2015 AGM/Elections/Statements

2015 Annual General Meeting AGM: Elections (Candidate statements · Candidate questions) — Resolutions Miscellaneous: 2015 Annual Review · 2015 Annual Report · UK Wikimedian of the Year 2015 · Timeline

This page contains the statements of the candidates for the board of Wikimedia UK. Please submit questions for the candidates on the 2015 AGM/Elections/Questions.

'Please don't edit this page directly. If you would like to nominate someone for election, please follow the instructions at Board/Becoming a trustee.

Neil Andrew Babbage

Self-nominated

I'm standing for election as I am willing to help address the identified skills gap of software/technology project management. Starting in IT in 1989 I have spent most of my career working either in IT itself or in related fields, such as business programme management. I've spent time as an IT auditor responsible for overseeing large scale project delivery.

For the last 10 years I've been an IT director for a large financial services company. A particular feature of my job has been the delivery of many successful major technology programmes of different types. These have included multi-year programmes, some with as many as 10 overlapping projects, with highly complex deliverables. Within these programmes there has been the full range of solutions from in-house developed applications to package installations, large platform to platform conversions and even application service provider implementations. I've delivered or overseen the delivery of back office mainframe platforms through to mobile and web based solutions. I've used many different project methodologies and I've seen the good and the bad way to deliver projects. As well as financial services my industry experience includes web start-ups, retail and hospitality

I have an MSc in Computing for Commerce and Industry and an ISEB certification in managing IT projects. With all of this experience of first delivering IT projects, then programmes of projects and finally overseeing the delivery of projects I think I can effectively close Wikimedia UK’s identified skills gap.

I am a committed Wikimedian having first edited some nine years ago and still going strong with 50K+ edits across the projects, mainly the English Wikipedia and Wikibooks.

Joseph Reddington

Self-nominated

I'm Joe and I'm standing for election to be a trustee of Wikimedia UK. I think I have a lot to offer, particularly in the areas of education, volunteer management/engagement and GLAM.

I'm comfortable with the duties and overall responsibility of being a trustee. I was a trustee for the charity Signalong and this year I left my job as a computer science researcher (I worked on the design of semantics for programming languages amongst many other things) to start the social enterprise eQuality Time. I now work on social projects full time and this has given me valuable experience in fundraising: we've had grants approved by NESTA, the National Lottery, the Awesome Foundation, and London Catalyst.

I've been making use of collective wiki-like principles in education for some years. I designed the process behind http://www.whitewaterwriters.com (you can see me talk a little bit about it at http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Your-book-in-your-hands-Joe-R-2) and over the last six weeks alone I've co-ordinated 20 volunteers who are leading teams of young people to create their own collaborative novels (stories like this one: http://www.stokesentinel.co.uk/Big-Read-Writing-project-shows-novels-child-8217/story-26687891-detail/story.html) all over the country.

One of my major passions is disability, particularly communication. I lead the open projects CommuniKate and AzuleJoe and you can see me talk a little bit more about them in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0nJN5Tddx0. I've also released open data sets looking a provision of assistive technology across the UK http://joereddington.com/aac-and-the-domesday-dataset/. For the last three years I've run the Flowers for Turing (http://flowersforturing.joereddington.com/) event, raising money for the charity Special Effect. I'm interested in finding ways that we can make wikimedia events more accessible.

When I'm not running my own projects I enjoy climbing and blogging at joereddington.com (this might be of particular interest to wikipedians: http://joereddington.com/4534/2014/11/24/the-list-of-uk-politicians-most-likely-to-be-making-up-facts./)