I am pleased to see the publication of the Compass Review and support all of its final recommendations.
First let me say that I sincerely regret any misjudgement or upset that any of my actions may have caused the Wikimedian community in any way. It has always been my intention to act in the best interests of the movement and I endeavoured to do so throughout this period last autumn, when there was press coverage that harmed the movement.
The Compass Review recognises that the press coverage was ill-informed (page 3). I am pleased that it does, as it has been upsetting for me and my family to read these inaccurate headlines that were written about me. Particularly given the amount of time, effort and passion I have given to the movement over the last few years. I would not want the reputation of any other volunteer to have suffered in a similar way. Looking ahead, I do hope that both the UK chapter and the Wikimedia Foundation realise that when a volunteer is subject to this kind of media pressure, they owe a duty of care to the volunteer to ensure that inaccuracies are corrected and that retractions, if necessary, are sought from the publisher.
Initial press coverage about the Compass Review highlights the ownership of QRpedia as being a factor in the difficulties the UK chapter faced. Indeed, it is implicit in the section covering the resignation of one of the Trustees Jocelyn Upendran. For that reason, I would just like to put the record in order and to explain what has been happening.
As the Wikipedia article on QRpdia makes clear, the idea was developed when I was working as a volunteer Wikipedian-in-Residence at Derby Museum in April 2011. The idea was developed in collaboration with Terence Eden and from the very start we made it clear that we wished to transfer the rights to Wikimedia UK. That is why the code is freely licensed.
The Compass Review fails to mention that the first practical use of QRCodes was in Derby Museum, and I initially introduced the idea in a talk to UK Wikimedia chapter members at the AGM in Bristol in April 2011. The members saw how QRpedia codes worked in practice from pictures taken from Derby, and I recall a number of interesting questions.
At the AGM in Bristol I was elected to the Board of Wikimedia UK and asked to be Chair. QRpedia was not a shared Board priority at this stage, as the technology had only been used on a single occasion. The Board had the establishment of a full time office in the UK, the recruitment of full-time office staff and securing charitable status in the UK as its principal priorities. Therefore, the ownership of QRpedia did not become an issue until the July Board, when a fellow Trustee first raised in advance of the talk we were going to jointly do in Bristol in early September for Tedx Bristol 2011. Board members were asked to prepare a proposal to allow Terence and I to hand over QRpedia so that ownership of the domains would be in the full control of the Wikimedia UK chapter, and it was hoped that this would be complete by the end of 2011.
I presented the idea of QRpedia at the Wikimania conference at Haifa in Israel - where I first raised the subject of QRpedia personally with Sue Gardner. She was not very interested, but she had a tour of the UK National Archives later that year (with several other senior WMF staff members) where the Doomsday Book and the Magna Carta feature QRpedia codes. At Wikimania I met Ting Chen who was the Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation and he travelled from Frankfurt to our next board meeting in September where he later reported "And one of the most cool things I ever saw is the QR codes in the meeting venue, the Derby Museum ... a really magnificent thing." (The Derby project was a major success for Wikimedia UK with 1,200 new articles created).
At the end of October, Jon Davies was appointed Chief Executive and the London office was to open in early November. One of the first tasks for Jon was to organise the smooth transfer of QRpedia to the chapter. (See Minutes November 1st 2011 – Action on Jon Davies).
No progress was made on the matter until February, when Jon Davies was asked again to chase progress on this matter. In March, at the request of an Executive Board meeting, Terence and I were asked to restate the way we would like to proceed. Our suggestion was that we handed the rights to QRWP.org domain name to the Chapter, which would allow a continued guaranteed service. We asked to retain control of QRPedia.org as part of this initial position. From March till the AGM in May, the Board had a heavy workload with the Monmouthpedia Project. Monmouthpedia was officially launched on May 19th.
The ownership of QRpedia was discussed in early May In-Camera as stated in the Compass Report, as I have learnt since the publication of the report. The old Board stood down on the 12th May and the new Board took over then.
At the In-Camera meeting it is recorded in the Compass Report:
“MP raised issues that he had with the amount of charitable effort that had gone into advertising QRpedia.org. Fae said that he did not see this as an issue as any commercial use of QRpedia will support Wikipedia. MP disagreed - he does not want QRpedia used with non-Wikipedia non charitable projects as there is a risk of too much crossover into purely commercial projects. MP wants ideally one site run by RB and TE ("Multilingual QR Codes Ltd, "QR.org" or the like), one site run by Wikimedia UK qrwp.org and a joint project between the two QRpedia.”
(This is not a cc by sa license)
The Compass report records that Ashley van Haeften was planning a one hour phone meeting but does not mention that an agreement was reached by all of the parties involved in July. Present on the call was, Terence, Ashley and Jon Davies. The agreement went no further as disagreement at Board level as to the best way to proceed meant nothing substantive happened.
Joscelyn was tasked with restarting the process and we had an amicable conversation as she needed to understand not only QRpedia but also the way Wikimedia UK worked. I do not remember any document being created but I was surprised to be told that she had resigned. This was one of the occasions when I offered my resignation. The board preferred to take legal advice concerning how to handle the conflict of interest.
The Board next communicated with me about QRpedia in December, when it asked a new co-opted board member (Saad) to discuss another potential contract to transfer the rights of QRpedia.
To secure an agreement I insisted that the board members who were going to agree the terms had delegated powers to make an agreement as this had not happened on the last occasion when we had made an agreement in July. Saad and Doug reported that they had these delegated powers. We successfully reached an agreement earlier this week.
On the following days the rest of the board failed to ratify the agreement despite their earlier assurances.
I plan to attend the next UK board meeting tomorrow (8 Feb) where the prospect of an agreement will be raised again.
I feel it is important that the existing users of QRpedia are supported in a free and uninterrupted way as they have been since the service was first offered. We have had outline agreements at least twice. The Chief Exec was given this task over many months. The Wikimedia board have changed their minds after delegating board members to make an agreement. There is a contract already drawn up from July that would ensure Wikimedia had a continued QRpedia service for ever by moving the most important domain. The issue is not whether we will sign a transfer document but whether we can create a stable agreement that someone does not want to change after it has been agreed. To date Terence and I have spent money in maintaining this service and we have contributed hundreds of hours. We have not made any money from this service which we continue to support.