Dear Community,

A few days ago, I wrote you a "short" email to give you feedback on the last board meeting, which occured in
Florida. Reference: http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-December/011869.html

As I promised, we welcome today 2 new board members, whom most of you already know, Mindspillage and Oscar
(also known irl as Kat Walsh (us citizen, lady), Oscar van Dillen (dutch citizen, gentleman). Welcome to
you both.

Tim Shell has chosen to resign from the board, effective 15th of december. At this date, he will be replaced
by Jan-Bart de Vreede.

I would like first to give a special thank you to Tim Shell, whom I did not know at all 2 years ago, and whom I
learned to appreciate. Tim has seen the birth of Wikipedia, be part of the first 4 years of life of the
Foundation, and I hope he will keep an oldbie eye on it. Thank you Tim, and prosit (tchin, santé etc...).

Let me introduce you Jan-Bart. We wanted to choose a more external guy, who could have another view on 
our whole organisation. You may consider him external, since he hardly has any edits   , was not member of
any of the internal cabal mailing lists... so, it is our first attempt to introduce the "outside" in here. 
At the same time, he is not a stranger. Many of us already met him, he was at the two wikimania. And several of us
have been talking with him quite a bit in the past. Most recently, he got involved in the ED search committee
(so, was unofficially already acting as an advisory board member). His name came as an evidence to us.
He is a young man of 36 (which is still younger than I). Married, two kids. Dutch (which means we have two dutch
guys on the board...). He studied Business Administration at the Rotterdam School of Management (which
may definitly be an asset in our organisation). He works for Kennisnet Foundation, THE dutch
organisation for ICT use in Education.

Jan-Bart put a short bio about him on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jan-Bart

So... I hope it is all good news for everyone. I am really glad we make that step. Welcome Kat, Oscar and
Jan-Bart. And thank you Tim.

Ref: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Board_expansion

Ant

aka Florence Devouard
ChairChick of Wikimedia Foundation