2015 AGM/Elections/Questions

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 has been set up to allow voters to ask questions of the candidates for the 2015 Wikimedia UK Board elections. Please add your suggested questions below but remember that candidates are not obliged to answer any question.

Further information is also available in the Candidate Statements.

Questions

For all candidates

Question One

What is the main thing (or things) you would want to achieve through your tenure as a Wikimedia UK trustee? Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 09:33, 7 July 2015 (BST)

Question Two

How do you see the role of volunteers in WMUK and how can the board best help the charity to support its volunteer community? Thanks! Sjgknight (talk) 07:56, 17 July 2015 (BST)

For Neil Andrew Babbage

Question One

The end result I'd like to see is a larger and much more active community. We have a very large number of Wikimedians in the UK and, in comparison, a very small number of active members of WMF UK. I think there are great opportunities to leverage technology and tools better to encourage local participation. QuiteUnusual (talk) 08:47, 20 July 2015 (BST)

Question Two

The volunteers are WMF UK. The board can best support the charity by ensuring:

• That it's aims are understood and promoted to existing volunteers, potential new volunteers and others who share our aims and wish to support us. The more volunteers there are, the more representative we will be of the community we represent.
• That there is a climate that encourages deeper and wider participation and ensures this is maintained and improved. Barriers to participation are actively identified and eliminated.
• That the highest standards are maintained. One scandal is enough to destroy an organisation like ours as well as having the potential to contaminate the wider Wikimedia movement.
• That we are seen to be an independent organisation with shared beliefs but ultimately our own goals - that is, we are not part of a global WMF organisation with a single US-centric agenda.

QuiteUnusual (talk) 08:57, 20 July 2015 (BST)

For Nancy Bell

Question One

For Greyham Dawes

Question One

In your nomination statement, you describe WMUK as "an entirely credible example of good charity governance and competent financial management" and take at least some of the credit for getting the board to that position. How do you reconcile this assessment of WMUK's performance with the major overspend and subsequent staff redundancies at the end of the last financial year?

For Josie Fraser

Question One

For Michael Maggs

Question One

For Nick Poole

Question One

For Joseph Reddington

Question One

For Doug Taylor

Question One

Answers

Neil Andrew Babbage

Question One

Nancy Bell

Question One

As a Trustee I would:

1. Share my extensive national and international networks in the cultural heritage sector to build an army of volunteers to support the mission of Wikimedia.
2. Act as a responsible Trustee to ensure good governance, and delivery of the strategic plan.
3. Advocate on behalf of the organisation to new audiences.

Greyham Dawes

Question One

Josie Fraser

Question One

I want to contribute to the good management of the charity, and to it's financial stability and growth. I would work to ensure that the excellent work of the community is more widely understood and celebrated. I also want to help build and develop connections within and across the school sector, and support the greater involvement of schools and young people in understanding, making use of, and actively contributing to the work of Wikimedia UK.

Question two

Thanks for the question! Without volunteers there would be no Wikimedia UK; it's the job of the board to ensure their ideas and advice is heard and that the strategic direction of the organisation best represents and corresponds to the experience and aspirations of its community. The board is there to help articulate and promote this organisational sense of community and shared purpose, including the importance of inclusivity. And of course one of the key ways that the board can support current and potential volunteers is by by ensuring a financially robust and secure future for the charity.

Michael Maggs

Question One

I'd like to see real improvements in the way the charity interacts with our volunteers, an increase in volunteer numbers from hundreds to thousands, and an increase in membership. We should build on our successes in working with GLAMs to be more ambitious in seeking specific open knowledge outcomes such as large-scale releases of media files. Diversification of funding will be important to enable us to remain both effective and independent. --MichaelMaggs (talk) 10:47, 13 July 2015 (BST)

Nick Poole

Question One:

There are 3 things I would like to achieve during my tenure at Wikimedia:

• I would like to support the executive and fellow Trustees in developing sound governance and a robust organisational model so that Wikimedia UK can deliver its strategic plan
• I would like to learn more about the structure, organisation and values of the Wikimedia UK movement so that I can use my networks to build bridges and develop relationships
• I would like to promote engagement with the wiki community by my colleagues in museums, archives and libraries. -- NickPoole12

Question Two

I think Wikimedia UK and its volunteer community ought to be synonymous - in my experience, it is vital to avoid an 'us' and 'them,' mentality by placing the volunteer firmly at the heart of the organisation and then structuring the work of the paid staff as a service to support their needs. I am committed to transparency as a fundamental principle, and so while the staff ought to be able to marshall resources and effort towards specific aims it ought to be the volunteers that decide what those aims should be.

Joseph Reddington

Question One

I have a real passion about Systemic Bias, (particularly around disability, and oddly enough, IT literacy). I'd like to see much greater outreatch to people who haven't edited our projects before in communities that are under-represented by our editors. I think I'd like to see our events calendar involve more events in the style of a library event . I would argue that having more events like this is both A Good Thing and an excellent way to demonstrate to groups and funders outside of the community that we can have a positive impact on local communities, provide transferable skills, and build links. In turn this would allow us to widen our group of funders, giving us a little more financial stability.

J

Doug Taylor

Answer to question one

There are many things that I'd like to achieve, but probably the two main ones would be to significantly increase the number of active volunteers and to reduce our financial dependency on a single funding source. To achieve the former, I would like to develop and strengthen strategies that involved more volunteers in the charity's work as an integral part of the process, and actively seek broader outreach opportunities at a local level. To achieve the latter, we need to recognise that somewhere between £1 million and £2 million is donated by UK residents to WMF during the six weeks or so of the WMF's Annual Fundraiser. Around half a million of that is then granted to WMUK, which becomes our principal source of income. I believe that WMUK needs to demonstrate its value to donors by increasing its activities at the community level. If we establish the value of WMUK to the ordinary users of Wikimedia projects, we increase the likelihood that those donors who support the Annual Fundraiser will be wiling to financially support WMUK directly throughout the year. --RexxS (talk) 13:19, 8 July 2015 (BST)

Answer to question two

The role of volunteers in WMUK is to take part in achieving the vision that was set out when volunteers created the charity. We formed the charity not because we wanted a company, nor because we wanted a chapter of the WMF, nor because we wanted charitable status as an end in itself. We formed WMUK because we believed that having an organisation of Wikimedians within the UK would offer us greater benefits of working collectively to further our shared interest in the biggest online encyclopedia ever created - and all of its sister projects, as well as similar projects that provided open educational resources to the public. It has had the benefit of allowing us to employ staff whose purpose is to perform those tasks that volunteers will not, or cannot, perform. If we accept that WMUK exists to serve volunteers, it is obvious that the Board needs to thoroughly understand what volunteers do and what they want. To do that, the Board needs to be seen as part of the volunteer movement and board members need to participate in activities as volunteers. Having hands-on experience of WMUK events and outreach will allow the Board to make informed decisions about what support volunteers need. --RexxS (talk) 01:40, 21 July 2015 (BST)