Katherine Maher’s reputation in the Wikimedia community

Katherine Maher is the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. As the executive director of a global media superpower Katherine is a public figure and a fair subject of conversation. However, despite the popularity and influence of Wikimedia projects, the Wikimedia community’s development depends much more on personal relationships than business goals. Any public figures in the community take prominence because of attention that they seek and not, as with other organizations, from a corporate designation to be a public spokesperson. I am about to share some thoughts about Katherine. I have mixed feelings about writing anything because the mood of the Wikimedia community is that Katherine is not quite a public figure, and not quite appropriate as a public subject of discussion, and also her position as executive director is not quite the sort of organizational role which anyone should take seriously enough to describe or critique. Katherine and I have had some brief, friendly conversations and I like her. At the same time, she is standing in a position to influence the ways in which ~10-20% of people in the world access media. I think about the implications of what she does and want to talk about her.

I recognize that talking about any else’s reputation is a sensitive conversation topic, especially if the person is not a highly discussed celebrity or public figure. I am going to share my perspective on Katherine’s reputation and the reputation of the Wikimedia Foundation executive director itself. I have my own sensitivities in what I notice and what is important to me, and I also have my own agenda in highlighting things which I see and not noticing things which I fail to mention. What follows is what I find relevant about Katherine to my experience as a Wikipedia editor.

Please consider this photograph which I took at Wikimania 2017 in Montreal. Katherine and another person are in private conversation at the bar in the conference. In taking this photo it was my intent to show that Katherine is giving her attention to another person whom this photo does not identify, and to show that this meeting was in a busy conference space but off to the side in a visible but private space. I find this situation interesting because Katherine is the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation and her time is scarce, and yet repeatedly I have seen her make time to have private conversations with all sorts of individuals who wish to speak with her. It is unusual for executive directors to make time to meet with individuals, often casually and without appointments. It is unusual for executive directors to put themselves in public spaces where people can approach them for such meetings. It is not unusual for an organization to want or need their executive director to invest their time in this way. I am going to discuss the relationship between the Wikimedia community and the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, speculate on why Katherine gives so much of her attention to personal interaction with the Wikimedia community, and describe how I have come to feel about Katherine after meeting her on about 10 occasions and talking with other Wikimedia community members who talk to her at public events but do not otherwise collaborate with her routinely.

There was no planning in the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) or the Wikimedia community that the person serving as executive director should be a celebrity. When Wikipedia began in 2001 it had no staff and no budget. Jimbo has always been a public figure. Dariusz has a chapter in his 2014 Wikipedia book talks about how Jimbo is a spokesperson for the Wikimedia movement. The mass media and public at large have misunderstandings about what Jimbo does, with the common misunderstanding being that he plays an executive director role as the founder. This inaccurate belief comes from how people understand similar organizations, where the famous founder also retains control as the head. Instead, Jimbo is one of ten on a board of trustees and has not been an executive except perhaps in ways before 2005 which are not described in publication anywhere that I have read. An early supporter, software developer, board member, and all-around public face of Wikimedia projects, Eric Moller, found that the Wiki community offered him some leadership recognition between maybe 2005 and 2008. I would not say that the history of the executive director role at the WMF story begins with him because he never formally had that role and because he was not subject to the scrutiny of the hire and the establishment of formalized community conversation about WMF that began during the service of Sue Gardner.

When the board of the WMF hired Sue Gardner in 2007 Wiki community members spontaneously mobilized to respond to the role. The primary reason why the community became excited was because any Wikimedian who was already the sort of person to ask “who is in charge?” suddenly was able to get the answer that the executive director was. Of course the idea that the Wikimedia Foundation is in charge of the Wikimedia movement is a misguided or at least incomplete understanding, but it definitely is true that the head of the WMF is in charge of something influential and relevant to what the Wikimedia movement is. Whoever is at the top of the WMF gains a range of abilities through the position, including being the focus of some attention, and gaining the ability to attract an audience while speaking, and being able to direct the staff of the WMF to the extent that the governance structure allows the top person to direct the lower staff. With typical organizations, the executive director is either not a public figure outside a narrow field or does not gain general international celebrity status. In the WMF the role comes with global attention from all sorts of people with the only common element among them being that they care about what information is available through the Internet and they have come to believe that information in Wikimedia projects influence public access to information in a sector about which they care.

Among all things which Sue did in her tenure, the one thing which I feel most explains her activities, the development of the Wikimedia Foundation in that time, and the changing social stature of the executive director was that the WMF went from having a budget of US$ 1.5 million in 2006 the year before she arrived to to 75 million for the fiscal year immediately after she left. She presided over the WMF establishing fundraising practices. To an outsider who knows conventional organizational management but does not know the WMF’s situation this change in finances is challenging to understand. When Sue came to the WMF Wikipedia was already one of the most popular media outlets in the world, and if it was not most popular, then at least it was second to no other by the standards of many Wikimedia community members and enough outside commentators. My view is that the WMF already having great media power probably by 2003, and recognition of power by 2005, and supporting evidence in data for having power by 2007, but it is challenging to sort this history and bias for and against Wikipedia comes from all directions especially about these early days. There was a volunteer movement which had created the most consulted source of information in history, and that source also happened to be a living publication managed by volunteers and then later, some people established an organization to support that movement. All the while, despite the massive audience reading the publication, the publication itself got little respect and there was the bizarre public image that no one was reading it and many individuals imagining that Wikipedia is somehow their own secret personal source of information, not read by other people.

Uniquely and bizarrely amidst so much media currency, the Wikimedia movement’s cultural norms developed their basis outside the context of the WMF as the stewarding organization having any budget to guide or management community participation. This means that when Sue stepped into the role, wiki community volunteers far removed from the WMF had already set expectations for what the Wikimedia movement would do and how it would work. Many of those baseline principles were totally unlike what any corporate structure would establish, but because they were a precedent they were carried forward and the WMF organically developed from those odd starting conditions. Among the strange rules were customs of power sharing between the WMF and the Wikimedia community. Lots of people could say lots of things about the bizarre power sharing and its bizarre implications, but some striking points are that (1) the Wikimedia community of volunteers chooses the composition of the WMF board of trustees (2) the Wikimedia community has the perception that it manages the WMF staff to a greater extent than the WMF staff have the perception that they manage the community, and (3) any funds which the WMF raises actually belong to the Wikimedia community and not to the WMF, with the WMF only acting as the legal steward of those funds at the community’s behest. The reason why the Wikimedia community controls the money is that the Wikimedia community controls the elections for the Wikimedia Foundation board of trustees.

Someone else can write Sue’s biography and accomplishments. She was overworked and underpaid considering what she did, and accomplished, and considering the stalking and harassment she endured. I expect that she thinks back fondly of her time at the Wikimedia Foundation, but I can only imagine that a role like hers in Wikimedia was an intervention on five years of her life and that it was shocking and disruptive. Maybe her term changed her life perspective, or alternatively, maybe Sue is so worldly and urban that it all felt normal to her. In the public talks of her that I have seen she often talked about Internet user rights more than I felt she discussed the Wikimedia Movement as its own experience, so my impression is that she identified less as a Wikimedia Movement leader and more as an Internet media consumer advocate at the helm of the Wikimedia Foundation. Whatever Sue attempted, the lore that has begun to develop is that she did fine in what she attempted. Along with that, since the origin of lore is the Wikimedia community, there is a bias for discussing what Sue did for the community and what the community wants of executive directors. I follow Wikimedia community politics, and I participate in various Wikimedia community organizations including the chapters in different countries, and governance committees, and thematic organizations, and the mood that I perceive as distilling down from everything that Sue did in 5 years was that she was no friend to Wikimedia community chapters and openly sought to position them to be in conflict with the Wikimedia Foundation. I do not state this as either praise or criticism of Sue, and to summarize everything that a person did in 5 years as tension with weird volunteer community organizations is not an accurate portrayal, but even today when I hear discussions of what the WMF executive director does, then people associated with chapters tend to talk about how the role helps or hinders chapters. Sue is remembered for non-alignment with chapter interests and for advocating for decreased power and authority to chapter groups. She said things, but the most commonly discussed position she took is the September 2013 Annual report on the Funds Dissemination Committee process 2012-2013 in which she said, “I have significant concerns about how our movement entities are developing…” and presented a Wikimedia Foundation criticism of the Wikimedia community chapters that the chapters felt mirrored their criticism of the Wikimedia Foundation. Anyone can read her words, but many people in the Wikimedia community interpreted her words to mean that she wished for the balance of power to be for more funding and power to go to the WMF and for less funding and power to go to community led programs. The Wikimedia community has mutual feelings; it wants the same accountability of the Wikimedia Foundation that the Wikimedia Foundation asks of chapters. There is a wide-ranging feeling that funding comes to the Wikimedia movement because of community engagement and only secondarily to leadership decisions made with less community input at the WMF. At the same time the Wikimedia community groups by their nature seek their share of power, so of course having the a historical narrative of Sue’s disfavor to community groups only promotes their call to order for Wikimedia community organizations to assert their stake in selecting board trustees. At the time what Sue said or thought seemed to matter; in retrospect, if anything matters it is how people interpret and respond to the history they read in Wikipedia. These days Sue’s perceived disunity with wiki community groups is a a perspective which the community would say is incompatible with the role of executive director.

In the WMF’s governance model support from chapters is required. The chapters directly appoint 2 of 10 seats on the board of trustees and the people who engage with Wikimedia projects through chapters have an outsized influence on the entire board and governance system. The design of this board structure encourages the executive staff to have excellent community relationships and discourages the success of anyone in the executive position who is in conflict with chapters. Some of Sue’s comments mobilized an activist response for Wikimedia community members to mistrust anyone at the WMF who failed to support community volunteer organization. Nowadays in board appointments the community encourages the appointment of trustees who want stronger chapters and who will demand an executive who supports the chapters. I will not say that the allocation of power to Wikimedia community chapters is ideal or the best sort of governance, but this is the legacy we have, and there have been thousands of people starting thousands of discussions about casual comments from Sue about her feelings about Wikimedia chapters. I am sure that she never expected her comments to be deconstructed and dehumanized to the point of abstraction and to become a focus of attention in this way affecting how hundreds of thousands or millions of people relate to the Wikimedia movement. No one planned or anticipated that some conversations and comments would be the foundation of culture in a global media movement entering its second generation of influence and only accumulating more power.

Sue would have conversations with people in Wikimedia chapters because things were casual then and the attention of the executive of the WMF was either less scarce then, or at least associated with much less money than it is now. The Wikimedia Foundation did not pay Sue market rate for her role. In 2007 when she came to the office there was almost no respect for the Wikipedia or the Wikimedia projects anyway, and practically all conversations about Wikipedia in respected circles were to criticize it and predict the return of traditional publishing models. Future generations will neither understand nor believe the popular skepticism of the viability of the Internet which existed until 2007, or perhaps till 2013, or perhaps till even today in 2017. With Wikipedia being among the least respected but most prominent Internet-based projects in the time of Sue’s tenure, Wikipedia was the most popular target for any sort of complaint that anyone wished to make about anything that could happen with the Internet. In this context Sue made a graceful exit from the WMF in 2014 and went on to other things. Everyone appreciated what she did and wished her all success in her future endeavors, as well as speedy recovery for any psychological trauma which she assumed as part of the job description. I hardly ever had a conversation with her but like so many others lived the collective mythology for what we thought she was.

When the board hired Lila Tretikov wiki volunteer insiders thought she seemed great. She was Ukrainian, so that meant she had cultural connections outside the US and Europe which was a plus. She also did software, so that meant that she would fix all Wikimedia software development issues. She seemed well spoken. This is what people talked about. People began asking something else – “Have you met her? What is she like?” Not many people had opinions, because it seemed that relatively fewer people had met her as compared to having met Sue. She was new and it takes time to get to know people, and everyone wanted her to succeed.

More time passed and then the Wikimedia community implicated Lila in a scandal. There is lots of documentation on this, and I have my own interpretation, but my view of the “scandal” was that Wikimedia community groups accused her of allocating WMF funding without the input and agreement of the Wikimedia community. This would not be a scandal for an organization which had a normal governance structure. Typical organizations, even nonprofit organizations, have their executive staff make the executive decisions. If executives decide to do a project then they do it and would never think of asking for the opinions of pseudo-anonymous volunteers out in Internet communities. The “scandal” has its nuances because Lila’s plan also had its conflicts with WMF staff, and because there were exciting mini-scandals which the Wikimedia community observed and encouraged for entertainment value and true belief. Whatever the case, in Wikimedia projects the executive answers to the board and the board answers to the community, and the community was not tolerating advanced decisions making and major financial commitments planned without the continual input and approval from the community. There was no chance of Lila’s continued service as executive director without the community’s approval of her projects. Lila’s silence during community discussion felt horrible and we all felt as if we were drowning for lack of information, or that we were betrayed, or that many processes were deeply broken. Again – I find no fault with Lila, except that even the WMF staff who coached her gave her incorrect information about the place of Wikimedia community approval in movement governance. The WMF staff executive actions in this process encouraged the recruitment of thousands of volunteer labor hours from hundreds of volunteers who absolutely did not want to spend their time on this political nonsense. Thoroughly burned, the Wikimedia community thereafter solidified in demands that executive staff must seek approval from the community and must communicate effectively, honestly, and often in public.

After Lila departed there was some waffling about who would be the next to lead. Katherine Maher became interim executive director by stepping up from her role as communications director. Lila had been hired in the context of the Wikimedia community’s emotionally exhausting participation in a worldwide hiring process with many people speaking up with their heartfelt wishes about what they hoped the next executive would do. I thought it was a good idea to seek community participation because that is what we do in wiki, but as time passed, people kept talking and more people were asking for miracles, and human hopes and patience strain or contort as time passes. The Lila hiring process was in wiki community attention and conversation for too long, and her hire was a relief at the time. With her firing, a lot of people were upset that so many failsafes had failed. No one wanted to revive community conversation about hiring the next person. There was some expectation that maybe the trustees would simply hiring one of the other leading candidates from the last search. An abrupt announcement came that they would just hire Katherine. Immediately thereafter, James Heilman commented that he approved, which was a relief to the community since he was a major figure in the Lila scandal and his approval seemed like an indication that everything was going to be okay for the community. People knew Katherine, she was a promotion from someone with wiki experience, she had earned a reputation for ably managing the position as interim director, and by hiring Katherine everyone could go forward with all the projects paused by lack of a head of state.

I like Katherine. I like everything she has done as executive director. I like hearing her talk and watching her do things. I think that she is the right person to be executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation at this time. I have no criticism whatsoever about her, except that she fails to be superhuman. Unlike some other executive directors at organizations of similar power and prestige to the WMF, she was neither born into extreme wealth and power nor has all the privileges and abilities that people with personal staff can buy. The WMF is unable to fund her to execute her whims to the limit that all possible hired staff can accomplish, so that is a shortcoming of what people wish for their leaders. It is no fault of Katherine’s and simply a limitation of a limited budget for Wikimedia projects. So far as normal humans go Katherine is maximally talented and able in her role. I do not know Katherine so well, but I have interacted with her maybe 10 times. Here are my Katherine anecdotes.

Katherine attends the 2016 WikiConference North America

In October 2016 Wiki NYC and others presented the third annual WikiConference North America, a 3-day regional Wikimedia conference which about 15 leads plan and which attracts 400 participants. I am one of the organizers for this. In 2014, perhaps due to the tone which Sue set, WMF gave us a very hard time about presenting the conference. I got the distinct feeling that while some community-loving factions in the WMF supported us organizers, the other factions were pushing back on community organization in all the ways that stem from the unfortunate view that “because an empowered community elects the WMF trustees, therefore a less empowered community makes for easier WMF working conditions”. While I was grateful to have gotten conference funding from the WMF for the conference, I felt like they should have been more supportive considering that volunteers who are presenting a 3-day conference for 300 people in Manhattan on a small grant are doing this for love. We should not have needed to beg for some matching funding to present an event with volunteer labor huge matching donations in NYC. With our collective funding so scarce and so many corners cut at the expense of more expert Wikipedians organizing an event rather than engaged in purely wiki skill sets, I was shocked to see that the WMF spend more money to send staff to the conference to observe it, promote their projects, and take advantage of community attention than they did to fund the rest of the conference. I do not expect perfect management especially on the haphazard, life-support level administration on which the WMF operates, and I blame no one for anything. However, I felt policed at the 2014 conference, and I attribute that mood to Sue’s attitude that Wikimedia chapters and their activities were a liability to WMF operations. For the 2015 WikiConference the WMF offered no funding whatsoever. Different people have their own memories about why that was, including Frank’s op-ed in The Signpost which I read as a coded message that the WMF should fund small, low-budget, volunteer labor conferences; and my own memories which I summarized after the 2016 conference. I feel that the WMF pushback could be attributed to the success of the 2014 conference and yet greater WMF fear of Wikimedia community organization especially in the United States. All we wanted was coffee and cookies and a place to have conversations, but to hear the way the bureaucratic process treated us sometimes it seemed like they worried that when the coffee ran out we would disband the San Francisco headquarters. Again, I am not talking about anyone in particular here. Collectively, the WMF can be crazy like any organization in aggregate. Individually, all the employees are as bright and friendly of people who can be found doing great jobs. All of us in this – volunteer and staff – are the victims of an institutional machine which somehow projects a personality which is neither like any of its individual members nor what anyone would expect of the sum of all those individuals’ good will. When communication goes through several good people in a bureaucracy the message which comes out the other end can be absurd just because there is no sense to be made in conversations between corporate entities and individual people.

The WMF’s perspective on the 2016 WikiConference North America was really easy to explain though: Katherine came, seemed to recognize everyone by name and face, sincerely complimented every individual after having somehow done research on all of their personal interests, then spoke on stage saying how great the conference was. The organizing team in 2014 and 15 half overlapped with 16. I do not think that any of us expected the WMF to voice significant support of the event, and although we invited Katherine as we invited Sue in 2014 and Lila in 2015, I think that we were still in the mindset that the concept of a Wikimedia community conference the the grassroots agenda we presented was still something which the WMF perceived as anti-WMF and maybe anti-wiki. Katherine not only praised all the volunteers who participated, but she herself joined the conference acting as an equal to any other attendee. She was not on a schedule, she did not have a minder to conform her location to a schedule, and she ate food with other attendees.

Katherine was onstage in plenary sessions. Katherine spoke in small-group sessions like a typical presenter in a breakout session. Katherine mingled around in the social events. Overall, Katherine participated in the conference like a typical attendee because she actually was in the conference as an actual attendee. After the conference was underway I was outside the conference for some reason with Dorothy / Hexatekin. Dorothy said, hey look that’s Katherine sitting at that coffeehouse. What should we ask of her? It is not correct to say that all WMF staff are like fat guinea pigs swimming across the piranha-infested rivers of the Wikimedia community, but in this weird social ecology which we all have created, WMF staffers either are ignorant or play ignorant that they control levers of power which individuals in the Wiki community covet to advance their own projects. It is common for the Wiki community to orchestrate conversations around WMF staffers. Whereas WMF staffers enter social spaces including hundreds of people whom they cannot possibly know, they themselves – despite having job descriptions which in typical organizations would confer no prestige – are often the target of intrigue, attempts at social manipulation, and courtship in the hopes that they do some trite, dumb thing which removes a barrier to progress for a demographic of Wikimedia community volunteers. Dorothy and I discussed our wishes and conversation objectives between ourselves. Our mission was to suggest that Katherine thank the conference organizers and give praise to people who had done work and found success in organizing Wikimedia community projects. As I would come to learn, Katherine does such things anyway. It seems like a small thing, but Katherine’s praise and encouragement were sufficient to retain volunteers in my social circle such that they found more gratification in our shared activities. I believe that Katherine’s participation in the conference in 2016 was a form of pre-approval for WMF support for the conference in 2017 and the iteration in planning now for 2018, as well as for renewed support for community activities all around the WMF. Her coming to the conference brought a major shift in how Wikimedia organizers in the United States felt about volunteering. Before Katherine, getting funding from the Wikimedia Foundation required a process which felt like scrutiny for mismanagement of funds. After Katherine, getting grants for the Wikimedia community felt more like a partnership in which the Wikimedia Foundation would supplement volunteer labor with safe venues to meet and coffee to fuel the events.

Katherine comes to New York to advocate for a collaboration between Wikimedia projects, PBS, and NPR

When Dorothy and I said hello to Katherine at the coffeehouse neither of us had talked with her for a while, but she remembered our names and what both of us did. As an executive director I know that Katherine meets a lot of people. Maybe like other directors she comes to learn a lot of names, but I did not expect her to immediately remember mine, and yet she did. I had last talked with Katherine and first met her in March 2015 when she came to NYC to join some Wiki NYC people in a discussion about collaboration between Wikimedia projects and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The context of the conversation was that Katherine at the time was WMF communications director, not executive, and some individuals associated with PBS and NPR wanted to deepen relationships with the Wikimedia community. The conversation was at a preliminary stage, so no one was yet stating official positions of the WMF, PBS, or any of the other entities we were representing, but by this particular conversation there had been perhaps a total of ten prior conversations between a group on one side with representatives on the other. At this conversation Katherine spoke about the WMF and introduced Wiki NYC organizers as fit for ongoing local conversation with PBS in NYC. Maybe 10 of us were present, including Dorothy and me, which was how we both met Katherine.

Wikipedia, PBS, and NPR are all nonprofit media organizations so we ought to work together. It takes time for a relationship to warm and although there have been regular collaborations since that meeting our collaboration has not matured. Regardless, Katherine helped moderate discussion on that day. She introduced us all nicely and had more prior understanding of what we did and what we wanted than we expected her to be able to articulate. I was actually worried that when she talked she would express a misunderstanding of what the Wikimedia community does, because typical WMF staff are community outsiders hired into a narrow role and have limited understanding of how anything in the Wikimedia community works. When she spoke well at the meeting and in a way that supported the organized volunteer community, this told me was that she had done her research and got sufficient briefing in advance of meeting us to be able to anticipate what we might like. She was more prepared that we could have expected her to be. The way these kinds of meetings work is that the external organization will contact the Wikimedia Foundation, thinking that to be the center of power for content collaborations as it would be in a traditional organizations structure. Then, the WMF makes an introduction to the most relevant community group. Katherine did this superbly. We had our own internal discussions about how Wiki NYC, the WMF, and external partners relate to each other following the lead that Katherine demonstrated in this case.

Looking back, Wiki NYC had a budget of US$ 1000 / year at that time and was somehow using that to manage relationships with many of the most prestigious institutions in NYC including media companies, museums, universities, foundations, some companies, and whatever else. Katherine’s appearance at this time was one of the inciting factors which prompted us in Wiki NYC to organize and fundraise to get a budget of about $60,000 for the following year. She made for a different climate for chapters and the time was ripe.

Katherine walks in the rain to the party at Wikimania 2016 in Italy

After the conference tracks on Saturday night at the June 2016 Wikimania conference in Italy there was a social event in an outdoor tent at the conference. Lots of us were waiting around enjoying ourselves. We were asking among ourselves whether Katherine would attend the party. Her time is valuable and maybe she would have important meetings or work to do and skip. The party was for the community and maybe she as executive director would not feel welcome even though she was invited. She had just taken the executive director position a couple of months previously. The weather became rainy and then the rain came down hard and cold. It was so wet that no one would have blamed anyone for passing on the event, as we were outside in a tent with a long walk through the rain to arrive at our party space. The tent was cheap and not a proper shelter as the wind blew in water through the sides. Someone said that Lila would not have come out in the rain. I have no idea what relationship Lila had to weather and parties, and probably no one had evidence about Lila making any decisions based on rain. Regardless, we were all standing around in a shabby tent in a heavy storm speculating on whether the previous director Lila would come if she were here. People were asking around if Katherine would come and thoughts were probably not even though earlier she said that she would.

Not too long later, when people were settled in but not so late that anyone had given up hope, Katherine showed up walking in the rain and quite drenched. She said that of course she would not miss the party, and that she was so happy to see all of us. She greeted everyone there. Her hair was wet and she was a little rough and wet but so were all of us, and she attended the event on our terms rather than as someone with a distant image to maintain. I did not expect her to show. I was surprised that she did. I was surprised that she came by walking in the rain like all the rest of us instead of getting a car. I liked that she demonstrated that she would spend time with the rest of us, in the same conditions we had, and that she would use her time to socialize with us.

Katherine joins a Wiki NYC event at the United Nations
In August 2016 Wiki NYC organized a wiki editing event for an organization in the United Nations. That was fun. Katherine came to NYC to present.

The meeting went great. What surprised me was that Katherine came early to participate and stayed late after her presentation. Sometimes with invited speakers they do their talk and then split. Katherine was there for chat before her talk and she stayed a long time to talk with all the attendees. She made space for private conversations with people. In the midst of her being there, she also repeatedly stepped away to take video conferences, but she kept those short. After taking a video call she would make the rounds in the editing event again, and many people would not have even noticed that she was ever absent. After making her appearance she would step out again and take other calls. The effect was that she kept a full schedule and commitments but also seemed to be continually at hand for everyone who wished to talk with her. She came without an executive assistant or any staff escorting her.

Board retreat in NYC in November 2016
On 11 November 2016 there was a WMF board retreat in NYC. Wiki NYC participants met them at Reichenbach Hall after their meeting at the end of the day. We talked about Jimmy getting his account hacked. Wiki NYC did not have particular engagement in it, but the discussion at the bar last night was one contributing factor to the Extension:LoginNotify tool which the community selected in the annual wishlist. It was great that Katherine made herself available in this casual way. It is not that she did anything in particular. Board members would have come without her. It is just encouraging and inspiring to know that leadership is around. Meeting casually for social events makes for memories and better mutual understanding.

Keynote at Wikipedia Day 2017
Katherine was a speaker at Wiki NYC’s Wikipedia Day 2017, the celebration of Wikipedia’s birthday. Again, besides speaking, she hangs out at the conference and talks to everyone. She has private conversations casually over coffee and snacks.

At the end of the day my boyfriend Fabian dropped in to take me home. Fabian had come to Reichenbach Hall two months ago and met Katherine there. Katherine recognized him and remembered his name. I was flattered. I met huge numbers of people and it is not possible to learn so many names at continual conference attendance. Fabian is an unusual person who cannot be mistaken for anyone else, but still, Katherine knowing my loved one made me feel entirely watched over and made me feel very encouraged in what I do with Wiki NYC.

April 2017 NYC fundraiser

The WMF hosts a fundraiser event in NYC every year. Wiki NYC people get invitations to join. These are set up as socials and the idea is that funders ask us why we edit wiki and we ask the funders why they care about wiki. It has been surprising for me to see who donates, hear why they donate, and to ask them what they hope to see from Wikimedia projects in the future. All of us wiki people at these events find them very satisfying. I was at the April 2017 one.

The pattern with Katherine is the same. She chats up everyone at the event. Anyone who is a wiki person gets her special attention and thanks. Whether someone has donated a pile of money or just started editing wiki she expresses gratitude just the same, or more likely, just takes an honest and tireless interest in hearing about anyone’s passion. At this particular event she asked us about recent local projects by naming them, again indicating that she does her homework and any grassroots project we do merits her attention.

Katherine does Karaoke at Wikimania 2017

At Wikimania 2017 anyone out late on Saturday could join at the karaoke bar. Of course everyone wanted Katherine to sing. She choose “Barbie Girl“, a song with lyrics in which the singer celebrates consuming products, being groomed, and being a puppet to act at the request of others. The Wikimedia community is an activist community. In general, Wikimedia contributors feel some opposition to consumer culture, and dislike consuming more than necessary, and avoid treating women as sex objects, and want the executive director to be a strong leader. This particular song is well known enough to a generation as a feminist critique of Barbie and how the media demonstrates that women should behave. By choosing this song, Katherine was showing that she knows what kind of pressure the world puts on others. Her choice of this song made me feel like she planned several steps ahead of everyone else and that as a leader she was looking ahead for all of us.

Alternatively, who knows, maybe she was just drunk and thought the song would be funny. It was. My noting the issue probably says more about me than it does about her. It is not like she planned to make a statement at the bar, but then also, I am not aware of stories about Sue or Lila inviting people to bars or what songs Sue and Lila did in karaoke. From my perspective, making karaoke a job requirement for the Wikimedia Foundation executive director position would do more good than many other job skills more routinely considered.

Final thoughts on Katherine

Executive directors are expensive. Besides their salary all the staff in the organization in all kinds of ways have to adapt their schedule to match the wishes and priorities which the executive director dictates. There is hierarchy and consensus and group buy-in, but to some extent an executive director also makes their own decisions and says what goes. There are about 300 employees at the Wikimedia Foundation but there are also perhaps 8000 community members who care in a noticeable way about WMF governance and management. Of those 8000, maybe 3-4000 actually get involved in the governance process somehow. Katherine has at least 4000 people who check out her activities in some close way. I cannot guess about the extent of her influence on other people, and I also cannot guess on her influence in the context of the much broader influence of Wikimedia projects.

The picture that I posted at the top of this post is the sort of situation in which I have seen Katherine make for herself repeatedly. She has a reputation for joining community organized events all over the world and prioritizing conversations with community participants. She does this by talking to crowds, and by joining small group conversation, and by talking one on one with people who request that of her. Most organizations would not want the valuable time of their executive director spent in this way. Time that she spends having conversations with volunteers about small things is time that she is not spending negotiating major institutional collaborations, or doing fundraising, or mediating huge community conversations about global campaigns, or presenting the face of the movement to the media, or supporting her team of executive staff. Of course I want all of these things done, but at some point, Katherine and the community and WMF staff and whoever else had to come to some agreement about what the most urgent needs were and what makes volunteers most able to actualize their potential and be as inspired as possible to advance Wikimedia projects.

I feel that what the community wanted more than anything else was a leader who would meet with any volunteer as an equal, and who encouraged all good projects with recognition, and who would continually praise any group of people who would do volunteer projects well among themselves and in collaboration with other groups. She recognized the community’s values and support them.

I know that being in NYC we have gotten to see Katherine more than many other groups get to meet with her. Also maybe she gets to know NYC better because she visits it more. Still, I believe that I have seen her honest natural behavior, and I have heard these kinds of stories from wiki groups around the world. Katherine has a busy visitation schedule and attends larger community events wherever she can, which in many cases is the first in-person acknowledgement from a WMF staffer that these groups have gotten. She has been the first conversation with a WMF staffer that many individual volunteers have had. Maybe in the future the trust and respect will be there so that WMF can appoint nuncios in which people of a recognizable rank can demonstrate support from the WMF, but at present, people know Katherine, trust Katherine, love Katherine and want to see Katherine. I would have never imagined that a director for a massive organization should spend so much time being an in-person face on such a humble level, but in the case of the WMF at present, the hardest job to delegate to anyone else is building trust. Whatever the compromise in time and sharing of duties, the wiki movement requires a lot of trust and mutual respect and I feel that Katherine is succeeding because she deploys the trust to whichever Wikimedia community volunteers and organizations need it the most.