Board

People

Board of Trustees — Committees — Employees — Job openings — Recruitment procedures — Staff Handbook — Operational policies

The Board is responsible for the majority of the day to day running of the chapter and is elected by the membership at the Annual General Meeting. Members of the Board act as Directors of the company and as trustees of the charity. Legal duties and responsibilities of board members are set out below.

Members

Wikimedia UK board as of 8 June 2013

The figure in brackets denotes the AGM at which the Trustee was elected:

• Chris Keating - Chair (2012)
• Michael Peel - Secretary (2012)
• Greyham Dawes - Treasurer (2013)
• Saad Choudri - Trustee (2013)
• Michael Maggs - Trustee (2013)
• Alastair McCapra - Trustee (2013)
• Ashley Van Haeften (Fæ) - Trustee (2012)

Biographies

Chris Keating

Chris Keating

Chris Keating is currently Chair of Wikimedia UK. He is a professional fundraiser, campaigner and long-standing Wikipedia editor. He is an administrator of the English Wikipedia where his contributions range from the article on the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead to the one on the dreadnought battleship. Elected to the Board of Wikimedia UK in April 2011, his main priority is making sure Wikimedia UK communicates well with the Wikimedia community and with our other supporters. He also took a lead on the 2011 Fundraiser.

Outside of both work and the Wikiworld, Chris is a keen amateur violinist and "an even more amateur photographer". You can find him on Wikipedia as The Land and on Twitter as @chriskeating.

Chris's term runs until the 2014 AGM. You can view Chris's candidate statement at the 2012 AGM.

Email: chris.keatingwikimedia.org.uk

Michael Peel

Mike Peel

Michael Peel (User:Mike Peel) is currently Secretary of Wikimedia UK (since April 2010). He served as Membership Secretary from late 2008 to April 2009, and Chair from April 2009 to April 2010. A graduate and a doctorate student of the University of Manchester, Mike first edited the English Wikipedia in March 2005 and the Wikimedia Commons since July 2006. Like a lot of new editors, he started editing because he was irritated by a few grammatical errors he saw. Since that time, Mike has made over 16,000 edits on the English Wikipedia, and uploaded over 1,800 photos to Wikimedia Commons. He has been an admin on the English Wikipedia since July 2007. Outside of Wikimedia, Mike is an astrophysicist with knowledge of programming, web design and photography.

Michael's term runs until the 2014 AGM. You can view Mike's statement at the 2012 AGM.

Email: michael.peelwikimedia.org.uk

Greyham Dawes

Greyham Dawes

Greyham has been treasurer and trustee of Wikimedia UK since February 2013. He is a professional financial adviser specialising in regulatory compliance, charity governance and restructuring and public accountability, drawing on extensive knowledge and experience gained as head of accountancy policy at the Charity Commission in the nineties. He provides pro bono advice in these areas to the charity sector generally, serves on a number of standing committees for best practice in charity financial reporting and is well known for his books, essays and lectures on that topic.

He is a chartered accountant, an independent member of the audit committee at SCOPE, chair of the finance & audit committee as a non-executive director of the British School of Osteopathy and hon. treasurer of the Association of Church Accountants and Treasurers.

Greyham's term runs until the 2015 AGM.

Email: greyham.daweswikimedia.org.uk

Saad Choudri

Saad Choudri

Saad has been a trustee of Wikimedia UK since September 2012. He is a practising solicitor in the video games industry and has offered legal advice pro bono in the past.

Saad's term runs until the 2015 AGM.

Email: saad.choudriwikimedia.org.uk

Michael Maggs

Michael Maggs

Michael has been a trustee of Wikimedia UK since June 2013. He is a retired patent attorney and a current Commons bureaucrat.

Michael's term runs until the 2015 AGM.

Alastair McCapra

Alastair McCapra

Alastair has been a trustee of Wikimedia UK since June 2013. He is also Chair of the Landscape Institute.

Alastair's term runs until the 2015 AGM.

Ashley Van Haeften (Fæ)

Fæ

Fæ is a trustee of Wikimedia UK (since April 2011) and a member of the Wikimedia Chapters Association Council (since July 2012). With a particular interest in GLAM activities, including supporting the GLAM movement internationally by sitting on the steering group of the GLAM toolset project. He is co-founder of the Wikimedia LGBT project, a proposed Thematic Organization. He has over 750,000 edits across Wikimedia projects, with a further 1.3 million by bot, mainly supporting Commons by making better use of Ordnance Survey OpenData for photographs in the UK, along with uploading over 80,000 images and audio files.

Fæ has a professional background in managing change and improvement in a number of sectors including Government agencies, utilities, retail and engineering. He used to be a pure mathematician and moved over to management and organizational strategy to "pay the bills".

Fæ's term runs until the 2014 AGM. You can view Fæ's candidate statement from the 2012 AGM.

Email: faewikimedia.org.uk

Previous members

Board members in previous years were:

2012-13:

• Chris Keating - Chair
• Doug Taylor - Vice Chair
• Michael Peel - Secretary
• Greyham Dawes - Treasurer
• Saad Choudri - Trustee
• Ashley Van Haeften - Trustee
• John Byrne - Treasurer (resigned)
• Roger Bamkin - Trustee (resigned)
• Joscelyn Upendran - Trustee (resigned)

2011-12:

• Roger Bamkin - Chair
• Michael Peel - Secretary
• Andrew Turvey - Treasurer
• Chris Keating - Trustee
• Martin Poulter - Trustee
• Ashley Van Haeften - Trustee
• Steve Virgin - Trustee

2010-11:

• Andrew Turvey - Chair
• Michael Peel - Secretary
• Thomas Dalton - Treasurer
• Steve Virgin - Director
• Joseph Seddon - Director (resigned)

2009-10

• Michael Peel - Chair
• Andrew Turvey - Secretary
• Tom Holden - Treasurer
• Thomas Dalton - Director (co-opted)
• Zeyi He - Initiatives Director
• Joseph Seddon - Events Director
• Steve Virgin - Corporate Relations Director
• Paul Williams - Volunteers Director (resigned)

2008-09:

• Kwan Ting Chan - Chair
• Andrew Turvey - Secretary
• Tom Holden - Treasurer
• Michael Conn - Communication Officer
• Michael Peel - Membership Secretary

Duties

Board members have certain legal duties and responsibilities, which include:

1. To act only within the powers given to them by the Articles of Association
2. To act in good faith and with integrity to promote the success of the chapter in achieving its purposes, with regard, where necessary to long term effects and the interests of employees, the community, the environment, relations with suppliers and customers, standards of business conduct and fair acting between members of the chapter
3. To use the chapter's resources reasonably and only for the promotion of its purposes
4. To exercise independent judgement and reasonable care, skill and diligence and consider getting external professional advice on all matters where there may be material risk to the chapter, or where the board members may be in breach of their duties
5. To avoid conflicts of interest, declare them where necessary in accordance with applicable law and not to accept benefits from third parties where these may give rise to a conflict of interest
6. To avoid undertaking activities that might place the chapter's assets or reputation at undue risk, ensure that the chapter remains solvent.

In addition, the chapter's Board members are personally required to ensure that the chapter complies with its other legal duties such as those arising from being an employer and its reporting obligations to Companies House and the tax authorities.

To be eligible to act as a Board member, a person must be:

1. A member of the chapter
2. 16 years old or over
3. prepared to publicly disclose their real name, date of birth, and the names of any other companies they are the director of. Note that residential addresses are no longer disclosable.
4. not an undischarged bankrupt, a person whose estate has been "sequestrated", who has made an undischarged arrangement with creditors or has granted a trust deed in favour of their creditors
5. not disqualified from acting as a company director or removed as a charity trustee by the Charity Commission, the High Court or the Court of Session (Scotland)
6. not convicted of any offence involving deception or dishonesty which is not a "spent" conviction - even if it was not in the UK