Yes, I really like the 'raising awareness of access to information and intellectual property' side of this idea, Andrew - it's a whole new dimension to the photography and local history ideas that are currently on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Possible_projects_of_Wikimedia_UK
One dream that I have that would have real marketing potential is a project where children in a school in the UK link up with a school in Pakistan, say, or Kenya, to write an article or groups of articles in English/Swahili/Urdu, whatever. They could collaborate on articles of collective interest to both groups, and then publish a nice WikiReader at the end of it to show their work.
But I have a question here also: which is who has access to the WMUK wiki, and why not others? I am aware of the confidentiality of many issues, but, seeing as the list of initial directors was drawn up fairly ad hoc, is there no way of giving access to others who have been pretty intimately involved in this process over the last few months? I'm a bit concerned that our work will start to fragment otherwise - have we abandoned Meta, for example?
Ok, well, looking forward to response on this, and further ideas to develop. Is this work starting yet, by the way? Do we have to wait until we have charity status?
Cormac
On 3/7/06, Andrew Walker keggers@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all,
I'll throw in another idea that has been floating around for a while. (I think it may originally have come from Gordon, but I could be wrong
- it will be in the archives somewhere). This weekend I ran it past a
friend who also happens to be the local (i.e. UK) contact for the charitable fund run by a very large e-commerce company that gives grants in the UK. He thought it was the sort of thing that may be funded by such an organisation.
One of the things we could encourage is the creation of free images for wikipedia, wikinews and wikicommons. There are loads of local history groups, local nature groups and so on around the UK who may want to be involved in creating such content. What we could do is offer a project where we would provide a digital camera and training on basic concepts of intellectual property and producing images for websites to such groups. We could look for funding / sponsorship to fund the project (or provide the cameras) and expect to get significant new free content in return.
Thinking about it, we may even want to get schools involved.
Cheers,
Andrew
On 3/6/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/03/06, Caroline Ford caroline@secretlondon.me.uk wrote:
I think there is loads of potential with wikibooks. National curriculum topics, community language instruction, sports/health/fitness instruction. The British girl guiding wiki or the Manchester United wiki are possibilities.
That's a fantastic idea!!
I presume we don't want to stop people donating directly to the foundation - or do we? Is ours ring fenced for UK work? (This will depend upon the mems&arts).
That is the idea. We get some tens of thousands of pounds sterling donated directly to the WMF, taxably; we think it's safe to assume that's almost entirely from people in the UK, who could reasonably be expected to give even more tax-exempt or Gift Aid.
(I say "some tens of thousands" without being quite sure of the total. But http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q4/Day_21 lists that one day's GBP donations as about 1/10 of one day's USD donations.)
Money that comes into WMUK can not be used on:
- stuff outside the UK, until we're *very* sure we can make specific
grants or whatever. (We are working on the assumption that we're surrounded by people watching us like hawks and looking for an opportunity to wreck our charity status and fuck us up, because we are ;-)
- servers, because of the UK's unspeakably awful libel laws.
We have ideas of what to spend it on, but I'm looking for the ones that make a good marketable story.
- d.
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