the Board needs now, or that the
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I only see three ways to stay clear from a perceived or potential
Conflict of Interest: to lay still and do nothing, to remove the source of the Conflict, or to step away from the position of power. Since the first option is unsatisfying, the second option unavailable, only the third option
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well with our missionâI found myself trapped between too many constraints. I feel like I cannot offer my thoughts and my considerations openly, since they might easily be perceived as expressions of interestsâregarding my previous work, regarding my friends, regarding my current employment.
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This hit home every time there was a topic that might be perceived as a potential conflict of interest between
Wikimedia and my employer, and even though I might have been in a unique position to provide insight, I had to refrain from doing so in order not to exert
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has to be considered under the aspect that it will be read as "it is a Board-member writing that comment" and/or âItâs a
Googler writing that commentâ, I donât see how I could effectively pursue such a
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will be meeting in Berlin during the
Wikimedia Conference on April 22nd and 23rdâduring this time we will discuss how we should fill the open community-nominated and appointed Trustee seats.
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them. I understand now that I could not have suggested
Wikidata as a member of the Board. It takes an independent Board to evaluate such proposal and its virtues and decide on them.
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was for me just one step towards my actual goal, a fully multilingual Knowledge. I hoped that as a Trustee I could pursue that goal, but when even writing a comment on a bug in
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may be a misnomer, really, as those "selected" candidates are probably also subject to the sitting board members' approval, and are thus nothing but recommendations ...
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movement needs me in that position. What I learned is that the profile that allows someone to win an election is not the profile that makes an effective Trustee.
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think that in that role I can be more effective and more valuable to the movement, the Foundation, and for our mission.
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In a post to the Wikimedia Announcements mailing list made three minutes later, Wikimedia Foundation board chairman
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Doc James, a fellow "community selected" board member. For that reason, I'm not sorry to see him leave.
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be accepted on the board. Then again, there's no harm in being more explicit, so I've
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in January 2016, means that two of the ten WMF board seats are currently unfilled.
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wikibreak, and look forward to seeing him on the projects and around the movement.
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There were constant and continuous attacks against me, as being merely
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I look forward to sharing more information with you in late April.
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I exchanged a walk on part in the war for a lead role in the cage.
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his decision on the Wikimedia-l mailing list on April 8, saying:
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It's why I wrote "one of three community-selected members
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2006 in Boston, when Markus Krötzsch and I had lunch with
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the sentence to replace "selected" with "recommended". --
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So I have decided to resign from the Board of Trustees.
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Denny VrandeÄiÄ resigns from Wikimedia Foundation board
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Denny VrandeÄiÄ resigns from Wikimedia Foundation board
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242:It was at
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