Wikimedia South Africa/Board Meeting/27 July 2020

Wikimedia ZA - Board Meeting - 27 July 2020

Attendees[edit]

Everyone to please email their activities for the year.
Ingrid's work with ATHLEA Africa: Wynand to send details to Douglas
3 x Meetups organised by Ian
Adri participated in the rebranding strategy
Bobby: Goethe Institute involvement - Who's Knowledge - Decolonise the Internet Project
Phase 1 complete and Phase 2 is underway. Phase 3 still to happen
GI: Hackathon - Hack your culture
Moleskin Foundation: COVID 19 translation project (Rossouw and Michael)

Michael attended this.
App: http://techiaith.cymru/packages/macsen/?lang=en
Michael suggests that we create an app like this for all African languages, starting with Afrikaans.
Coenraad: Cool ideas for CS students - can ping that off Computer Science departments, Lets schedule outreaches to universities as per grant, and include this as part of the package
Ian says that the reason we don't have this is because we're not quite good enough with publicising ourselves. We need to find ways to effectively grow the community.
Coenraad: we need to list all ideas and resources on Zulip so we can find it when we need it. Building community IMO is about sharing ideas for people to pick up and run with.

Now that our grant has been approved, Wynand proposes that we go to the Fund Manager at Rhodes to get the ball rolling to stimulate research at Universities. This will help to stimulate interest.
Wynand has requested Tobias Seanwetter to talk about Copyright to Librarians as well as Creative Commons to do a talk. This all helps to stimulate thinking around Wikipedia.
Wynand would also like other Wiki-projects to do talks with Librarians.

Michael attended and enjoyed it, but there weren't a lot of Wikimedia related touch points.

Hiring committee met last week.
Adri to complete the hiring advertisement and share with the hiring committee (Coenraad, Bobby, Douglas and Adri).
From there it will be published on various channels (tbc).

They are looking to get a MOU with the Chapter.
They are looking to take a structured approach for future projects. There should always be one person responsible on both ends. The first MOU will take the form of a 6 month contract.
There will be a competition and the budget that was set aside previously for the live event will now be used to sponsor a prize.

Douglas will create an updated letterhead and will share it with the group to use in the future.

Suggested that we have themed Meetups in the future where we can invite WMF members to speak on certain topics or discuss problems on everyone's minds, specifically this can help the Afrikaans community to grow as there are currently problems around notability, importance, and editors being blocked for having different views.

From 7 July to 28 July:

Twitter: 1593 followers -> 1600
Facebook (English): 984 follows (896 likes) -> 984 (896)
Facebook (Afrikaans): 643 members -> 657
Mailing list (Afrikaans): 313 members. Suspect most are fake, AOL addresses, no valid activity for years -> 314
Mailing list (English): 262 members -> 258
Instagram 172 Followers -> 178
Meetup: 127 members -> 128
YouTube: 51 subscribers -> 52
Zulip: 27 users -> 30