This is an update on Wikimédia Magyarország's activities covering January 2012. Reports covering the September - December 2011 period have been prepared but due to a server crash they will only be released at a later time.
During the month of January we had one general membership meetup and a board meeting. The membership meetup was aimed at community building and discussing ongoing projects and ideas. The main reason for the board meeting was to admit three new members. With the admission of the newest members, Wikimedia Hungary now has 60 members.
January has been a great leap professionally for Wikimedia Hungary by hiring Tamás Mészöly as our office manager in charge of most administrative duties and special projects we assign to him.
He has started working at the end of December, but due to holidays, January was his first full month. His first main tasks have been setting up the office (telephone, printer, access to the bank account), working with our accountant, members and board on closing the books on 2011 and as gesture towards our partners, ordering and sending out our greetings cards.
On or around 11 January the RAID controller component of a server hosting our websites and a number of web services (like our membership application form, among others) has crashed and due to an error of the replacement controller some data has been corrupted.
We have already migrated essential services (like e-mail) to our own server, and are working on restoring and recreating the content that was stored on the crashed server (and obviously, implementing an off-site backup solution). In the mean time, wikimedia.hu redirects to our Meta-Wiki page.
Wikimedia Hungary has received much help from its partners in previous years and we wanted to contribute back this year by encouraging the self-organization of Wikimedia communities in the neighbouring countries and supporting the participation of Wikipedians in the neighbouring regions in Hungarian and regional Wikimedia events.
It is this theme that the independently conceived idea of a Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees–Chapters Committee trips to the region fit into; and as the first step, Ting Chen from the Board of Trustees, and Miloš Rančić (Wikimedia Serbia) and Bence Damokos (Wikimedia Hungary) from the Chapters Committee visited Zagreb between 20-22 January.
On the trip they made contact with and between the local Wikipedians, who have already founded the not-yet-recognized Wikimedia Croatia chapter and a local hackerspace organization called MAMA. The visitors tried to encourage Croatian Wikipedians to have regular meetups (possibly facilitated by a travel costs grant from the Wikimedia Foundation) and to restart the recognition process of Wikimedia Croatia.
The next destination is Slovenia, which we will visit on the weekend of 26 February, on the 10th anniversary celebration of the Slovenian Wikipedia.