Dear Ziko,
Let me take the opportunity to thank you for all the efforts over the past years. While we
do not always agree on everything it was pleasure exchanging ideas with you and I felt
that the leadership of the Dutch chapter was in great hands while you where the chair of
the Dutch board. I am happy to see that some of your thinking behind the WCA has
influenced other collaborations between chapters and thematic organisations. Wikimedia
Netherlands has enjoyed three years of your leadership, and is so much the better for it!
Although some are expressing regret at seeing you go I am assuming that you are not going
anywhere and that we will see you on the projects or maybe in some other volunteer role in
the future.
Jan-Bart de Vreede
Chair
Wikimedia Board of Trustees
PS: I do not envy your successor for having to fill your role during “speech time”. I
enjoyed every one of your introductions and talks at conferences and will miss the
sentence “welkom vrienden van vrije kennis” (I hope I am quoting it accurately) and the
always inspiring link to something “completely different” which turned out to not be so
different after all :)
On 30 Mar 2014, at 19:59, Ziko van Dijk <vandijk(a)wmnederland.nl> wrote:
Dear colleagues, collaborators and friends of free
knowledge,
After three eventful years I left the board of Wikimedia Nederland;
yesterday was the General Assembly in Utrecht. This means a 'goodbye'.
In this time, I had the privilege and pleasure to work with many great
people in many different organisations. We saw a lot of small steps
and some bigger ones directed to our common goal, the support of free
knowledge. Certainly, not everything we as a movement or parts of the
movement was achieved, though.
Between many WMNL members and me, there were two grades of separation:
coming from the humanities, my geekiness differs a little from the
average Wikipedianess; having the German Wikipedia as my home wiki, I
was never a very active or 'true' part of the Dutch editing community.
And when I quoted in my speeches from medieval quests or Prussian
literary realism, I received therefore some strange looks from some
members.
But I remain firmly convinced that good governance and respect have no
nationality. Indeed, stroopwafels do have, and so I adopted the Dutch
custom to bring them with me to Wikimedian meetings abroad.
Wikimedia Nederland has experienced and overcome a difficult period of
transition. Office space and employees, more members including more
members without Wikipedia background, more activities, more money,
more responsibility; more need for an association to mature and focus
on what is necessary (and not always easy, cool or fun). We achieved
that as a collective, slower than previously expected, but with the
appropriate pride and good feelings about the future.
Goodbye - and Hello: I am looking forward to see many of you again at
whatever wiki, chat or real life meeting.
Kind regards
Ziko
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Nederland
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Ziko van Dijk
Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland
Postbus 167
3500 AD Utrecht
http://wikimedia.nl
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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