Thanks Lucy, for your positive response to the issues raised recently.
On the technology front, I'm sure I'm not speaking out of turn when I say that
I'd like to see something like the old Technology Committee revived to give volunteers
a defined channel for communication with the Board and Staff, and also to encourage
volunteers to give their time and expertise to help address technical issues and to expand
our technical capacity in the future.
To that end, I'd like to survey informally what skills participants on this list would
be willing to bring to help WMUK's technology programme. It would be also very helpful
if those who would be keen to help re-establish some sort of Tech Committee could express
their interest.
It doesn't matter whether you're just interested in tech or a seasoned developer -
all offers are welcome. Any takers?
--
Doug
On 11 January 2019 at 16:19 Lucy Crompton-Reid
<lucy.crompton-reid(a)wikimedia.org.uk> wrote:
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?
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