Alice Wiegand lives in Duesseldorf, Germany, where she is a personal aide to the Mayor of Meerbusch. Previously she ran Meerbusch’s IT department as a specialist for system administration in the public sector.. Alice has made various detours before she reached her current occupation. Originally she studied economics, then she decided to become a. tailor. After that she jumped at the chance to be trained in software development, followed by training and study for the German senior civil service. She has recently begun her Master’s studies in Public Policy and Governance.. Alice started editing German Wikipedia in 2004, following one of the first major series of media stories about the site in Germany. She was looking for something meaningful to do besides her job and started to edit on topics like contemporary art and comics. Soon her activities switched to administration, organization and contributor support. In recent years, she has organized several workshops and skills trainings for contributors, for the volunteer response team OTRS and for Wikipedia administrators.. She has extensive experience as a board member of Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE, the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement), which she joined in 2008. At WMDE, she served as secretary and vice president, and she was involved in strategy development, organizational structuring and executive accounting and assessment.. Alice is convinced that offering free knowledge to people is an essential condition to facilitate free and independent decisions. She believes in the strength and advantages of decentralized structures and wants to improve the mutual understanding of all parties involved in the Wikimedia movement. She sees the need to provide reliability and stability at a time when the movement faces fundamental changes in resource allocation, new models of affiliation and the interaction of the chapters.. Alice served as administrator and bureaucrat on German Wikipedia. Her edit count is 22860, but the curve shape has rapidly decreased since 2008, when she joined the board of WMDE.. She joined the Wikimedia Foundation Board as a Chapters' selected Trustee in 2012, and was appointed to serve the remainder of Ana Toni's term until December 2014, as well as a subsequent full term until December 2016.
