Weekly reports don't seem to me like a successfull strategy for two reasons:
- If there isn't anything to report in a given week, people are going
to be dismayed 2) People will scrape and scrounge to report *anything*, even if it's not really news, just so they don't look like they're not doing anything 3) It doesn't get the larger community involved in the process at all.
I've seen weekly meetings used to far greater effect. Wikimedia Canada was having weekly IRC meetings until they set up milestones and elected a steering committee. Now the steering committee meets regularly through some conference call software (dont remember the name of it) and they hold public IRC meetings regularly but at longer intervals.
Having a meeting instead of just a report gives you the ability to divvy up necessary tasks to willing volunteers who otherwise wouldn't know that such a task even existed. IRC is a great and easily accessible venue for this. I don't know if #Wikimedia-uk exists yet or not of freenode, but it would be trivial to have it set up if not.
My thinking for making sure things keep moving and people know where we are is to have a detailed timetable (the provisional one can be found at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK_v2.0/Timeline ). That way you don't need a report every week you just need a report every time you reach a date on the timeline saying whether you've achieved that milestone or not and if not why not and what you intend to do about it (I've divided all the tasks into small enough chunks that it will soon become obvious if things are getting behind schedule).
Weekly public meetings may be useful once we're up and running, but I don't think there will be a great deal for the community at large to do at first. There should almost certainly be regular board meetings on IRC (weekly or biweekly probably) and I see no reason that those shouldn't be readable by anyone (except when discussing things like individual membership applications that contain confidential information). While the board are handling the paperwork, the rest of the community can be working on longer term plans, that could be done through weekly meetings, but I don't think it's the best way (keeping everything on meta, or a dedicated wiki, would make it accessible to everyone regardless of when they can be online).