Board of Trustees - Wikimedia Foundation

Board of Trustees - Wikimedia Foundation

Board of Trustees
From Wikimedia Foundation

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The Wikimedia Board of Trustees manage the nonprofit and supervise the disposition and solicitation of nonprofit donations. The Board of Trustees are the ultimate corporate authority in the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. (article IV, sec. 1 of the Wikimedia Foundation bylaws).

The Board has the power to direct the activities of the foundation. It also has the authority to set membership dues, discipline and suspend members (article III), and to amend the corporate bylaws (article VI).

The Board consists of five directors. Since June 2004, two of these seats have been elected. In each case, voting was open to all active users who were eligible for sufferage. The latest vote was held during three weeks from June to July 2005, and the elected representatives in July 2005 will retain their seats for two years.

The Board holds regular meetings. All Board meetings can be reviewed on the Meetings page.

The current Board members are:

* Jimbo Wales, Chair and founder, life member
* Florence Nibart-Devouard, Vice-Chair, Contributing User Representative
* Angela Beesley, Volunteer User Representative
* Michael Davis, Treasurer
* Tim Shell, Secretary

Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
Jimmy Wales in Paris.
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Jimmy Wales in Paris.

Jimmy "Jimbo" Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), is an Internet entrepreneur and a wiki enthusiast.

Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama and is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of Alabama. He worked as Research Director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm then located in Chicago. He also admires the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. In the mid-1990s Wales started Bomis, a search portal focusing on aspects of pop culture, one of the first users of the freely licensed data of the Open Directory Project, and in 2004 founded Wikia, a wiki-style search engine.

In 1999, Wales had the concept of a freely distributable encyclopedia and founded Nupedia, by hiring philosopher Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief and assigning 2 programmers to write software for it. Nupedia failed primarily due to being a top-down cathedral model, as opposed to Wikipedia, which is the ultimate bazaar. After more than 2 years of struggle with the Nupedia concept, Wikipedia was opened to become an instant success.

Wales is currently the president of the Wikimedia Foundation, a Tampa-based non-profit organization that encompasses Wikipedia and its younger sister projects. According to the Herald Sun, an Australian newspaper, Wales has spent over AU$400,000 on Wikipedia and Nupedia; later, Time Magazine reported that Wales spent around US$500,000 on his Wiki projects.

Wales is married, and lives in St. Petersburg, Florida with his wife Christine and his daughter Kira.

Florence Nibart-Devouard
Florence
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Florence

Florence Nibart-Devouard serves as the Contributing User Representive to the Board and is the vice-chair of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Florence was born in Versailles (France). She grew up in Grenoble, and has been living since then in several French cities, as well as Antwerpen in Belgium and Tempe in Arizona.
She is a engineer in Agronomy (ENSAIA and also holds a DEA in Genetics and biotechnologies (INPL). She has been working in public research, first in flower plant genetic improvement, and second in microbiology to study the feasability of polluted soil bioremediation. She is currently employed in a french firm, to conceive decision-making tools in sustainable agriculture. She joined the Wikipedia adventure in February 2002 and is known as a contributor under the pseudonym Anthere.

Florence is 36, and live in Clermont Ferrand with her husband Bertrand and her two children, Anne-Gaëlle aged six and William eight.


Angela Beesley
Angela in London
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Angela in London

Angela Beesley serves as the Volunteer User Representative to the Board.

Angela was born in Norwich, England in 1977 and grew up in Maidstone and Colchester. She holds an honours degree in psychology. During a year out from Aston University, and for a period after graduating, Angela worked as a research assistant in the Aston Dyslexia and Developmental Assessment Centre. She then worked for the National Foundation for Educational Research, based in Berkshire, as a developer of the national statutory assessments for England and Wales.

Angela currently lives in Essex and manages Wikicities, which she founded with Jimmy Wales in October 2004.

Michael Davis

Michael Davis is a graduate of Williams College and the University of Chicago. Formerly the CEO of Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago, Davis is now retired and lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Tim Shell
Tim Shell, La Jolla California, 2003
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Tim Shell, La Jolla California, 2003

Timothy Shell is an internet entrepreneur with an interest in self-organization, and decentralized order, as exemplified by Wikipedia. In 1996 he was pursuing his degree in computer science when he decided to chuck it and go into business, joining up with Jimmy Wales to start Bomis.

Shell has lived in Chicago, Florida, and San Diego, and currently resides in Las Vegas.