Wikimedia Foundation selects new executive director

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Wikimedia Foundation selects new executive director

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After a lengthy search, the Wikimedia Foundation has announced the selection of a new executive director. Lila Tretikov comes from SugarCRM, a software company dealing in customer relationship management (CRM), where she was the chief product officer, based in Cupertino, California. It produces the web application Sugar, also known as SugarCRM, which is a customer relationship management system that is available in both open-source and commercial open-source applications. Since the start of this year, she has been a board adviser for Zamurai Corporation in the San Francisco Bay area. Her skill-base emphasizes the hiring and developing of people, technical management, and product design. Tretikov was named as a 2012 finalist in the Female Executive of the Year – Business Services category.

Jan-Bart de Vreede, the chair of the Board of Trustees and the chair of the Executive Director Transition Team that selected Tretikov, stated in an email that Tretikov "will be an excellent leader in the Wikimedia movement. She strikes us all as smart, brave and unpretentious, and ... she has the skills the Foundation needs":

“

As many of you know, about a year ago Sue Gardner announced she planned to step down as our ED. As we launched the search for her successor, we spent some time working through the most critical requirements for the role. We decided the new ED should be someone with a product/engineering background, ideally in an open-source or other online community context. We wanted someone experienced with organisations that were growing, who'd managed staff and budgets comparable to ours, and who had experience creating continuous delivery of technology improvements in an agile context. We wanted a person who is oriented towards collaboration, transparency and openness, with some experience with complex stakeholder environments, and with an international orientation. We knew we needed someone with courage and strong personal integrity, who wouldn't be intimidated by attempts to censor the projects.

Lila is precisely what we set out to find.

”

For her part, Tretikov wrote a lengthy email to the Wikimedia-l mailing list, telling the movement that "I'm excited to bring my passion for building products that people love and growing innovative, high-performing organizations to the Foundation. ... I've been warned that joining the Wikimedia movement is a bit like drinking from a firehose, and so I'd consider myself, right now, to be excited, curious, optimistic, and just a tiny little bit daunted."

Sue Gardner announced at the May metrics meeting that shipping the final version of the annual plan end of May will probably be her last duty for the Foundation. Tretikov will officially start on 1 June 2014, and will spend the next few weeks meeting staff.

Updates on this story from the community are welcome, and we will follow with a longer Signpost feature next week.

External links

Announcing our new Executive Director: Lila Tretikov, Wikimedia blog
Thank You!, by Lila Tretikov, email to Wikimedia-L (Fri May 2 00:39:42 UTC 2014)
Video of the Announcement of Lila Tretikov and Q&A with staff/community, 2 May 2014, YouTube via Google Hangouts on Air
"Why SugarCRM hired a CIO", YouTube

In this issue

30 April 2014 (all comments)

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How on earth do you "ship" a plan? This article needs serious editing. GeorgeLouis (talk) 17:51, 8 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Congratulations Lila! I look forward to watching the announcement video and seeing what you can bring to the Wikimedia movement for several years to come. You have big shoes to fill! Zell Faze (talk) 20:14, 1 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Welcome, Lila. It is wonderful to have you join the WMF; I wish you every success in your upcoming work. – SJ + 22:57, 1 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
What SJ said ;) Pundit|utter 07:39, 2 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What is her username? -- Ssilvers (talk) 14:36, 2 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

@Ssilvers: It is User:LilaTretikov. Zell Faze (talk) 17:01, 2 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Is it? The userpage exists, as does the User talk, but there doesn't seem to be a registered user behind them. Powers ^T 18:38, 2 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It seems to have been put up there by an employee of the WMF, User:JTrias (WMF). Hchc2009 (talk) 18:54, 2 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It was a copy of a page on the Foundation Wiki as well. If we are blanking the page here, it might be worth doing there. Zell Faze (talk) 19:27, 2 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure about the policy rules on the Foundation Wiki, so couldn't really comment - but I do feel that paid staff creating a user page and then putting up an unreferenced biography of their boss on the Wikipedia doesn't seem quite right to me. (NB: as per WP:NOPR) Hchc2009 (talk) 19:32, 2 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Powers, the account is registered globally (from meta.wikimedia.org). It will become locally registered once Lila starts using it here.--Eloquence * 05:55, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Has she ever edited? What did the Board think of her software and business method patents? EllenCT (talk) 11:47, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I too would actually be somewhat interested in if she has ever edited Wikipedia prior to this. It would be a strange decision if she had not I would think. Zell Faze (talk) 13:35, 3 May 2014 (UTC) Apparently she is not an editor. She says so at about 29:45 into the Wikimedia Metrics May 2014 video. Zell Faze (talk) 14:18, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Some fresh eyes might be good. See my discussion here:

Wikipedia talk:VisualEditor/Archive 6#Newsletter template for user pages? - it is actually a discussion about the VisualEditor (VE), and the need for true section editing before VE can be as revolutionary and fast as the wikitext editor. From reading her bio I doubt Lila Tretikov will be intimidated by the technical aspects of the Wikimedia software and developers. --Timeshifter (talk) 19:33, 3 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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