Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-01-16/News and notes

The Signpost
← Back to Contents
View Latest Issue


News and notes

Communication is key

Contribute   —  
Share this
By Evad37

Communications appointments

Heather Walls, new Chief Creative Officer
The Wikimedia Foundation has made two new leadership appointments in its Communications department. Heather Walls, interim Chief of Communications, will become the Chief Creative Officer, a newly created position.

Kui Kinyanjui will take on the position of Vice President of Communications, in charge of both traditional and digital communications, and will report directly to the Chief Creative Officer. Kinyanjui will take up her new position in early March, working remotely from Nairobi, Kenya.

Further information is available in Executive Director Katherine Maher's post on the Wikimedia-l mailing list.

Mapping community capacity

The WMF's Community Resources team has started an experimental Community Capacity Map (CCM). The page presents self-assessments of capacities of Wikimedia communities in a variety of fields, such as communications and media relations, community health, and technical skills.

The CCM aims to track these capacities over time, and help identify areas that need improvements – not only for the community groups themselves, but also independent experts, volunteers, and the Wikimedia Foundation. Further information is available on Meta.

Brief notes

← Previous "News and notes"
Next "News and notes" →
+ Add a comment

Discuss this story

These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.
  • We have a brand? Ouch. Best Regards, Barbara (WVS) ✐  ✉ 22:03, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Of course first I read our article Chief creative officer. The list of examples there is heavy on entertainment, whereas I'd expect a more typical corporate title to be Chief communications officer. So this sends a subtle message; is it intentional? Is WP an entertainment company? But this also stood out: the people in the CCO role are known heavyweights and even figureheads for a particular set of intellectual property – for example John Lasseter for Pixar and Joe Quesada for Marvel. In these two examples they are creators of a great deal of the company's property in their own right. The recent appointee at WMF is an unknown to me and I spend, ahem, a lot of time here. So I'd like to know more about what that's all about. I'd also like to hear where the WP content contributors stand in their vision of stakeholder groups. Is the chief creative officer interested in hearing from the creators? I'm here. Hello? ☆ Bri (talk) 03:23, 18 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    It's been my experience that tech-centric nonprofits like this tend to let people create their own job titles; it's one of the perqs, or rather one of the bits of leeway for doing nonprofit work at nonprofit salaries when people could be making more money in the commercial sector. As long as the job title makes some kind of sense, no one should get too bent out of shape about it. "Chief communications office" is a corporate title, and not all that often found in nonprofits. ("Communications director" is the more frequent NGO equivalent; I've had both titles in my time, for the same work, and the only real difference was that one of the nonprofits I worked for was led by someone who really liked corporate-ish titles and the other by someone who let us design our own business cards, as long as the work got done.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 04:38, 18 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    What's the over–under on this CCO surviving the ExecDir's tenure? Chris Troutman (talk) 04:42, 24 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Ms. Walls, who designed the early zen-inspired look and feel of the WP:TEAHOUSE back in 2012 (and who bears striking resemblance to actress Nicole Kidman) seems to have an infinite capacity for expressing calmness while within storms, and should easily survive that tenure.  Spintendo      17:33, 3 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The Signpost is looking for new talent.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2018-01-16/News_and_notes&oldid=1193877316"
Uses material from the Wikipedia article Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-01-16/News and notes, released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.