On 18 January 2012 23:36, Roger Bamkin victuallers@gmail.com wrote:
Just picking up on a point that Charles made earlier about whether the board wants to solve all the issue and then find someone to do it .... or get someone to run it and decide the rules....
I would be very surprised if the board wanted to sort everything out and then delegate it. IMO we are not very good at that. We have had some success with choosing the right person and telling them to do it and tell us what they've decided ...
I think you need to decide the objective. <snip>
Indeed, and switching to more opinionated mode, I think (firstly) that the Board here should only be setting the broad strategy, and (secondly) that there is more to say on those aims.
It appears to me, in the context that the future of WMUK's fundraising agreement with the WMF is uncertain, that there is a need of a "Plan B". And there is, independently of that consideration, a good case that WMUK should be plugging into the very widespread support in this country for "heritage".
In other words what Roger says makes sense to me: details of WLM-UK should be subject to management decisions that don't have to go back to the Board. But on the other hand the strategic aim should be linked, not just to participation to promote grassroots activity in the form of people going out of their front doors with a camera to help Wikimedia, and not just to producing a *welcome* addition of a stack of images to Commons, but also to positioning WMUK as a force in its own right in documenting UK heritage on the ground. "Part of the work we do is to mobilise volunteers to create content that makes this country's heritage more accessible and easier to find online" sounds just fine to me.
In what is a crowded and complicated field of UK institutions and charities and websites that already work on "heritage", such positioning does require an assertion of distinctiveness. And this goes back to Geni's initial point. So this is the area where I think the Board ought to be looking carefully right now.
Geni and Johnbod and I were in the National Gallery hashing some of this over on Tuesday, and this was earlier than the conversation to which WSQ alluded, which was in The Euston Flyer, over the road from the British Library. We each argued our own corner. I had some comments about "lists", to the effect that examples come by me often enough that seem relevant here. One that I brought up: in the Whitechapel Gallery not long ago there was a display about murals in London: the non-posh "paint it on the side of a house" type. It said that there were 86 (maybe) known examples, there was no protection and they disappeared over time, and there was no one whose job it was to photograph them and keep a record. So this rang bells with me, especially as there was an opinion piece not long ago in the Signpost about just such ephemeral things, and the required sense of urgency to preserve them."If not us, who?"
So I'd be very happy to see a third "aim" laid down by the Board, not prescriptive, but getting closer to a mission statement: to the effect that WLM as run and developed should be seen as part of a distinctive and "reaches the parts that others don't" approach to a UK heritage strategy. What Geni has said in my hearing about (for example) concrete pillboxes is compatible with that approach; taking "monument" in a too restricted and unambitious sense is not. Bearing in mind also that a first year of running a competition need not be the last word on what happens in another year,
Charles