Hi Seddon,
Thanks for this summary of the issues.
Streamlining and standardizing trademark agreements with affiliates for branded merch production would be great.
Even supposing that the US affiliates went to the trouble of opening a collective merch store, the production and shipping costs for small batches of high quality apparel are so high that I doubt that there would be a good business case for us to try to turn a store into a source of revenue that earns much more than it costs to operate. That said, it seems to me that it should be OK for affiliates like WMFR to run merch stores and generate income from them that exceeds cost recovery so long as the proceeds are used by the affiliates in a manner that's compatible with the affiliate and Wikimedia missions.
Pine
On Mar 23, 2016 17:28, "Joseph Seddon" jseddon@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hey John et. al
Apologies for the delaying in responding to the last few emails. I want to try and cover a couple of the points that been raised.
I'll first start with the history. I am very much aware of the background surrounding merchandise, in particular the chapters and the changes in the chapter agreements back in 2009 that essentially stopped all that. At the time I was on the board of Wikimedia UK and I very much remember the frustrations that surrounded the changes. In terms of who has and who hasn't run commercial stores I am not going to even attempt to summarise that here and I honestly don't think people rehashing the particular individual histories of trademark agreements of the last half a decade for how ever many affiliates have had them. We all have far more interesting and worthwhile things to talk about in the movement.
So here's to looking forward and where we can do things better:
Where no exchange of money is involved, the Trademark policy already does
a
good job of allowing affiliates or members of the community to print or make one-off merchandise to give away at the events they run, or to
members
of their organisations.
Where we could do probably do better is where the exchange of money is
only
for the specific purpose of cost recovery. The sort of thing that Pine was talking about in relation to Wikiconference USA. Merchandise isn't cheap and where possible it makes sense to be able to offset the cost. It's probably an area we should strive to make easier, more consistent and less of a struggle for affiliates and where we could probably make the biggest impact in improving the ability of affiliates to produce small runs of
cool
stuff.
The operating of stores by affiliates is one that I think there is a lot
of
potential in. The WMF store, in its very focused scope, works well. But there are a lot of areas where we could do better. Multilingual store and checkpoint support is lacking, international shipping is expensive,
support
for local currency should be better and an ability to print on demand is
an
area that needs work. I think that this could be improved through other stores. It just needs to be done right and a good framework set out for chapters to do this work. I and others will need to time work out what
that
will be.
This whole topic was something that was one of the first that was
discussed
about areas that at as department we could do better in terms of working with the community in. There is a lot of good will from those above meand
I
think over time we will see some good changes here. It's not the only area I am working on and we are only 6-7 weeks into me being on board but I
will
get to it.
I am going to be in Berlin for the Wikimedia Conference and I think it would be a good place to start conversations about how we can move forward in an area that realistically should not be controversial in any way but that should be done well.
Regards Seddon
On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 11:07 PM, John Mark Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Mar 23, 2016 at 12:51 AM, Sam Klein sjklein@hcs.harvard.edu wrote:
.. On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 12:07 PM, John Mark Vandenberg <
jayvdb@gmail.com
wrote:
IIRC, there were several affiliates that were previously running a store, and naturally supporting the most relevant languages of their community. They were effectively shutdown, and localisation lost due to centralisation to the WMF.
Is this true? Please record any actual examples on: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_trademarks
I dont have any actual examples, only possibly faulty memories of events that mostly affected other affiliates.
As I recall, and apologies in advance for my memories fading or being faulty, the French, Italian and German chapters were running what could be considered a store before the WMF's "Chapters Agreement" and/or "Fundraising Agreements" of 2009/2010 were required to be signed by chapters , and the language of those agreements removed the possibility of merchandise.
Again as I recall, many chapters tried to negotiate amendments to that prohibition, and I vaguely recall the French chapter being successful, and I vaguely recall the Italian chapter being unsuccessful.
I see the French chapter's shop is still open.
http://wikimediashop.spreadshirt.net/
I do not see a shop for Italia or Deutschland, but locals may be able to find what I can not.
Any details regarding the old chapters stores, especially German and Italian, would be most welcomed to augment and possibly correct my vague recollections.
Sj, 99% of this happened during your time on the board, so it would be great if you can help provide some clarity with whatever memories you have.
-- John Vandenberg
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-- Seddon
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