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@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
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe