I'm not sure if its the first WMUK wedding, but it probably is. In December we finished off 2011 with news that our recently appointed office manager had maaried our leading ambassador into fresher fairs and Girl Geeks. Not unusually it was unusual being conducted in a small marquee in the rain behind a house in Coventry. Several wikipediams were there and I got to congratulate them after the service.
My job as chair of Wikimedia UK arrived out of the blue. Its said to be a symptom of the method of government/anarchy that wikimedia imposes on itself that people can arrive suddenly at positions of power within the organisation. I was elected chair I think because I had just completed the second backstage pass in the UK and as a result I had co-created a new type of QR code. More importantly I had made no mistakes as I'd arrived with little history. The election was unusual for Wikinedia UK in that we had more than seven people standing for the seven positions. Each of was required to summarise what we thought was important both in writing and verbally and then the unusual voting procedure took place. After the votes we managed to get Mike Peal as secretary and Andrew Turvey as Treasurer. Mike, Andrew and Steve Virgin, who had organised the Bristol AGM, were our three experienced directors. The other four of us had come via the British Museum outreach event the year before (and some of were still trying to work out why there was no "p" in Wikimedia).
The task facing the new board was primarily to register ourselves as a charity. This was not going to be easy. Previous boards had already had clear answers from both Her Mayasty's Revenue and The Charity Commission that we were not going to achieve this easily. The benefits of becoming a charity was primarily that we would gain 2-300,000 pounds in gift aid. We would also gain the status of being a charity which would make dealing with collaborators and donors simpler to explain. Lastly we could also benefit from the existing models of how a successful UK charity operates.
Birmingham was our first in person board meeting and unusually for a board meeting it was outside London. The meeting was held at a business park which was given to use free as were still trying to decide where out office should be. By the end of the meeting we had agreed that London was the only option but we should recruit a first permanent employee and that person would decide. We had also hired a facilitator and she led us though our missions and visions but more importantly we learnt who each of us were and we started to become a team. Fae took on the task of leading GLAM. The success of the work with the British museum had been initiated by Mike and Liam Wyatt. Liam had led on the British Museum work, he had left a good model but it was not obvious if it could be scaled. Martin took on the more difficult education role where we did not have an established model although Alex Stinson arrived from the U.S. with some expertise. Chris Keating took on the role of improving our communications but he was keen to assist with the annual fundraiser.
This was not a board meeting but it was the location of the years Wikimania event where the world's wikipedians gather annually. The board had at the lastminute decided to sponser delegates from the UK and outside. Three UK Wikipedians were sponsored as well as a delegate from Kenya and Hungary. There were over 500 people there including other UK wikipedians who had either funded themselves of gained a bursary from the foundation. The conderence became important to the UK board because the main board had decided to not support chapters who wanted to be in the fundraiser with the one exception of Germany. Chapters were to be encouraged to take grants and to let fundraising happen centrally. The UK was specifically askede to take a grant despite the fact that the UK had signed an agreement with the foundation regarding the fundraiser.
The board meeting in Derby was at Derby Museum which had agreed a collaboration with Wikimedia UK in January. The board were able to see the QR codes that supported multi-lingual access and meet Ting Chen. Ting who is the chair of the main board had flown in from Germany for the first half of our board meeting on the Saturday. It was obvoius that Ting was impressed with the board and the board gained confidence in its intention to continue with its ambitious plans. Key actions from this meeting was to empower Steve Virgin and John Byrne to find new lawyers and get us charity status. The board knew that this was a challenge as we had failed twice before. The tax people said we were not a charity and the Charity Commission said that the we did not easily fit in with existing definitions. We also agreed that we would proceed with setting on permanent staff and that we should engage HR consultants to assist us with finding the top person first. Andrew too the lead on this and we also empowered Chris Keating to organise our fundraiser - assuming we were to be permitted to run one.
The London board meeting started in the British Library and it was a celebration. Days before John and Steve were able to confirm that we were officially a UK charity. Our first permanent employee, Jon Davies, was available several months before we thought we would have someone in place and the fundraiser was running and raising about 50% more than the previous year. This was exactly what we had estimated. Jon had found and rented our first office apace and Sue Gardner the global Exec director was present and we web streamed the first Wikimedia board meeting to the web.
We had another facilitated session to look at Governance. The board had largely achieved what it intended to do, the remaining task was to employ the remaining staff and a week later we made an offer to Richard to change his job from temporary to permanent. We made plans to get Jon to emplot three more staff.
The main challenge to the board and staff was to cope with the change. Several months earlier we were seven people elected to directors of a company registered to Andrew's home address with no employees, no office but ambitious plans with no agreed method of funding those plans beyond our existing funds. We were now seven trustees of a UK registered charity with an office, employees and a million dollar budget. Our primary task was to consolidate but we also committed outselves to achieve UK Quality standards for a new charity and we agreed that we would advertise to find trustees who were not white, male, wikipedians.
This board meeting is intended to attract new board members trustees.
This will be the first UK board meeting outside of England and is intended to celebrate our partnership in Wales.
The AGM will be held at ... on ....
Every month Mike would put together a monthly report that bulleted what we had achieved. As you look back on a month then you realise what we have achieved. I've pulled a few events out here but you can see each that Mike has put together for April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, January, February and March. (links placed in here).
The board tried hard to involve the membership. At our first board meeting we organised a wiki-meet in Birmingham. Not amazingly popular but we ran it in a cafe and served coffee to those who came. There have been ??? London Wiki-meets this year including the 50th. At the 49th we used the meeting to show our short listed candidates to the members and all three became involved although we only employed one. At the 50th we held our Extra-Ordinary General Meeting where we changed our companies objectives. WE also organised a wiki-meet in Edinburgh and there were others in Cambridge, Manchester and Liverpool.
We established a fairly regular blog of what we are doing and we re-structured our web page. Notable stories included our charity status and QRpedia which got Wikimedia UK mentioned in most major languages.
At our first meeting Fae had predicted that we may have 20 GLAM events. Some disbelief and a lot of raised eyebrows are contradicted by the events. We had an event in The Herbert Museum in Coventry, a prize giving in Derby, ? events at the British Libary, ? events at the British Museum, ....
We have spoken about Wikimedia UK in Amsterdam, California, Indiana, Lillehammer, Haifa, Vienna and Mombai.