User:Econterms/Meyer 2020 candidacy statement

Peter Meyer

Mandatory Disclosures:

(a) I do not have a financial interest in ongoing or planned transactions or arrangements of Wikimedia District of Columbia.

(b) I am not subject to laws, regulations, agreements, or covenants that prevent me from taking full part in the deliberations of the Board of Directors.

(c) I have not been convicted of a felony.

(d) I am not an employee, director, officer, or agent of the Wikimedia Foundation or any chapter besides Wikimedia DC.

(e) I have participated in Wikimedia Foundation projects for nine years. I am active on English Wikipedia and English Wikisource, and sporadically active on other projects and sites as User:Econterms. I have not been subject to disciplinary actions on these projects.

I'm Peter Benjamin Meyer, and User:econterms on Wikimedia. I have been an active member of Wikimedia DC and on its Board of Directors since 2013. I have organized many editing events, and helped many new editors. I am the chair of the Public Policy committee, where we study and advocate on issues related to Wikimedia, and the Audit committee.

I want to continue to support cooperation between the Wikimedia movement, open source programmers, academic research, and government agency practice in ways that helps us build the best reference works that we can imagine. Our works have historical source materials, equations, footnotes, maps, photos, sounds, moving images, many human languages, and more. They are easy to use. And we can do more, and do it better better.

Our chapter has been successful and continuing on our path we can succeed further.

Among my specific activities:

• I actively encourage U.S. federal government participation in the Wikimedia projects and in using Wikimedia software. I invite you to let me know of good opportunities to work with federal agencies on wiki matters. My ambition is that every U.S. government employee has a way to edit a government wiki so as to enable the efficient sharing of information, expose problems and opportunities, and to communicate with the public too in citizen-science contexts.
• I attend conferences on wikis and Wikimedia. This year I represented the Chapter at the Wikimedia conference of affiliates. I have attended the annual worldwide Wikimania conferences, the North American conferences, and sometimes the academic WikiSym conference, and will continue to do this as much as possible.
• Encouraging others to bring their diverse and unique capabilities is sometimes the most valuable thing I can do for the projects.
• I am working on standardizing patent data on Wikidata, in the new Wikidata:WikiProject Patents which I started. In the long run we can upload a lot of information about historic patents and put it to useful work there.

My background: I worked as a software developer at Symantec for 6 years then went to graduate school in economics. Now I am a research economist at a federal government agency. My main research is on how new inventions and industries arise. Information-sharing institutions like wikis, conferences, journals, and clubs help these things happen. I am trying to show this with statistics.

I ask for your votes. With your support, I will continue on the Board of Directors doing the good work of the chapter.