Wikimedia South Africa/Board Meeting/27 March 2016

The Board Meeting was held via Google Hangouts on 27 March 2016, from 19h00 to 21h21

Present :

Apologies :

Absent :

Preparation for Berlin Chapters conference and affiliate board seats[edit]

Douglas and Deon will be attending the Chapters Conference in Berlin, representing the South African chapter and editing community.
Update on the current situation in the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as some historical involvement of the Foundation with its chapters.
Aim to formulate a position for Douglas and Deon to present at the meeting.
Broadly, in the search for a new Executive Director, agreed that the candidate should ideally have experience in some sort of NGO/Open Source role, have experience in an entity doing development, experience with working with the community, and respecting openness and transparency.
Agree to support Lodewijk and Maarten as affiliate board members
Agreed to propose that the two affiliate board members jointly (if they agree) have veto power (currently only Jimmy Wales has veto power). (Note from Ian afterwards - I was not clear during the meeting about the community board members, and don't support only affiliate board members having veto power, not community board members)

African editors routinely experience systemic bias when it comes to their articles being deleted or nominated for deletion.
Editors need to spend energy in deletion discussions, or simply become discouraged and leave.
It was suggested that WMZA makes up list of trusted, experienced editors to nominate to receive the autopatrolled right.
A discussion arose on a "Wikipedia of the Year" award to an excellent local editor. Suggested that a "Hall of Fame" may be better, as there is no need to repeat the process at regular intervals, and a number of worthy editors can be recognised at the same time.
This will reduce the likelihood of a new article being nominated for deletion.
Douglas has a list of administrators who have an understanding of the issue, and will be supportive, and will forward the list.
It was also recognised that South Africa needs users with administrative rights, and will actively approach potential users to apply.
Clear criteria to need to be drawn up in advance.
The recent lack of African representation for Wikimania scholarships was discussed.
Agreed that the current criteria "Improved gender, language, or geographic diversity..." is not being adequately implemented and that the criteria themselves need to be strengthened to improve diversity.

As discussed previously, an accountant was paid to investigate the R50 000 unaccounted for.
Conclusion was that, while the amount spent and the amount requested matched, and were correct, the amount paid by the Wikimedia Foundation was too little.
This was on account of WMZA incorrectly calculating unspent money from previous grants, and asking for too little.
The accountant has made suggestions for better financial record-keeping systems
Currently all records are stored on a DropBox account for viewing by the board, Dumi to share this information with members of the board that doesn't have access.
Accountant suggested that all data is stored by year.

Dumi requested that the language-translation tool be added to the current WMZA websites (Wikimedia South Africa, Joburgpedia, and WikiIndaba).
Ian agreed to implement, to get access details to the server from David.
Ian also to add bank account details so that donors can donate to WMZA
Still working towards allowing donations to WMZA to be written off for tax purposes, this requires becoming a public benefit organisation.
Ian is also to look at updating the wikimedia.org.za domain details - currently Lourie is the only contact.