[Foundation-l] London meet: Wikimedia UK discussion

[James D. Forrester]

On Saturday, March 26, 2005 8:44 PM, David Gerard <fun at thingy.apana.org.au>
wrote:

> Well, that was fairly productive. "Let's go down the pub and
> start a charity!"

Yeah. Was quite productive at being fun. Not so sure about Things Done (tm),
however. ;-)

> JDF has the notes, the below is from memory:
> 
> JDForrester has registered wikimedia.org.uk.

... And wikimedia.co.uk. Both just have silly little things on them right
now. Will get on with uploading the portal, suitably modified.

... <time passes> ...

Done. Of course, the portal is more suited to wikipedia.org.uk (more on that
later), but it's a start. We'll probably eventually want a wiki on
wikimedia.org.uk, though.

Anyone who want to put up the portal somewhere, note that it's in UTF-8.

For the record ('cos I think that, beforehand, I'd just stated this in IRC),
*@wikimedia.{org|co}.uk all gets auto-forwarded to board at wikimedia.org right
now. Obviously this situation will, err, improve in future. I hope.

Also, wikipedia.co.uk is owned by Bomis (/not/ the Foundation, which is
probably just a blip), and redirects to en.wikipedia.org (tsk, we Britons
speak more than just that one language); however, wikipedia.org.uk is owned
by one "Chris Brooking", whose name I don't recognise, though that also
redirects to en, so I'm not wholly worried. Will try to find a contact for
him and sort that out.

Of course we'll need to transfer the domains to Wikimedia UK as and when
that's a going concern, so it may not be worth the hassle of transferring
the 2/3/4 domains to someone else first.

> VampWillow has
> set up any number of charitable companies, so will be starting
> on the paperwork for this one.

And truly wonderful she is, too.

> The mission will be nicely open-ended. VW will write something
> that should get rubber-stamped by the Charity Commissioner.

The blurb at the bottom of the Foundation's business cards is "A registered
non-profit corporation dedicated to encouraging the growth and development
of free-content, multilingual, wiki-based information and learning
projects.", which I cobbled together from a few sources and nabbled a bit.
Something similar but expanded might be suitable for our "mission
statement".

> Once it's got charitable status, people in England and Wales will
> certainly be able to make tax-deductible donations to it. People
> in Scotland and Northern Ireland *probably* will.

S and NI will get tax-deductable status, deffo, it's just that Wikimedia UK
won't have to run under NI law, nor S law, but E&W law.

> Angela mentioned we can set up a UK Wikimedia mailing list.

Looking forwards to it. Yet another bloody list. :-)

> What we spend the money on ... servers are a possibility. Kate
> had made some noises about coming to London, but didn't. cc'd to
> Kate: what would be good technically to buy in the UK?

Note that, to avoid, err, 'complications', the idea is to rent the servers
from the Foundation (possibly at slightly implausible rates; we need Brion
and Jamesday managing them, rather than just "a computer", so the Foundation
will charge us a set-up fee and monthly rental, or something).

> James, anything I missed above that's in the notes?

Not really. Oh, yes, the other cunning wheeze we had whereby we can donate
to the Foundation without donating is for Wikimedia UK to have "affliated
membership" of the Wikimedia Foundation, costing some nominal amount ($1k?,
etc.).

> Oh, and our London readers might want to pop down to Maplin in
> Tottenham Court Road, who had WD Caviar 160GB/8MB hard disks
> for £60 and might still have some.

Gah, forgot about this one, then we went off for dinner. Bother.

Yours,
-- 
James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

Mail: james at jdforrester.org | jon at eh.org | csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk
IM  : (MSN) jamesdforrester at hotmail.com