Meeting Minutes-20 April 2017
Attendees:
Shannon Eichelberger (SE)
Eugene Eichelberger (EE)
Rebecca O’Neill (RO)
Sharon Flynn (SF)
Dan Garry (DG)
We welcomed a new member to the group, Dan Garry
User Group
Project Coordinator position: After reviewing the applicants it was decided that the group would hire Rebecca O’Neill for the position. She will report bi-weekly at the meetings and to the Volunteer Chair (Shannon Eichelberger) on the off weeks. RO outlined her plans over the next few months. In short:
Reaching out to other ‘Open Knowledge’ groups as well as heritage institutions to create new partnerships. She has a meeting with a representative at the National Library next week.
Investigating an updated website. The choices are a wordpress site or an expanded meta page. It is envisions that we would start a blog about our activities and use it to better promote our activities.
Recruiting an accountant to bring the group into tax compliance and to facilitate paying of employees and contractors.
Starting a monthly newsletter in addition to posting the meeting minutes.
Sorting out our memberships at TOG, which will give us a place to host meetups and also give us contacts into the maker community.
WLM contractor position: We have several promising candidates. EE will begin the task of organising interviews, assisted by SE and RO.
Edit-a-thon/Workshops
Upcoming Workshops
June-UCC
Possible future events
WLM editing workshop
Library Association workshop
Trinity faculty who are looking to work with Wikipedia in the classroom
RO is following up with the Vicipéid group-looking to make them independent by training them to run their own workshops. SE spoke to a participant of the original workshop who is based in Galway. He is very interested in organising an event towards the end of the year. SF is meeting with him next week.
Conferences
Wikimedia Conference update-SE and RO attended this conference at the end of March. The main take away is that User Groups are going to be the way forward for the Foundation in the short term. There are currently 71 User Groups. These groups do not have a strong voice and there are not many supports in place for them. We are proposing to conduct a survey of the User Groups to get a better idea of their compositions and what they need from WMF, from other chapters, and from each other. We hope to present our findings at WMCON next year.
Upcoming Conferences
July 5-6-Celtic Knot-Edinburgh-RO to attend
August 23-25 International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym 2017)-Galway-RO will look into possibly presenting a poster. We will also look to have a presence there.
WLM
Planning for 2018 is underway. RO is looking into a venue to hold an exhibition of past winners.