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Denny Vrandečić resigns from Wikimedia Foundation board

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By Andreas Kolbe

Denny Vrandečić resigns from Wikimedia Foundation board

Community-selected Wikimedia Foundation board member Denny Vrandečić (Denny) has resigned from the WMF board. He announced his decision on the Wikimedia-l mailing list on April 8, saying:

Be bold
,

Denny

In a post to the Wikimedia Announcements mailing list made three minutes later, Wikimedia Foundation board chairman Patricio Lorente said,

All,

As many of you already know, Denny Vrandečić 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 wikibreak, and look forward to seeing him on the projects and around the movement.

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 will be meeting in Berlin during the Wikimedia Conference on April 22nd and 23rd—during this time we will discuss how we should fill the open community-nominated and appointed Trustee seats.

I look forward to sharing more information with you in late April.

Patricio

Denny, who has been a Wikipedian since 2003, 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. He joined the WMF board in July 2015, as one of three community-recommended members accepted on the board that year. His departure, along with that of Arnnon Geshuri in January 2016, means that two of the ten WMF board seats are currently unfilled.

Brief notes

External videos
video icon WMF Metrics and Activities Meeting - March 2016
  • March Metrics and Activities Meeting: A video of the Wikimedia Foundation's March 2016 Metrics and Activities Meeting is available on YouTube.
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With all respect to Denny, whose contributions to our work are immense, no members of the board are "community selected"; the community recommends, and the individuals recommended are then appointed, or not, by the board - and, as we saw with Doc James, may as easily be removed. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:56, 14 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Andy, I know that. It's why I wrote "one of three community-selected members accepted on the board that year"). The community does select candidates which then may or may not be accepted on the board. Then again, there's no harm in being more explicit, so I've edited the sentence to replace "selected" with "recommended". --Andreas JN466 11:58, 14 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It occurs to me that meta:Affiliate-selected_Board_seats 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 ... Andreas JN466 12:04, 14 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]


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