I JethroBT (WMF)

Hey folks. Since 2006, my curiosity has kept me engaged with the English Wikipedia under the username I JethroBT. I've contributed and worked together with editors in a variety of areas such as building high quality articles, community building, and developing help spaces. Before working with the WMF, I taught and studied cognitive science and psychology. Since graduating, I've coordinated a number of edit-a-thons and relationships with institutions in the Chicago metropolitan area.

I live in my home state of Pennsylvania in the United States, and previously lived in Chicago for about 14 years. You are likely to find me contra dancing or practicing taiko, two vibrant folk traditions supported by fantastic communities. (Stay curious!) Otherwise, I am probably planning my next trip to Japan. 日本語を少しゃべられますが、いつもまだまだです。

I enjoy getting to know the people involved in our projects, the challenges we've faced, and why we are motivated to contribute. Feel free to reach out to me anytime you like.

Currently, I am managing funding programs for communities in the United States & Canada and the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) & Central Asia regions.

I joined the Wikimedia Foundation's Community Resources team in 2015. With the Community Resources team, my role is to lead and maintain our grant programs, where folks can apply for funding to support ideas, events, and programs that improve Wikimedia projects and benefit the communities who want to use or contribute to them.

In my past work, I supported volunteers to develop initial thinking for events and projects with IdeaLab and the related Inspire Campaigns, which invited editors to develop ideas to solve important and pervasive needs in our movement along a certain theme.

Here are most projects and programs I've been closely involved with. (It gets hard to keep track of everything after awhile.) My involvement has been in my capacity as staff unless otherwise noted:

• Wikidata 10th Anniversary
• Grants:Regions/North America
• Grants:Regions/CEE and Central Asia
• Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines
• Wikimania 2021 scholarships
• #WikiForHumanRights campaign
• Wikipedia20
• Movement Strategy community and global events
• Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021
• Simple Annual Plan Grants
• Annual Plan Grants
• Project Grants
• Conference & Event Grants
• Dataset Imports on Wikidata
• Wikimedians of Chicago User Group (volunteer)
• FormWizard
• Grant metrics tool
• Rapid Grants
• Inspire Campaigns
• Towards a New Wikimania
• Future IdeaLab Campaigns
• Reimagining WMF grants
• The Co-op (volunteer)
• WikiProject GLAM/Pritzker Military Museum & Library (volunteer)
• The Teahouse (volunteer)
• Moodbar Feedback (volunteer)

I've enjoyed participating in many movement events, including

• WikiConference North America 2024
• CEE Meeting 2024
• Turkic Wikimedia Conference 2023
• CEE Meeting 2022 in Ohrid, North Macedonia
• Wikimania 2021 held virutally
• Wikimania 2019 in Stockholm, Sweden
• FDC Deliberations 2019 in Lisbon, Portugal
• Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town, South Africa
• Wikimania 2016 in Esino Lario, Italy
• WikiConference North America 2016 in San Diego
• Wikimania 2014 in London, UK (as a volunteer!)

I've contributed to the following academic publications:

• Im, J., Zhang, A. X., Schilling, C. J., & Karger, D. (2018). Deliberation and resolution on wikipedia: A case study of requests for comments. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(CSCW), 1-24.