Well, that was fairly productive. "Let's go down the pub and start a charity!" JDF has the notes, the below is from memory:
JDForrester has registered wikimedia.org.uk. VampWillow has set up any number of charitable companies, so will be starting on the paperwork for this one.
The mission will be nicely open-ended. VW will write something that should get rubber-stamped by the Charity Commissioner.
Once it's got charitable status, people in England and Wales will certainly be able to make tax-deductible donations to it. People in Scotland and Northern Ireland *probably* will.
Angela mentioned we can set up a UK Wikimedia mailing list.
What we spend the money on ... servers are a possibility. Kate had made some noises about coming to London, but didn't. cc'd to Kate: what would be good technically to buy in the UK?
James, anything I missed above that's in the notes?
Oh, and our London readers might want to pop down to Maplin in Tottenham Court Road, who had WD Caviar 160GB/8MB hard disks for £60 and might still have some.
- d.
Was quite a fun way to spend an afternoon, wasn't it ;-)
JDForrester has registered wikimedia.org.uk
:: notes that the referenced link for portal doesn't permit access ::
that should get rubber-stamped by the Charity Commissioner.
There is *nothing* that will get rubber-stamped, but I shall try to make something likely to produce a path of least resistance
Oh, and our London readers might want to pop down to Maplin in
I went in the one opposite the pub; note that they aren't always WD (mine is Hitachi). One couldn't choose manufacturer.
For the record, btw, I have now created myself a second ident on en:wp under my 'real name' (well, personal name and initial of family name). I'm not intending at the moment to switch idents, but it means that I can use a WP ident that won't cause me problems in a 'public' sense.
vW
David Gerard wrote in gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation: [ ... comments from discussion about UK foundation ... ]
this sounds quite positive. i think i noted on the relvant meta page that i'd be interested in helping, although charities/business isn't something i have a great deap of experience with...
Kate: what would be good technically to buy in the UK?
non-US purchasing decisions/planning are a bit up in the air at the moment as we work out what we're doing with various EU offers (Belnet, Kennisnet, ...). the ideal situation would be if we could purchase equipment in the UK (using UK funds) and ship it to other places in the EU (initally likely to be Holland or France, but could be elsewhere). would this be possible under UK charity law? moving funds back to the US is unlikely to be required, even if it were allowed.
i am reluctant at the moment to suggest buying any kind of service within the UK wrt. hosting, hardware &c. particularly until we have a production off-site cluster and know what we need to do, we're unlikely to make good use of it, and it's not going to be worth the cost. even then it remains to be seen whether a large number of seperate clusters is worth the administrative effort.
do we have any idea what sort of money we're looking at from UK donations?
- d.
kate.
(subscribed to foundation-l, so please don't cc me on replies.)
Kate Turner wrote:
David Gerard wrote in gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation:
this sounds quite positive. i think i noted on the relvant meta page that i'd be interested in helping, although charities/business isn't something i have a great deap of experience with...
That's why VW is doing the paperwork, 'cos she does ;-)
With a suitable mission statement we should be able to fit in almost any activity that would reasonably advance Wikimedia and/or its contents.
Kate: what would be good technically to buy in the UK?
non-US purchasing decisions/planning are a bit up in the air at the moment as we work out what we're doing with various EU offers (Belnet, Kennisnet, ...). the ideal situation would be if we could purchase equipment in the UK (using UK funds) and ship it to other places in the EU (initally likely to be Holland or France, but could be elsewhere). would this be possible under UK charity law? moving funds back to the US is unlikely to be required, even if it were allowed.
No idea! VW?
i am reluctant at the moment to suggest buying any kind of service within the UK wrt. hosting, hardware &c. particularly until we have a production off-site cluster and know what we need to do, we're unlikely to make good use of it, and it's not going to be worth the cost. even then it remains to be seen whether a large number of seperate clusters is worth the administrative effort.
Yeah. We thought the answer might be "nothing right this moment".
do we have any idea what sort of money we're looking at from UK donations?
Presumably some fraction of what was donated in GB pounds last fund drive. There were about GBP3623 (before PayPal fees) last fund drive. I have no idea how much of that people would prefer to send direct to the UK organisation than directly, though I'm sure deductibility would be a tremendous encouragement.
That said, I'm sure there are lots of things we'll be able to spend money on that aren't hardware or bandwidth.
- d.
On Saturday, March 26, 2005 8:44 PM, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
Well, that was fairly productive. "Let's go down the pub and start a charity!"
Yeah. Was quite productive at being fun. Not so sure about Things Done (tm), however. ;-)
JDF has the notes, the below is from memory:
JDForrester has registered wikimedia.org.uk.
... And wikimedia.co.uk. Both just have silly little things on them right now. Will get on with uploading the portal, suitably modified.
... <time passes> ...
Done. Of course, the portal is more suited to wikipedia.org.uk (more on that later), but it's a start. We'll probably eventually want a wiki on wikimedia.org.uk, though.
Anyone who want to put up the portal somewhere, note that it's in UTF-8.
For the record ('cos I think that, beforehand, I'd just stated this in IRC), *@wikimedia.{org|co}.uk all gets auto-forwarded to board@wikimedia.org right now. Obviously this situation will, err, improve in future. I hope.
Also, wikipedia.co.uk is owned by Bomis (/not/ the Foundation, which is probably just a blip), and redirects to en.wikipedia.org (tsk, we Britons speak more than just that one language); however, wikipedia.org.uk is owned by one "Chris Brooking", whose name I don't recognise, though that also redirects to en, so I'm not wholly worried. Will try to find a contact for him and sort that out.
Of course we'll need to transfer the domains to Wikimedia UK as and when that's a going concern, so it may not be worth the hassle of transferring the 2/3/4 domains to someone else first.
VampWillow has set up any number of charitable companies, so will be starting on the paperwork for this one.
And truly wonderful she is, too.
The mission will be nicely open-ended. VW will write something that should get rubber-stamped by the Charity Commissioner.
The blurb at the bottom of the Foundation's business cards is "A registered non-profit corporation dedicated to encouraging the growth and development of free-content, multilingual, wiki-based information and learning projects.", which I cobbled together from a few sources and nabbled a bit. Something similar but expanded might be suitable for our "mission statement".
Once it's got charitable status, people in England and Wales will certainly be able to make tax-deductible donations to it. People in Scotland and Northern Ireland *probably* will.
S and NI will get tax-deductable status, deffo, it's just that Wikimedia UK won't have to run under NI law, nor S law, but E&W law.
Angela mentioned we can set up a UK Wikimedia mailing list.
Looking forwards to it. Yet another bloody list. :-)
What we spend the money on ... servers are a possibility. Kate had made some noises about coming to London, but didn't. cc'd to Kate: what would be good technically to buy in the UK?
Note that, to avoid, err, 'complications', the idea is to rent the servers from the Foundation (possibly at slightly implausible rates; we need Brion and Jamesday managing them, rather than just "a computer", so the Foundation will charge us a set-up fee and monthly rental, or something).
James, anything I missed above that's in the notes?
Not really. Oh, yes, the other cunning wheeze we had whereby we can donate to the Foundation without donating is for Wikimedia UK to have "affliated membership" of the Wikimedia Foundation, costing some nominal amount ($1k?, etc.).
Oh, and our London readers might want to pop down to Maplin in Tottenham Court Road, who had WD Caviar 160GB/8MB hard disks for £60 and might still have some.
Gah, forgot about this one, then we went off for dinner. Bother.
Yours,
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org