Message from the Directors of the Appropedia Foundation

In April 2016, Appropedia will celebrate its tenth birthday!

One decade since its launch and over 75,000,000 visits later, we can celebrate the wonderful work of the many thousands of contributors to Appropedia from around the world. With tens of thousands of articles - edited over 300,000 times - on solutions for building rich, sustainable lives, Appropedia has become a vital resource for international development, sustainability, education, research, making and sharing.

The Appropedia Foundation has been privileged to support the development of Appropedia. We have, we think, developed a culture and an approach which has worked well and gotten us this far. But we now want to go further.

Appropedia has now grown to the point where we think that new levels of commitment and investment are required to enable it to grow further. To reach more people. In more languages. With more content. With more quality. With the latest tools. And to bring its users together more.

The Directors of the Appropedia Foundation would like to hear your opinions on how we should invest and support Appropedia over the next ten years. While we remain committed to the mission and values that have guided Appropedia from the start, we want to explore how we might change our structure and how re-energize our engagement with the wider world.

We think that the Appropedia Foundation should recruit its first full-time Executive Director to oversee the development of Appropedia. This would take a fairly traditional structure for a non-profit, with the Executive Director reporting to the board and with responsibility for fundraising (including, initially, for their own salary). They would not necessarily need to be an expert in web technologies, but would rather support and develop a team to work on Appropedia.

Over the next four weeks, we would like to hear your thoughts on this idea of recruiting an Executive Director. What do you think of this idea please?

Once we have considered your feedback, we will make a decision on how to proceed and may come back to the community for input into the priorities of the Executive Director.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us and, indeed, for for all your contributions to Appropedia. It literally wouldn't exist without its users!

-Lonny, Chris, Curt, Andrew & Kiva

Feedback

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Great idea - make it so! --Joshua (talk) 12:59, 23 November 2015 (PST)

I've been mulling this over a few days. I think the main priority of a director would be building up the userbase/networking. Wikis in general seem to be less popular than they once were (see: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/ActiveWikipedians.PNG ). However, over the last ten years the subjects covered by this wiki seem to have become more popular. I think we can bridge this gap. So I'd say the best candidate for a director would be someone with experience in networking or community organizing, in both in-person and online communities. A second concern: will we be able to attract the best candidates if there is not already a decent bit of cash saved up for their first year salary? I looks like maybe this concern is already being addressed via the work on supporters? --Ethan (talk) 18:24, 29 November 2015 (PST)

Ethical sponsorship

I know this question might seem more relevant elsewhere, but thought it'd be good to have it here:

To what extent will we, and will we be able to ask for and get what might be called "ethical sponsorship". (On Wiser W there was a group to consider such things - as website has now gone can't give a reference, Socially responsible investing W is nearest thing I can find on wikipedia, but the point of ethical sponsorship is to consider ethics at the other end eg as assessed by receivers not just the givers) Philralph (talk) 01:32, 29 November 2015 (PST)

Hi Phil,
Great timing for this question. I copied it to where we happened to just (re)started the conversation about this at Appropedia_talk:Supporters.
Thanks, --Lonny (talk) 17:29, 29 November 2015 (PST)
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