At the last Board meeting, one of the matters that was briefly
discussed what where the AGM in Jan/Feb should be held.
London would seem an obvious option for me - although not
geographically central, it is easy to get to from all parts of the
country,
Oxford would also be a good choice, as its the location for our
Wikimania 2010 bid so would be a good opportunity to familiarise
ourselves with the city (and have some experience organising an event
- albeit much smaller event - there)
I guess other cities that are fairly central could be candidates too -
Birmingham was mentioned as was Manchester which is fairly central
when looking at the whole of the UK rather than just England.
Has anyone got any views on this?
This probably wont be decide for a few weeks yet, but would be good to
get peoples' views.
Thanks
Andrew
> Yes, nice to agree.
>
> The Governance of WMUK is far from settled AFAIK. A very large group
> (hundreds or thousands) cannot have a single voice with some
> hierarchical or other structures.
The Governance is pretty much determined by the Companies Act 2006,
the Memorandum of Association and the Articles of Association. There
are members who elect a board at the AGM and the board runs the
charity. The members have certain additional powers which can be
exercised in writing, at AGMs or at EGMs. "Member" is this context
means "guarantor member".
The part that isn't settled yet is membership fees and what forms of
membership we'll have (if any) in addition to membership of the
company proper, but whatever is decided, they won't get a vote at
AGMs.
Having 100s or over 1000s of members shouldn't be a problem - most
will probably vote by proxy at the AGM. There are public companies
with 10s or even 100s of thousands of shareholders that manage just
fine, the vast majority just fill out a proxy statement that is sent
to them in the post and never go near the actual meeting.
michael west said:
>> A board seat for a representative of indigenous non English speakers would Ipresume only represent a member of the Celtic language speakers. The facts are that non-indigenous people who contribute to the WMF who speak languagesat home or in prayer outweigh those whose languages are official languages of the UK. It just seems bizarre.
The reason why I think Wikimedia UK should focus more on, say, Sottish Gaelic with its 50,000 speakers than, say German, with its 500,000 speakers in the UK, is that we already have a German chapter which can promote German language projects. We are the only chapter which could ever promote Scottish Gaelic, and, as I said before, we may be able to unlock public funds in order to do so. I don't remotely agree that this is racist.
There is clearly a danger that Wikimedia UK will end up just being Wikipedia London; recognising the diversity of UK Wikimedians - across projects, languages and the constituent countries, would I think be a positive step.
My suggestion of 2 had in mind a board of around seven. Of course it would be fewer if there were fewer board seats.
From: Andrew Turvey <raturvey(a)yahoo.co.uk>
To: wikimediauk-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Saturday, 29 November, 2008 0:40:35
Subject: Re: Election Rules (non-english speakers)
Q5: Is there any way that you think the election should be run differently to the election of the interim Board?
I wanted to answer one of the questions I put with a suggestion regarding minority languages.
Most of the people active in Wikimedia UK seem to be active in the english Wikimedia projects. However, there are some other smaller Wikimedia languages where UK editors form a vital part of the editing and readorship base. I'm thinking particularly of the native languages of the UK such as Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and maybe Irish, Scots/Ullans, Cornish, Manx etc.
As well as recognised the diversity of the Wikimedia community, there are also significant public funds available for promoting these languages which could be used by us to support these projects.
The Board has already reached out to these projects by asking if the newsletter could be translated into these languages. My suggestion is we set aside two reserved seats on the Board for people who actively contribute to at lease one wikimedia project in a minority language of the UK.
What do you think?
We've sent out a message inviting people to apply to join but we're not able to cash their cheque until we have a bank account. However, do we need to wait to accept them as members?
Should we not just accept them as members now and then wait until the bank account is opened before cashing their cheque?
Just a thought.
Andrew
2008/11/29 Gordon Joly <gordon.joly(a)pobox.com>:
> At 22:22 +0000 29/11/08, Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> > It is for such concerns that I have suggested a limit on guarantor
>>> members, say to 75 or 100 people, all reviewed by the board, and open
>>> membership for the "Friends of WMUK 2.0" with no review.
>>
>>Why should only the first 100 people get to have any say in the
>>running of the chapter?
>
> They will have a say, at the AGM, or an SGM, only. The Board runs the Company.
>
> Also, look forwards a decade? Many of the "first 100" will have left
> by then, and it will be important to maintain a stable body.
The AGM is a meeting of members of the company, ie. guarantor members.
"Friends" don't get a vote at the AGM.
Q5: Is there any way that you think the election should be run differently to the election of the interim Board?
I wanted to answer one of the questions I put with a suggestion regarding minority languages.
Most of the people active in Wikimedia UK seem to be active in the english Wikimedia projects. However, there are some other smaller Wikimedia languages where UK editors form a vital part of the editing and readorship base. I'm thinking particularly of the native languages of the UK such as Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and maybe Irish, Scots/Ullans, Cornish, Manx etc.
As well as recognised the diversity of the Wikimedia community, there are also significant public funds available for promoting these languages which could be used by us to support these projects.
The Board has already reached out to these projects by asking if the newsletter could be translated into these languages. My suggestion is we set aside two reserved seats on the Board for people who actively contribute to at lease one wikimedia project in a minority language of the UK.
What do you think?
> It is for such concerns that I have suggested a limit on guarantor
> members, say to 75 or 100 people, all reviewed by the board, and open
> membership for the "Friends of WMUK 2.0" with no review.
Why should only the first 100 people get to have any say in the
running of the chapter?
I was having a think about this project and I wondered what the nascent UK chapter could easily do to help out for this. Two ideas sprang to mind:
1) Looking at Wikipedia Loves Art on flikr, it mentions "Teams with the most points at the end of the month will get cool prizes" (http://www.flickr.com/groups/wikipedia_loves_art/). Could/should Wiki UK maybe put up a prize for the best team at the Victoria & Albert? Say budget £50 and get a gift (somthing like this maybe: http://www.vandashop.com/product.php?xProd=142&s=1 with a message from the chapter?)
2) Alternatively, if we arranged a particular day where a group of wikipedians went down to capture images from the V&A, could we maybe do something where we had a reception and served coffee and sandwiches to people who had come down for it?
Has anyone done anythign like this before? Do you know what kind of thing would work?
Andrew
The Board has decided to put on its agenda for the next meeting the process for admitting new members.
One question I wanted to raise for discussion among the community is what kind of "due diligence" should the Board do when admitting members.
Most of the people who get involved in the wikimedia projects do so because they want to contribute in a positive way to the projects. Unfortunately, given the open door attitude we have of "anyone can edit", we also attract people to the projects who spend most of their efforts vandalising, defacing, pov-pushing or playing the system.
This can also carry over into the running of chapters. Sadly, we have already seen this with Wikimedia UK v2 - where one person - a persistent sock-puppet on the projects - put themselves forward as a candidate using two identitities, lied about their age and later lied about their professional qualifications.
When we were drafting the constitution, we adopted the standard Articles for charities, which give the Board fairly broad powers to refuse (or remove) membership if they consider this in the best interests of the charity. This is subject to a due process that the Board must follow and a right of appeal to the AGM, which the Board decided to beef up from the standard rules.
The draft membership rules at the moment mention these as examples of where the Board may refuse membership:
- missing information or signature from the application form
- fee not paid
- information on the form "obviously fabricated"
- behaviour on Wikimedia UK community areas (the meta pages, email list and IRC)
Examples of invalid considerations include:
- activity/inactivity on Wikimedia projects
- behaviour on Wikimedia projects
I don't want to exaggerate the potential problems, but there are certain risks which I think we ought to take reasonable steps to minimise. These risks include:
- time wasting - people trying to play us so we spend all our time dealing with their obstructions rather than doing things to further our objects
- entryism - people getting all their friends to sign up so they can get voted onto the Board (more of a problem when we have more income/assets)
Coming back to my question - what kind of due diligence should the Board do? You could say just do nothing - trust that there will be enough reasonable people to outweigh the isolated troublemaker and their impact can be contained. With this approach we could be accused of complacency if we do run into problems.
At the other extreme we could vet every applicant and ask them to provide references, nominators and their activity logs from a wikimedia project. This strikes me as being too restrictive for the kind of organisation we want to be.
My feeling is that we just need to keep a watchful eye open to signs of abuse. This is particularly the responsibility of the Membership Secretary who needs to bring anything of concern to the attention of the Board. Things to look out for include getting lots of applications from one small town, all drawn on the same cheque and also where certain individuals apply for membership who have a history of abuse. I think this is probably the most effective way to deal with this kind of thing in parctice.
What do others think?