User:Econterms/Meyer 2020 candidacy statement

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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, which studies and advocates on issues related to Wikimedia.

I'll continue to support cooperation between the Wikimedia movement, open source programmers, academic researcher, and government agency staff to help build the best online reference works that we can imagine. Wikimedia's works include historical source materials, equations, footnotes, maps, photos, sounds, moving images, and text in many languages. They are easy to use. We can do more yet, and do it better.

The District of Columbia chapter has been successful in encouraging this, and keeping high morale and a friendly safe environment for its events. 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'd welcome tips of opportunities to work with federal agencies on wiki matters. My ambition is that every U.S. government employee would have 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. I learn from 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.
  • I encouraging others to bring their diverse and unique capabilities to the projects. Encouraging others is sometimes the most valuable thing one can do.
  • I work on making historic patent data available. I created a wiki for research on the history of aeronautics and aviation, and started Wikidata's WikiProject Patents.

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. I can show with statistics how information-sharing institutions like wikis, conferences, journals, and clubs help these things happen.

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


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