Dear colleagues in Kenya,
I would like to let you know that (after consultation with the Affiliations
Committee) the Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director, Sue Gardner, is not
extending the Board of Trustees' provisional recognition of your group as
Wikimedia Kenya. We recommend you pursue recognition as Wikimedia User
Group instead.
The recognition was conditional upon incorporation within a year, and that
has not happened. In addition, the provisional board disintegrated (with
some people leaving the chapter entirely) and no replacement announced,
almost no activity took place this past year, casting doubt on the group's
sustainability as a chapter, and certain personal issues added much
confusion and demoralization, which no doubt contributed to the inactivity.
In parallel, the Wikimedia movement has created new models of affiliation,
not available at the time your group was seeking recognition, that we are
confident would better serve your group at this stage, and would be more
appropriate, than the traditional incorporated chapter model.
Specifically, we encourage you to seek Wikimedia User Group recognition
(via AffCom -- e-mail affcom(a)lists.wikimedia.org) right now, which will
give you almost all the benefits of chapter recognition, with almost none
of the bureaucracy: trademark permission will be available to you, and as
you know, grants are always available, even to unincorporated groups (and
we will take steps to improve group oversight and governance to minimize
risk). Everything I know about this group and about AffCom suggests this
should be a smooth process.
Note that this does mean that the name "Wikimedia Kenya" should no longer
be used by you or others to refer to your group, and specifically, that you
are not to incorporate under that name. (It is best if incorporation under
any name is postponed until there's a better idea of the group's interest,
capacity, and plans. Creating a formal entity prematurely could saddle you
with inconvenient responsibilities without any of the benefits.)
"Wikimedians in Kenya", "Friends of Wikipedia in Kenya", and any number of
other names you may feel comfortable with, are good possibilities for the
name of your group, and can be recognized by the WMF if you do choose to
pursue User Group recognition.
We'd like to stress this is neither a punishment nor a demotion of your
group; it is actually an adjustment of what we call the group to match
reality and to adhere to the original terms of the provisional recognition.
We recognize your dedicated and valuable contributions in the past, and
look forward to renewed energy and accomplishments on this new path, as a
user group, and will be happy to support you in this in every way we can.
On behalf of Sue Gardner and the Wikimedia Foundation,
Asaf Bartov
--
Asaf Bartov
Wikimedia Foundation <http://www.wikimediafoundation.org>
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the
sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!
https://donate.wikimedia.org
Hello Everyone,
As some of us remember, Last year, we organized some Outreach Ecents across
various regions in Kenya including Mombasa and Nakuru (
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Kenya/Outreach_2012 )
The Mombasa Outreach was held in collaboration with the Kenyan Mozilla
Community and the The Mombasa Tech Group in Mombasa.
The Mombasa Tech Group is requesting if we could have such Outreach Events
and allow them to engage and collaborate with us in various Wikimedia
Related events/activities this year. To quote
We were thinking to collaborate with you on working out on a
> Wikipedia/Wikimedia event whereby you guys can come down and train more and
> more people on Wikimedia.
> We can also discuss and plan for a competition related to Wikimedia
> commons,GLAM contest or anything interesting that will promote as well as
> benefit Wikimedia and the tech community as well.
>
I think this is a positive step in the r-grouping of our chapter and
reaching out to newer member of the community and contributors. As such,
can we start thinking and drawing up of a Schedule for the year and some of
the events and activities we can engage in?
--
Regards,
Limoke Oscar,
Dream.Believe.Become....a world of endless opportunities
"I will open the book. Its pages are blank. I am going to put words on them
myself. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is the dawn of
every New Day."
Hi all,
First of all, a very big thank you to all those who made it for Saturday's
meetup and for those of you who couldn't make it, we made sure to document
everything here: http://wikimedia.or.ke/Meeting_Minutes:16_Jan_2013 Feel
free to chip in on the discussion page or this thread.
A summary though:
- *Company Registration*: It will take a month from this week to get a
certificate of registration issued
- *Offline Wikipedia*: We need to submit a spreadsheet of articles we
want for our zim file. Dennis is following up on this
- *Mombasa Outreach*: In a bid to make activities in Mombasa more self
sustainable, most people felt that getting someone from Mombasa to attend a
major Wikipemedia event in Nairobi may be more productive.
- *Themed Monthly meetups*: We already have thoughts lined up from March
to May. Asaf, let us know if you are still up to doing something over video
con this April
- *Financial Oversight Committee*: Alex and Bruce to balance off last
year's expenditure and issue report
Alex
Hi all,
I think we really had a good thing going with the monthly meetups. I'd
suggest we resume with this and have every meetup geared towards aching a
particular task eg: edits on specific topics, focus on commons etc
We can have it ran by someone different every month, to make it
participatory and exciting.
Building from that, we haven't met this year so I'm usggesting a meetup for
the 15th of Feb. Any takers...?
Alex
Dear Bence,
(Sorry for the very delayed response: I had hoped that a more appropriate person would have made an ''official'' response.)
WRT the Chapter founding, I recently (last week, I think) connected Alex with the lawyer, to resume the legal process, which was halted after the misappropriation saga.
I don't expect Alex (and Alex can correct me if I'm wrong) to have made any progress thus far, as things are still moving sluggishly after the (organizational) hiatus.
Thanks,
Abbas.