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The next Board Meeting will happen in the irc:wikimedia-uk-board IRC channel on Tuesday 13 January 2009 at 20:30 GMT/UTC. All are welcome to attend, but only board members will be voiced. General discussion will be in irc:wikimedia-uk.

Template:WMUK

Wikimedia UK v2.0 is the second attempt at a Wikimedia chapter for the UK. The Company is called Wiki UK Limited; it intends to operate under the name "Wikimedia UK" after approval by the Wikimedia Foundation. Board members were elected in September 2008, and the company was incorporated on 5 November 2008. Membership applications are now being invited, to be processed as soon as we have a bank account. The chapter has received initial approval from the Chapters committee, and is currently awaiting approval from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Discussion is taking place on the Wikimedia UK mailing list (see the archives), as well as in real time on the following IRC channels:

• General Chapter discussion: irc:wikimedia-uk
• Discussion of the Oxford bid to host Wikimania 2010: irc:wikimania-oxford
• Board meetings: weekly in irc:wikimedia-uk-board.

The first attempt failed due to problems with getting set up and is in the process of being dissolved. In order to avoid some of these problems we have been committed to being open, transparent and democratic from the start.

Objectives

See also: Wikimedia UK v2.0/AoA

The Memorandum of Association sets out a formal "Object" of the company which forms an absolute restriction on its activities. The contents are hard to change and therefore have been drafted in a general form so that the chapter has maximum flexibility for its future operations, yet also complies with the requirements of the, and Wikimedia Foundation's Requirements for future chapters including Wikimedia's Mission Statement. We have also considered the Wikimedia Foundation's Guidelines for future chapters where appropriate.

The charity's Object 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, 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 cause 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    —Memorandum of Association (extract)

Goals

Template:Chapters

• to create a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge by empowering and engaging people to collect, develop and effectively disseminate educational content under a free license or in the public domain;
• to act as a voice and representative for the UK Wikimedian community;
• the advancement of education for all in particular by supporting the charitable work of the Wikimedia Foundation;

Potential future activities

The interim board is focussed on the practicalities of setting up the chapter - incorporation, opening a bank account, gaining official Chapter status, processing membership, arranging Gift Aid and organising the first Annual General Meeting. However, once this has been completed, we intend to turn our attention to substantive actions we can do to support the Wikimedia projects.

This is a preliminary list of ideas that have been suggested; please add yours too and add your comments on the ideas proposed:

1. Public relations
2. Supporting Wikipedia v1.0
3. Running campaigns in universities and schools encouraging students and academics to edit
4. Installing new tool servers in Kennisnet that we would have (some) control over (probably no legal issues with this)
5. Giving sessions at teacher training "top-up" days on the responsible use of Wikipedia (et al.) in the classroom
6. Working with the community to increase coverage of e.g. historical sites
7. Supporting the Wikimania 2010 Oxford bid
8. Employing developers
9. Hosting an annual UK Wiki-conference, combined with AGM. Details
10. Sourcing and digitising public domain works located in the UK (e.g. documents, books, pictures, ...)
11. Encouraging the release of new and currently copyrighted works under free licenses
12. Stimulate research into the use of wikipedia as an educational and communication tool. Seek academic partners to further this aim and bid for research funds.
13. Donating back to WMF, subject to charitable restrictions
14. Hosting/funding a local mirror ("squid server") of the Wikimedia websites, subject to legal issues regarding libel law
15. Supporting the German Chapter owned, Amsterdam located toolserver, subject to charitable restrictions and considerations of libel law
16. Events along the style of en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Takes The City?
17. Supporting projects in minority languages native to the United Kingdom, accessing public funds that are available to promote these languages
18. Using our name to get into areas that would otherwise be hard to get into (museam backrooms bits of industrial archology) or doing much the same for major document collections.
19. Using the name to pursuade people doing significant digitalisation projects to release these under a free license

Board members

The initial board members, responsible for setting up the company and then turning it into a charity, are:

Name	Username	Position
Kwan Ting Chan	User:KTC	Chair
Michael Conn	User:Warofdreams	Communication Officer
Tom Holden	User:Cfp	Treasurer
Michael Peel	User:Mike Peel	Membership Secretary
Andrew Turvey	User:AndrewRT	Secretary

These members met the 50% support requirements in the elections held in September 2008. If by May 2009 (6 months after becoming a company) we have still not held an AGM at which all of the board stood down, or if we have not processed more than 95% of the membership applications received more than one month before the AGM, by the time it happens, then we will ask the WMF to withdraw any trademark license and official UK chapter status they have given us. We hope to arrange for WMF to commit to doing this.

Voting pages were at Wikimedia UK v2.0/Vote and Wikimedia_UK_v2.0/Candidate_FAQs. Minutes of board meetings are at Wikimedia UK v2.0/Board meetings.

Newsletter

If you would like to be kept informed of developments by receiving a copy of the monthly newsletter, please sign up here.

Join up!

We are now inviting applications for membership! Membership is open to all; there are no restrictions in the location or age of members, and members do not need to be editors of any of the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Members have the right to elect the Board, submit motions and vote at AGMs, thereby playing a central role in determining the activities of the chapter.

The annual subscription costs £12 (£6 for concessions). Please apply using the form and note that applicants under 18 need to have the form countersigned by their parent or guardian.

These applications will be processed as soon as our bank account is opened. We have recently applied for the account and hope that this will be up and running by late December.

Donate

If you are interested in supporting the chapter but do not want to join as a member, please consider donating to the chapter.

We applied for Gift Aid on 23 November; HMRC are currently working to a response time of 6-8 weeks, so we expect to hear back around the middle of January. We will be able to reclaim income tax from UK tax-payers as soon as this is accepted and will also be able to reclaim tax on donations given prior to the date of acceptance.

We will be publishing more details about how to donate in a short while.

Interested in being kept informed

If you do not wish to be a member at this time but wish to be kept informed or can help in other ways please add your name below.

1. Following proceedings with interest. Adambro 06:53, 29 August 2008 (UTC)
2. Particularly interested in being involved if the new entity is Not-For Profit Open Research 08:45, 29 August 2008 (UTC).

   It will most certainly be non-profit, we will eventually be registering for charitable status (there are hoops to jump through first). — Tango 18:17, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

3. I'd like to know what's going on. Axl 07:31, 31 August 2008 (UTC)
4. Please keep me informed...Zir 00:16, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
5. Hiding 11:20, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
6. Please keep me informed.82.29.255.162 08:45, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
7. I need to know what the fees are before I commit, but I'm interested in seeing whats happening. Anonymous101 10:39, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
8. Interested. Please don't call it a "chapter" though. Unless it's actually a section of a book. Or possibly Hell's Angels. Does it come with a leather jacket? --Dweller 11:30, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

   "Chapter" is the correct term for something like this. Even if we didn't like it, we have little say in the matter since that's what the WMF calls organisations like ours. --Tango 17:39, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

   Although we don't have to call it that ourselves if we dont want to! AndrewRT 21:56, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

   It's not a name, it's a description. I don't think there is a better way of describing ourselves. --Tango 22:14, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

   To my delicate ears, it's a horrible Americanism. I'm sure there are UK organisations with "chapters" (Google is your friend), but it makes me shudder. --Dweller 14:16, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

   And to mine, good sir. --Celestianpower (wp, wikt, books) 21:59, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

9. Martinp23 17:48, 8 September 2008 (UTC)
10. Celestianpower (wp, wikt, books) 21:59, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
11. I'm interested, but been very busy. Looks like I missed the vote and all of the discussions :-( -- Harry Wood
12. J Milburn 19:56, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
13. --MichaelMaggs 18:11, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
14. I'm not much interested in joining, but I would be willing to make a donation if and when you are registered for Gift Aid. Angus McLellan (enwiki talk) 00:00, 21 November 2008 (UTC)