Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-03-23/Interview





Katherine Maher says WMF at "interesting moment of change"
After the Wikimedia Foundation’s roller-coaster ride of the past few months, the appointment of chief communications officer Katherine Maher to lead the organisation as interim executive director has been greeted with relief by Wikimedians and WMF staff.

Maher brings to her new role a significant [//www.linkedin.com/in/krmaher/ track record] of international experience in technology-oriented management, community engagement, and governance. Getting people to trust each other and work together appears to be a hallmark of her style.

Her experience began with programmatic work and the modelling of market and governance stability in the Middle East. She went on to manage HSBC’s international development program from the UK, moving to financial and market analysis in the company’s Düsseldorf and Toronto offices.

Since then, Maher's career has mostly been in the NGO sector—first for a specific project in establishing an open-source citizen reporting site for Lebanon; then in the management, project design, and advocacy of ICT-supported endeavours for UNICEF; the non-partisan US National Democratic Institute; and the World Bank. In the 16 months before she was chief communications officer at the WMF, she was the advocacy director for Access Now, leading their global advocacy on human rights and technology policy.

The Signpost interviewed Maher last week by Skype audio on a range of issues—from the impending recruitment of key WMF managers to more existential challenges that face the Wikimedia movement. 



A transcript of the interview by Graham Pearce is available.

During the interview, a number of terms and abbreviations are used:


 * The  chief technology officer (CTO) is a critical executive-level role focused on the WMF's engineering side. The job description for this key position, as yet unfilled, is [//boards.greenhouse.io/wikimedia/jobs/161834?t=30xl7i#.VvY4fcehX0c here].
 * Product is short for the research and development of new software and functionality, as distinct from the WMF's engineering team. Wes Moran is the vice president of product.
 * Human resources (HR) is the management of an organisation's workforce. In the WMF, this is known as "talent and culture".
 * The Strategic priorities document for the short- to medium-term planning of the WMF is currently maturing at Meta.
 * MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki application. It was originally developed by the Foundation and is the basis of many of its websites, including the Wikipedias. MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language and uses a backend database.
 * Wikidata is a collaboratively edited document-oriented database knowledge base, focused around items. Operated by the WMF, it is intended to provide a common source of data that can be used by Wikimedia projects and by anyone else, under a public-domain licence. It was launched in October 2012 under the supervision of Wikimedia Germany.
 * A platform in the simplest terms is the stage on which computer programs can run. Examples are embedded systems that can access hardware directly without an operating system, a web-based browser like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, the Google platform, and the WMF's Wikidata project. By contrast, Wikipedia is a destination—a repository of information.


 * Editor's note: post-production audio advice by Bill Dengler and Graham Pearce.