What was Alison's bank idea shortcut sorry?
As I said before we'll have a definite answer from the OII in mid-September. But they're already doing quite a bit of work for us already and I'm in reasonably regular correspondence with them.
As for start up donations I imagine it would depend on what you were offering in exchange. I doubt anyone would give you £150 for nothing in return... And for lifetime membership my poll on pledgebank wasn't exactly have a resounding success (only one person other than me signed up). Lowering it to £150 and letting people pay through the year might help though. Creating a new pledge on pledgebank is the easiest way to see. Have you had confirmation from Alison that she's prepared to offer lifetime membership for £150?
Re: presentation materials, the way negotiations have progressed so far there hasn't been a massive need for them and I'm not massively convinced they'd ever be particularly appropriate. The people we're pitching too know what Wikipedia is and it takes about 30 seconds to explain what Wikimania is. (Being concise is usually a good thing.) Our credibility is established by the people we already have on board, and I imagine at meetings with large sponsors someone from the OII will rightly want to come along as well. That said we do actually have someone ([[User:Seddon]]) working on improving our presentation with various logos and (he tells me) videos in the works.
In any case your help with our bid would of course be appreciated, but perhaps in the short term the greatest help you could be to the Oxford Wikimania bid is by ensuring WMUK becomes a charity as soon as possible. If you have any specific advice or contacts you'd like to share by all means e-mail me off list though.
Thanks, and good luck in your dealings with WMF.
Tom
-----Original Message----- From: wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Businessfirst Sent: 02 August 2008 22:42 To: wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikimediauk-l] Records & Oxford stuff
Arkady says Wikimedia Educational Resources' records will be updated soon (go, Arkady!!). I've raised the finance/charity related things with the board, and by email with Cary and WMF, so far so good. We're also all waiting for news if Alison's bank idea shortcut works, but they probably won't have a reply this week.
Oxford sounds great. When will they be ready to come back to us?
Other stuff...
The student club idea's great, but will a research/editing club really be appealing or what would attract people and make them stick past college?
If we did seek startup donations of "a sum of your choice between £150 and £250" contingent on charity registration and say payable over 12-15 months to kickstart the charity, how many would be interested?
I've also done some work on a basic presentation for the banks before now that we could adapt, if anyone wants to start a team to work on presenting and promoting, and designing promotional material. I've got a lot of commercial experience in the conference business that might help (mostly commercial conferences and 10 years ago but I might have an odd contact from those days for organization, information and planning ideas).
Re materials, if we're researching venues and accomodation, then promotional materials helps everyone when we're pitching for support and facilities, we can put them online to get early traction for the bid. Things like theme + banners, handouts, multimedia presentations, mail-outs/leaflets can help a lot if we need to pitch to anyone and we'd need them anyway. Anyone with flash, web, marketing and promotion, or graphic design skills who wants to grab this and get the team going?
Paul Sinclair.
__________________________________________________________ Not happy with your email address?. Get the one you really want - millions of new email addresses available now at Yahoo! http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/ymail/new.html
_______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l