Business Plan 2008

Organizational Background

Mission and Objectives

The charity's mission is to aid and encourage people to collect, develop and effectively disseminate knowledge and other educational, cultural and historic content in the public domain or under a license that allows everyone to freely use, distribute and modify said content.

It proposes to do fulfil this mission by means including (but not limited to):

1. promoting freely accessible online information repositories whose content is freely and collaboratively editable;
2. acting as a voice and representative for the community of UK residents and citizens who use and edit such repositories;
3. preserving world heritage, and particularly that of the UK, through such repositories;
4. supporting the charitable work of the Wikimedia Foundation;
5. enabling, assisting, promoting and promulgating wider participation in the creation, dissemination and expansion of information and educational resources covering the world's knowledge and languages to all persons, everywhere;
6. furthering the development of electronic, printed, and other resources required to support such participation;
7. producing, publishing and developing, or causing to be produced, published and developed, information resources, whether in printed, electronic, or other forms;
8. making use of or encouraging the use of information resources for the advancement of education; and
9. encouraging the adoption of practices and policies to widen education, participation and dissemination of information worldwide.

Current status

Wiki UK Limited is a private company, limited by guarantee, with no share capital, registered in England and Wales (registered number: 06741827). Its current registered address is:

Wiki UK Limited
23 Cartwright Way
Nottingham
Nottinghamshire
NG9 1RL

It was incorporated on the 5/11/2008.

The membership

Wiki UK Limited currently has 5 members, all of whom are on the board of directors.

The board

• Chair - Kwan Ting Chan
• Secretary - Andrew Turvey
• Treasurer - Thomas Holden
• Communication Officer - Mickey Conn
• Membership Secretary - Mike Peel

Operational Plan

Status transitions

It is proposed that Wiki UK Limited switch from being a company limited by guarantee to being a charitable incorporated organisation within the next year. This is an alternative to registering as a charity with lower reporting requirements. It is not envisioned that this status transition should aversely affect the charity's operation in any significant way.

Staff

The charity currently employs no staff. Instead we rely on the volunteer effort of members of the company. There is no proposal to change this in the immediate future.

Capital (Premises/Equipment)

The charity currently owns no capital of any description. There is no likelihood of the charity purchasing premises in the near future, however, contingent upon the funds becoming available, the charity may be purchasing equipment (primarily technical). Further details of the equipment expenditures being considered are contained in the section "Planned charitable activities" below.

Planned charitable activities

Community relations

• Supporting the UK Wikimedian community through organising and sponsoring events, such as:
  • Meet-ups.
  • Coding weekends.
  • Conferences on Wikimedia's projects and the open content movement more generally.

Public relations

• Acting as a UK media contact for queries about Wikipedia and the other projects of the Wikimedia foundation.
• Promoting wiki and open content solutions in the media.
• Helping fund and organise the free distribution of the planned offline, DVD based, "Wikipedia v1.0".
• Running campaigns to encourage individuals to edit. Targeting such a campaign at students and academics may be particularly fruitful.
• Encouraging the release of new and currently copyrighted works under free licenses.

Educational links and work in schools

• Helping fund and organise the free distribution of future versions of the offline "Wikipedia Selection for schools" ( http://schools-wikipedia.org/ ).
• Giving sessions at teacher training "top-up" days on the responsible use of Wikipedia (et al.) in the classroom.
• Stimulating research into the use of Wikipedia as an educational and communication tool, through seeking academic partners and bidding for research funds.

Information acquisition

• Working with the community to increase coverage of historical sites, by:
  • Helping with costs.
  • Helping with organisation and the attainment of access and photographic permissions.
• Working with the community to increase Wikipedia's coverage more generally, by:
  • Purchasing copies of public domain documents/books/pictures/databases/etc. not currently available for free from easily accessible sources and then digitising them.

Servers and Systems development

• Employing developers to improve Media-Wiki.
• Installing new tool servers in Kennisnet, subject to us holding on to some control over them.

Other possible activities

The following activities would also support our objectives, but we could only engage in them after having first obtained official legal advice which supported them:

• Donating back to WMF (subject to issues around donating to foreign charities without sufficient control).
• Hosting/funding a UK squid server (a local mirror of the Wikimedia websites; heavily subject to finding a way round the UK's libel law).
• Supporting the German Chapter owned, Amsterdam located toolserver (subject to issues around donating to foreign charities).

Financial Plan

Planned fundraising

Membership

For at least the next 6 months we expect membership fees to be the charity's sole source of income. Fees have been set at £0.50p per month for under 18s, full time students, the unemployed and OAPs and £1 per month for everyone else. Fees will be collected annually, in advance. We expect the charity's initial membership to be at least 20 based on initial surveys of interest. With an equal split between full paying and concessionary rate paying member this means we project to have received at least £180 in membership fees by the end of February, 2009.