Frank Schulenburg

Background

About Frank Schulenburg

Seasoned technology and education executive with significant international experience, able to successfully navigate complex stakeholder environments. Good at strategy, innovation, organizational development, culture building, and the creation of alignment.I learned to code at the age of 14, and wrote my own operating system only two years later. Software development paid my bills while in college, and my passion for the internet led me to Wikipedia. As a board member of the German Wikimedia chapter, I set the stage for the organization's later success by hiring and managing its first CEO. In 2008 I moved from Germany to the United States to join the Wikimedia Foundation. During my time there, I led key global initiatives aimed at bringing more diversity to the Wikipedia volunteer editing community with a special emphasis on women and people in Global South countries. In 2014 I left the Wikimedia Foundation to found Wiki Education, an ed-tech nonprofit that works with post-secondary educational institutions across North America to support students in learning to edit Wikipedia, and which has a special emphasis on recruiting editors from non-majority identities. Wiki Education is enormously successful: despite its small size, it is now responsible for a staggering 20% of all new editors on Wikipedia, and the editors it brings in represent significantly more diversity than Wikipedia’s existing editing base. I have traveled to more than 30 countries and lived in three. I am a frequent public speaker on Wikipedia-related topics. My work has been covered in newspapers and magazines like Wired, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the Guardian.