Dear WikiProject Medicine enthusiasts & friends,
It's been a while since we last updated the list about what we've been up to this year (sorry about that -- it's on our list of improvements for next year).
As we are wrapping up 2018, we thought you might appreciate an update with some highlights, so below is a report on:
* Summary of 2018
* Renewing membership for 2019 - for all members, by Jan 31, 2019!
* Upcoming board election - during February & March 2019!
* Getting involved!
Yes, it's a bit long, but worth the read, and we do hope that it will inspire more of you to get more involved in the coming year.
Wishing you and your families a happy, fruitful and joyous 2019!
Yours,
Shani Evenstein Sigalov
Chairperson, WikiProject Medicine Foundation.
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==What did we achieve in 2018?==
2018 has been extremely busy -
* We continued to collaborate with like-minded organizations, like Cochrane, Translators Without Boarders, The World Health Organization (WHO), The International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) and Osmosis, to name a few.
* We have continued our collaborations with Universities around the world, where Medical students wrote medical-related articles as part of their academic curriculum.
* Around 60 new members, who share our passion to make high-quality medical information available to the world, joined us.
* We participated in conferences and published academic peer-reviewed articles in respected journals.
* We have further developed our Offline Medical Wikipedia App.
* Internet-in-a-box became smaller and smarter! We've continued to spread the word about it and send it to various places around the world.
* We've been working on an annual plan for 2019 for the first time. It will soon be released and you'll be invited to help us make it a reality.
To read more about each of these, please check out our 2018 report draft and add your activities to it by Jan 15th. We know we didn't cover everything that's happened this year, so please help us complete the report.
==Membership Renewal==
Till now, membership was not limited by time, i.e. members who applied were not given information about how long their membership is for. As our organization grows and evolves, we need to be able to track our members more closely. To that end, the board has decided to slightly edit the membership requirement, and include that membership will be for a maximum of 2 years, after which members will be asked to renew their membership.
Consequently, we will be starting to track our members this way as of Jan 2019, and membership in this round will last till December 2020, after which we will ask members to renew their membership.
Please note -- We ask that you fill out the form by Jan 31st, as we are close to elections and only members can nominate themselves and vote!
==Board elections ==
Our previous elections were in Jan 2017 for a 2 years term, where a board of 12 people was nominated and elected. Due to the international nature of our group, that board have had various difficulties operating and at the end of 2017 it was decided to down-sizing the number of board members from 12 to 7. In addition, on Jan 2018, 3 new board members joined us, replacing departing board members. Thus, as of Jan 2018, the board composition has been:
- Chair and Membership Admin: Shani Evenstein (elected on Jan 2017)
- Secretary: Doug Taylor, M.A. (Cantab)
(elected on Jan 2017)
- Daniel Mietchen, Ph.D.
(elected on Jan 2017)
- Carl Fredrik Sjöland
(elected on Jan 2017)
- Jennifer Dawson, Ph.D. (from Jan 2018)
- Sam Zidovetski (from Jan 2018)
- Indira
Gowda (from Jan 2018)
These ended up being positive changes for the board and 2018 has been a much better year in terms of board stability - we have been working more closely, meeting almost monthly throughout the year. On October 2018 Indira notified us that she cannot continue her role as board member, so we are currently 6 members. We have not added a new board member as we knew elections are close by.
One decision we made regarding the coming elections is that we'd like to keep the number of board members as 7, but for a period of 3 years, rather than 2. We also decided to split the elections, to ensure some continuity in the board. Building on the fact that we've had 4 board members voted for 2 years from Jan 2017 and 2 board members joining us in Jan 2018, we've decided to split the elections as follows: 5 board member seats (4 from Jan 2017 + Indira's seat) will become available in the coming elections, for a period of 3 years. As Jennifer and Sam joined a year later, they will continue as board members till the end of 2019 and their seats will be up for re-election at the end of 2019 for a period of 3 years.
Below is the timeline for the new board elections:
Phase 1: 5 board members, till March 2022.
* By Jan 2019 - Membership renewal
* Feb 3 - March 2 2019 - Nominations
* March 11 - March 24 2019 - Voting for 5 seats on the board
* March 26 - Announcement of the 5 new board members.
Phase 2: 2 board members, till December 2022.
* November 1 - November 30 2019 - Nominations
* December 1 - December 15 2019 - Voting
* End of December 2019 - Announcement of the 2 new board members.
Please note -- only WPMedF members can nominate themselves for the board and only WPMedF members can vote during the election, so please be sure to renew your membership!
More details about the nominations will be sent out at the beginning of Feb.
Finally, we have be working on a yearly plan for 2019, but can already say that one of our goals for this coming year is to involve more people from our community, i.e. members of the user group who are not members of the board, in our activities. In other words -- you don't need to be on the board to be involved, and we need help from as many people as possible!
We are looking for people who are either interested in getting involved with specific tasks, or have specific skills the board recognized as ones that could be helpful to the advancement of the organization in the coming year.
Please contact me if you'd like to get involved with -
* Running medical-related educational collaborations
* Running medical-related edit-a-thons
* Facilitating collaborations with a like-minded organization
* Presenting in relevant conferences
* Selling Internet-in-a-Box locally
* Helping map Wikidata items with Mix'n'match
Please also contact me if you have one or more of these skills -
* Programming, writing Wiki Tools, Wiki bots or generating statistics of specific pages across different languages.
* Fundraising experience
* Accounting experience (and in the US)
That's it for this time. Happy 2019, everyone!
Shani.