Katherine Maher appointed as interim executive director for the Wikimedia Foundation

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Katherine Maher has been chosen as interim executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation. Photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
Katherine Maher, the chief communications officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, has been chosen as interim executive director of the San Francisco-based nonprofit by its board and executive team. She replaces Lila Tretikov, who announced her resignation from the chief executive post two weeks ago.
In announcing this move, the board chair Patricio Lorente wrote:

In choosing an interim ED, the [executive team] started by identifying immediate priorities for the coming months, including building trust, improving communications, and filling key leadership positions. They felt, and we agree, that Katherine is the right person to lead the organization while it addresses these and other important issues. Additionally, this will allow the rest of the executive team to focus on critical organizational functions, including community and engineering management, fundraising, and strengthening our human resources function.

With interim leadership in place, our next step as the Board is to move quickly to plan and implement the search for a permanent Executive Director. We will be working together over the coming weeks to clarify roles and responsibilities in this search, and identify the best way for community and staff to participate.  We want this process to be inclusive and incorporate many voices.

We will share more information on this change in a Wikimedia blog post next week.
Juliet Barbara, Senior Manager of Communications
Wikimedia Foundation

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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