Dear all
As many of you will be aware, in 2017 the Wikimedia movement set out a new
strategic direction, which is that *By 2030, Wikimedia will become the
essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who
shares our vision will be able to join us**.*
Since July 2018, working groups made up of staff and volunteers from across
the global Wikimedia movement have been working together to identify key
guiding questions within nine thematic areas relevant to the movement.
These were published last week in the form of *Scoping Documents
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/Partici…>.*
There are three main ways of participating in the next phase of the
movement strategy process, and responding to the questions posed by the
working groups. These are as follows:
1. Contribute to on-wiki discussions through the talk pages on each of the
nine thematic areas (by following the link to the scoping documents above)
2. Respond to the survey, which will be circulated in April (on here, and
no doubt in other places/mailing lists)
3. Participate in a UK discussion, either in person or online
As the Strategy Liaison Co-ordinator for the UK, I would like to gauge
interest in holding an in-person community conversation about this phase of
the movement strategy. Please could you let me know if you would like to
attend an event of this kind, and if so what would make it easier for you
to do so - for example in terms of the location, time of day, time of week
etc. I'd also like to hear from people who would be unlikely to attend an
in-person meeting but could join some kind of conference call or hangout.
Please feel free to email me directly rather than responding to the whole
group, just for the sake of people's inboxes.
With many thanks and best wishes
Lucy
--
Lucy Crompton-Reid
Chief Executive
Wikimedia UK
+44 (0) 203 372 0762
*Wikimedia UK* is the national chapter for the global Wikimedia open
knowledge movement, and a registered charity. We rely on donations from
individuals to support our work to make knowledge open for all. Have you
considered supporting Wikimedia? https://donate.wikimedia.org.uk
Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered
No. 6741827
Registered Charity No.1144513
Registered Office Ground Floor, Europoint, 5 - 11 Lavington Street, London
SE1 0NZ
The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate
Wikipedia, amongst other projects). Wikimedia UK is an independent
non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility
for its contents.
Another in the series of meetups in the Makespace community workshop in central Cambridge, this time on a Sunday:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Cambridge/40
The initial workshop will be on the software being developed for the ScienceSource project. From 3 pm it will be a normal meetup, if that's not an oxymoron. Hope to see you there.
Charles
Hello all,
Hope you're having a good Wednesday. I'm currently working with the
Dumfries Historic Buildings Trust on the Dumfries Stonecarving Project,
(there was a wee blog about this last year:
https://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2018/11/green-men-gargoyles-the-dumfries-ston…)
and we're now moving toward the next phase. This will include volunteer
groups carrying out research, writing articles about notable local
subjects, and integrating some of the pictures that have been taken into
the encyclopedia.
As well as articles which pertain to local history and places, my feeling
is that there may well be a range of other articles relating to
architecture, etc, which might be usefully incorporated into a worklist for
one of the editathons which will form a part of this next phase.
I wondered if there were any wikimedians on this list with an interest in
architecture/ stonecarving who might be interested in helping me to explore
this? I'd love to have a chat some time. (Please do email me direct rather
than on-list, just for the sake of everyone's inboxes)
All the best
Sara
Dr Sara Thomas
Scotland Programme Coordinator
Hello all,
We recently had a conversation with the library at Conway Hall
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_Hall_Ethical_Society>, who are
currently digitising some of their vast collection of pamphlets, and we are
steering them towards open licenses and how best to work with Wikimedia.
Given its location in Holborn, and the location of the regular London
meetup, it could be that these two things work together.
We suggested to them that they could open up on that Sunday and anyone who
usually attends the meetup would be welcome to head over, be show the
collection and building, and possibly help get them on the way to freeing
up their collection. Not confirmed as yet, but it would be good to get some
feedback from our side.
They have a great library, and as a building it's interesting in itself,
with the great and the good being present over the years. Muddy Waters, Ben
Gurion, a who's who of British politics, and a little known band called "Ugly
Rumours <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_Rumours_(band)>".
I'll be adding something to the meetup page about this too, as and when
things are set.
Best
Stuart
--
*Stuart Prior*
*Project Coordinator*
*Wikimedia UK*
+44 20 372 0769
+44 7879 015 385 (text me otherwise I might screen the call)
Wikimedia UK is the national chapter for the global Wikimedia open
knowledge movement. We rely on donations from individuals to support our
work to make knowledge open for all. Have you considered supporting
Wikimedia? https://donate.wikimedia.org.uk
Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and
Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered
Office Ground Floor, Europoint, 5 - 11 Lavington Street, London SE1 0NZ
<https://maps.google.com/?q=5+-+11+Lavington+Street,+London+SE1+0NZ&entry=gm…>
.
Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The
Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate
Wikipedia, amongst other projects). *Wikimedia UK is an independent
non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility
for its contents.*
Hi all
Thanks for your contributions and discussions on here this week. It's clear
that as an organisation we need to reflect on how we're engaging with the
volunteer community, and there has already been quite a lot of internal
discussion about this over the past few months. I would encourage you, if
you can, to attend the meeting on 30th January to help develop our next
three year strategy; however please be assured that in the draft version
I'm working on (based on the 2018 board away day, and to give us a starting
point for discussions) there is a greater focus on both volunteers and
technology, which of course underpin all of our activities.
I'm sorry that the issue about recent changes and watchlists on the main
Wiki has not yet been resolved. Our technical contractor has been working
to debug this however he has not yet been successful and needs more time to
try to ascertain and address the problem. Obviously if anyone has any
practical suggestions of what the issue might be and how it could be fixed
then please feel free to get in touch :)
As some of you know, Wikimedia UK has worked with the support of two
technical contractors - both from the Wikimedia community - for a number of
years, however one of them had to step away from the role in September and
it has taken a little time to find a replacement (although we have now done
so). This means that the remaining contractor (Tom Morton) has been working
on his own, and we have needed to try to prioritise his workload. In the
past few months we have undertaken quite a big, although not outwardly
visible, technical project, which has been to migrate all of our websites
to new host servers. In doing this, we needed to employ a specialist
consultancy to upgrade and migrate the Wikimedia CiviCRM installation such
that it could be moved onto the new hosting platform, which has been a high
priority for us as CiviCRM is so central to our work with volunteers,
members and donors on a day-to-day basis. Tom has worked with the
consultancy on this but has also been required to fix a number of other
issues including QRpedia (which still has some bugs), the Board Wiki, and
problems with MediaWiki and the visual editor. I'm not trying to excuse the
fact that there are still unresolved technical issues, just to put this
into context and explain what else has been going on in the past month or
so.
Chris, you asked what concrete actions we are putting into place to ensure
this doesn't happen again. These include the appointment of another
technical contractor who will support Tom in resolving outstanding and
urgent technical issues in the short term, but in the medium term will also
work with us and the community to identify our priorities going forward. In
the next few weeks, Davina and I are also meeting with several board
members to scope out the charity's technical ambitions (which I hope we
will also discuss on 30th), and in December I submitted a provisional
budget to the board for 2019/20, with a view to presenting an updated
budget at the March meeting that supports these plans. There is more to do,
of course, but hopefully these things will all make a positive difference.
Thanks and best wishes
Lucy
--
Lucy Crompton-Reid
Chief Executive
Wikimedia UK
+44 (0) 203 372 0762
*Wikimedia UK* is the national chapter for the global Wikimedia open
knowledge movement, and a registered charity. We rely on donations from
individuals to support our work to make knowledge open for all. Have you
considered supporting Wikimedia? https://donate.wikimedia.org.uk
Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered
No. 6741827
Registered Charity No.1144513
Registered Office Ground Floor, Europoint, 5 - 11 Lavington Street, London
SE1 0NZ
The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate
Wikipedia, amongst other projects). Wikimedia UK is an independent
non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility
for its contents.