2015-12-05 Board meeting and Wikimeet Antwerpen

Wikimeet

This is the preparation page for the Wiki Meet in Antwerp. Meet from 13:00 at the KUBUS Permeke Library De Coninckplein, Antwerp (a 5 minute walk from the Central Station).

Route from train: leave the Central Station via the main exit in the direction of Astrid square, continue on the left of the square towards the Chinese gate, cross under the gate van continue in Van Wesenbeek street until you get to the De Coninck square; the library is on the right at 2 o'clock.

13 h: rdv at the Kubus cafe the glass building in the middle of the pic the brick building is the library
14-15 h: visit to the Permeke library, Thursday: alas, the guide has been taken ill, so the guided visit is off, but we can still visit the library on our own nevertheless or regardless
15-17 h: meeting with members and volunteers about the agenda

Yes, I participate

MADe (talk) 19:03, 2 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Derek (talk) 15:15, 18 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Dimi z (talk) 15:34, 27 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Lfurter (talk) 15:17, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Geertivp (talk) 17:54, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Romaine (talk) 09:56, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Lionel Scheepmans ^{✉ Contact} 19:21, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe

No, unfortunately

Board meeting

Date: 5 December 2015
Time: 15:00
Venue: KUBUS Permeke Bibliotheek Antwerpen
Present: Derek, Dimi, Geert, Maarten, Romaine
Excused: Stefano, Alberto
Members present: Smiley.tourist, Loraine, Lionel

The meeting is open for members.

Budget

Budget WM BE 2015 S2 was not granted by the Foundation. How to proceed? Current financial status?
Today is planned to finish the proposal for the budget in the first 6 months of 2016. You can still add your points during the meeting
Importance of the reporting to the Foundation. Taking pictures, upload on Commons and writing short reports on Activities.

About the budgets: We need to reduce costs amongst all projects and expenses. Planned projects:

Done	Dimi to check the Fosdem registration deadline

15 year Wikipedia
Wiki Saturdays
Schools and institutions
General Assembly
Small projects
Feminism
Fosdem
Training

We require better reporting to the Foundation of our activities: photos, small reports, impact evidence. This will improve the request and approval of future grants. Activities, goals, measurement of success

Reduce printing costs

We decided to temporarily stop all design and printing activities. (good news? Loraine is a designer). Furt(h)er ideas:

WMF funded printing
Shared printing with neighbouring countries BE/NL/FR/DE/EN
Cheaper design (by volunteers?)
Distribute English only version? With a small WMBE sticker label?
PDF via web site
Black and White only
Personal printing (from PDF on web site)

Hint: Upload a PDF version of all our official documents to Wikimedia Commons. Done

General assembly and board elections

Already more than one year of existence for the Wikimedia Belgium Chapter. Time to think about General Assembly and election is coming.
- As stated in the previous meeting, I think we should announce time and venue with good advance; possibly to combine with a presentation and updatings of WLArt and Education?
- Invite with due advance people that have manifested their interest (e.g. Fred Truyen, KUL, and others) and even take into consideration to ask them to give us a short presentation about what they would want from WMBE Ste.caneva (talk), 4 December 2015

General Assembly on Saturday 23 January 2016. It was felt that Saturday is better than Sunday. Maarten will initiate the process, search a venue, and search for a candidate co-organiser. Election of Board members for 2 year; president for 1 year. Any (new) Candidates? The current Board members were voted last year, so they can serve another year.

Reduction on number of Board members

We feel that having too many board members is limiting the inter-activity and dynamism amongst the whole team. A person should not be a Board member for the honour; board membership requires active participation. Therefore the following is proposed:

Limit the number of board members to 6
Setup a system of project managers with a Wikimedia.be e-mail address, business cards, and an official function
Add a role to the president as to support/educate board members in their function

Voted and accepted by all 5 present board members.

Collaboration

Ideas:

YOUR suggestions for content for our website
- Adding pictures and a short presentation/cv for the board members would increase trust both in a human and professional way
- Featured contribution of the month, to give volunteers the feeling we care about what they do
- Allowing also other members that are actively participating in WMBE projects to be mentioned in a community section: also for them, picture and short presentation; I think this should apply to people that propose new projects to the board or are involved in board-administered projects. We could even give a little prize (Wiki gadgets, tickets to take part in a conference or another event, or a reduction to visit GLAMs that collaborate with us) in order to reward the effort and stimulate collaboration
- as soon as WLArt and Education provide updatings (especially those involving the participation of peope and outreach), we should provide good stories of this on the website, with pictures and why not, also video presentations... to put it shortly, all that brings our activity more directly to the public Ste.caneva (talk) 4 December 2015
- Add agenda to the website

Our new (public) Drupal Web site

TODO	Drupal Web site maintenance

Too much whitespace at left margin (feels a bit empty)
Too few content
Multilingual pages with only EN texts -> translation required
Photos of board members + small function description
Password required to edit
Anybody can send new content to Maarten
We would require a web designer to layout the pages
We should encourage new members to receive the Monthly newsletter

Google for Non-profit organisations

There was a proposal to use Google for nonprofit collaborative facilities. We actually started to use Google for Non-profit for Board coordination purposes. Thanks to the efforts of Derek. Very nice idea, very practical. Seamless collaboration for mainly: Gmail, Shared calendar, Shared documents amongst all Board and Project leaders.

Check if new e-mail accounts work. Configure IMAP access. Send @board to verify if all board members are reachable. info@wikimedia.be remains linked with OTRS (handled by Romaine).

Components

Gmail
Calendar
Google Drive: Sheets, Docs, Presentations, Dwaw
Classroom
Groups: Board, Finance, (possibly other)
Sites: intranet ~ SharePoint functionality
Hangout: nice to have phone calls (instead of Skype or WhatApp)

Recruitment of volunteers

Ideas:

make more use of the mailing list and newsletter to communicate with our members
Use the mail to communicate stories as suggested above Ste.caneva (talk), 4 December 2015

About membership - Our motto: Engaging people in free knowledge

We should recruit more associate members: Maarten proposed that any of the board members to send an e-mail to 5 friends to propose membership of WMBE. Membership is free for all active volunteers and editors.

The number of active editors is going down on almost all language Wikipedia sites, especially the older ones like EN/NL/etc. We need more Flemish contributors and moderators in WP NL.

We need more involvement of Wikipedians in the different projects. We should make a distinction between volunteers (doing community projects) and editors (contributing to the content of Wikimedia projects). We need more Associate members and Effective members in our association.

Concrete actions

Looking for new contributers:

Projects
Editors
Training and followup
Museum visit and related organisations

Organise training sessions about contributing to Wikipedia, MediaWiki and other Wikimedia projects. We should make the general public aware how Wikipedia articles are created, and recruit new members. We should more relay via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Target communities: Vorming+, UGent, KULeuven, other high schools, secondary schools, adult education, libraries, musea, institutions.

Wiki Saturdays: nice idea; we need to organise regular sessions. This is another opportunity to recruit new members.

Press relations: We should build a Press relations management.

Collaborating with OKFN BE

OKFN meeting 15 December 2015. It is proposed that Wikimedia Belgium will become member in order to better collaborate amongst other open data organisations like the Flemish Government, OpenStreetMap Belgium, Open Data, Museums, institutions. We should have more symbiosis with related organisations in Belgium. Geert and Maarten will be present.

Ongoing and Planned projects

Wikiducation
Wiki Loves Art (see: meta grant)
Collaboration with Just for the Record
Volunteer development VPDI
SUGGESTIONS for WIKIPEDIA 15 years celebration

Administrative messages

Maarten to transmit a new updated grant request.

Secured postoffice mail; did we receive secured mail, yet? Postoffice proxy document to be registered at the local post office of Elsene (Dimi, Maarten?) using the statutes.

Another set of office Keys have been given to Maarten by Dimi. This will simplify access to the office for Board meetings, and administration.

New Effective member and Project manager

Loraine, Women and Feminism projects. She lives in Brussels. She comes from Lausane, Switzerland. Since 2007 she studied and is teaching Design in Mons and Brussels. We welcome some woman involvement in WMBE...

Conference call with Kacie

WMF Outreach and grant Manager

Summary of discussed topics (Derek, Maarten, Geert, Kacie):

Limit conference and printing costs.
Travel grant requests should be kept separate from Project grant requests.
Underspending, and respective overspending amongst different grants; no carry-over possible amongst different grants.
But… grant request and approval is taking too long… we would require shorter elapsed times, so maybe ask grants per project instead of per half year…
We have too much infrastructure costs and too few (completed) projects - but this is (quite) normal since we only started in end of 2014 as a new chapter…
Clear financial reporting is required: new project = new grant, instead of carry-over.
Better reporting on the content and results of past activities, including photographs.
We should measure: What is the Wiki impact versus budget?

More visibility on META. Collaboration with neighbouring countries should be ameliorated, and further developed. Organise Wiki Saturdays, partnership with OKFN Belgium. Survey: what do people want -> is there something that we can reuse from the WMNL survey? When organising activities: goals, measurement of success.