Wikimedia announces two new executive roles

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Earlier today we announced two important new Chief Executive roles at the Wikimedia Foundation – our new Chief Community Officer (CCO) Zack Exley and our new Chief Global Development Officer (CGDO) Barry Newstead.
These are two brand new roles for the Wikimedia Foundation.  The CCO will oversee and lead the development of our relationships with key stakeholders of the Foundation and our global projects: donors, readers, and volunteer editor/contributors. The CGDO’s work will focus on leading the Foundation projects’ reach and growth globally, but with a particular focus on the Global South, a key goal of the Foundation’s upcoming five-year business plan.
We’re thrilled to welcome Barry and Zack to the Foundation – two highly experienced leaders and advocates who bring new capacity and energy to our movement.
Jay Walsh, Communications

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

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From the press release: As CGDO, Barry Newstead will be responsible for increasing readership and supporting editor self-organization in the Global South, for overseeing communications with the general public and the media, and activities aimed at supporting and developing chapters. Newstead joins the Foundation from The Bridgespan Group, where he spent the past year helping the Wikimedia Foundation develop its five-year strategic plan. Previously, he worked with The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) for eight years and in 2004 he joined the Bridgespan Group, the nonprofit consulting organization created in partnership with Bain & Company. While at BCG, Newstead worked extensively… Read more »

and for Zack Exley: As Chief Community Officer, Zack Exley will be responsible for developing the Wikimedia Foundation’s relationships with key constituencies including readers, editors and donors. “Zack will be a terrific addition to the Wikimedia Foundation,” said Gardner. “He’s spent his whole career helping people self-organize to achieve their goals, and he has a track record of helping mission-driven organizations run effective online fundraising campaigns. It’s a very rare mix of skills, and I’m delighted we found him.” Exley brings to Wikimedia a wealth of experience in serving communities of online volunteers. He joins Wikimedia from the Chicago-based firm… Read more »

[[Press_releases/June_2010_Wikimedia_Foundation_appoints_new_CCO_and_CGDO_QandA |Questions and Answers]] on this press release.

I’m not really clear on the difference between the roles of each of these but they seem like great people to have on our side and I’m glad to have them.
I especially like that the contribution of editors is being recognised alongside that of donors even if editors contributions are harder to quantify in a balance sheet.
I hope the donations side of the balance sheet finds some way to mention the benefit received by our readers too.

What a terrible waste of donors’ money. In this economically difficult times the Foundation should be CUTTING its staff to get by, and come back to earth to stick to its basic objectives of supporting the servers and keeping Wikipedia online. Any “surplus” should be held in a sinking fund to prepare for days when donation is low. Instead the Foundation is adding an increasing number of managerial positions, even after the financial crisis begun. They are being paid an undisclosed salary and is going to put further strain on the Foundation’s finances. When revenues are down (or in danger… Read more »

Spitze Design hat dieser Blog. Woher hast du die Vorlage ? War bestimmt sehr teuer.

@Ervin Watchorn (#6): Vielen Dank für das Kompliment zu unserem Blog-Design. Unsere Entwickler haben es selber geschaffen, um es dem neuen Vector-Skin von MediaWiki anzugleichen. Sie können den Code hier sehen.
(Thanks for complementing our blog design. 🙂 Our developers actually made it themselves to match the new “vector” skin for MediaWiki. You can see the code here.)