Affiliate Chairpersons meeting March 29, 2019

Invitation Affiliate Chairpersons meeting Friday March 29, 2019

Location: Wikimedia Deutschland Office - room Alphabet

Time: 19:00 - 21:00

This meeting is open only for chairs of Wikimedia chapters, thematic organizations, and chairs from sAPG affiliates (including sAPG funded User groups).

Link to etherpad

Attendees

Present (please list your attendance)

Frans Grijzenhout (chair WMNL)
Itzik Edri (Chair, WMIL)
Josie Fraser (Chair WMUK)
Pierre-Yves Beaudouin (talk) (chair WMFr)
Filip Maljković (Chair WMRS)
Pru.mitchell (talk) 10:09, 26 February 2019 (UTC) (President Wikimedia Australia)[reply]
Toni Hermoso Pulido (Chair Amical Wikimedia)
Shabab Mustafa (talk) (President, Wikimedia Bangladesh)
Oscar Costero (President, Wikimedia Venezuela)
Laurentius (talk) (chair, Wikimedia Italia)
Lukas Mezger, chair of the Supervisory Board, Wikimedia Deutschland
Susanna Mkrtchyan {President Wikimedia Armenia}
Ana Cravo, Board member, Wikimedia Portugal
Bobbyshabangu (talk) 09:07, 15 March 2019 (UTC) ( On behalf of User:Discott , WMZA)[reply]
Geert Van Pamel (WMBE) (talk) chair Wikimedia Belgium
Beeyan (talk) (WMID)
Felix (talk) (OFWA)
Hogne Neteland chair Wikimedia Norge
Bence Damokos, vice-chair Wikimedia Hungary
Mattias Blomgren (chair Wikimedia Sverige)
Florencia Claes (board member) on behalf of Santiago Navarro, chair of Wikimedia España. Millars (talk) 14:05, 11 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Kayusyussuf (Co-founder WUGN)
Michael David Miller (board member) on behalf of Benoit Rochon, President of Wikimedia Canada. --Benoit Rochon (talk) 21:24, 20 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]
Stanislav Kozlovskiy - executive director of Wikimedia Russia (WMRU).
Finn Årup Nielsen - Wikimedia Danmark Char
Jaakko Pirinen, president of Wikimedia Suomi
User:Arash.pt, Iranian Wikimedians User Group
María Sefidari, chair of Wikimedia Foundation

Agenda

Opening
Notes Affiliate Chairpersons meeting November 24 - 25 2018
Getting to know each other a little better: intro sAPG affiliates (short report on past voting process to also include sAPG funded User groups)
Re-assess the value and purpose of the Affiliate chairpersons meetings
Discussion about the (2019 voting for the) Affiliate Selected Board Seats of the Board of Trustees. See: Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/Resolution_2019
Role(s) of the affiliates in the continued Movement Strategy Process
Other issues
Planning next chair meeting during Wikimania Sweden, discuss necessary actions / preparations
Chairpersons' November 2019 retreat and training in Paris, exchange of ideas
Closing

Notes

Opening

The meeting was opened at 19:20 by Frans Grijzenhout, followed by a brief introduction by every participant.

Notes Affiliate Chairpersons meeting November 24 - 25, 2018

The notes are on Meta. The meeting was appreciated.

Re-assess the value and purpose of the Affiliate chairpersons meetings

This statement is adopted in August 2017 and is available on Meta. Because of the newcomers to this meeting Frans read the statement. Any questions or comments can be sent by e-mail to Frans.

Discussion about the (2019 voting for the) Affiliate-selected Board seats of the Board of Trustees

A short summary of the process for appointing the two Affiliates-selected Board seats was given to the meeting. The new thing is that user groups are now participating in the process. WMF's bylaws were changed in January 2019. The idea is to bring more diversity into the Board. Reminder: the two board positions are not “our” representatives. They are selected and elected by the affiliates and will of course bring their experience and knowledge of affiliates to the Board of Trustees.

The time schedule is very tight and the design of the process itself is not yet finished, see: Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/Resolution_2019. Comments can be given until April 6.

After some discussions and critical notes regarding the process the meeting concluded as follows:

We support the decision of the Board of Trustees to include user groups in the ASBS-election process.
Due to the time pressure there are some flaws in the current process that should be avoided next time. We recommend the process to be evaluated and revised before the next election cycle starts.

Role(s) of the affiliates in the continued Movement Strategy Process

We take our responsibility in this process. Our ED’s and board members are involved in every working group. The affiliate chairs continue their support of the strategy process and looks forward to the results.

Planning next Chairs’ meeting during Wikimania Sweden

Any questions or issues to be prepared? Please share your thoughts by email or on the relevant meta page. The moderator got the task to organize the agenda.

Chairpersons' November 2019 retreat and training in Paris

After the evaluation of the successful retreat in 2018 in Prague we have asked WMF if they can support a new retreat in November 2019 in Paris. Due to the costs of the strategy work and the change of funding they refer to other chapters to fund scholarships.

One solution could be to have larger chapters to pay more, in order to make it possible that affiliates with smaller budgets can also access this retreat. This will not be easy to achieve. We will try to come up with a list of affiliates that can probably support other affiliates. While this could be a solution for this year we still have to find a more sustainable solution for the future.
We therefore still wants to further investigate if we could get funding from WMF. For this it would be necessary to have a strong case to describe what benefits it gives to the movement. Hogne and Josie volunteered to prepare a document.
Another alternative is to organize the retreat in conjunction with the Wikidata meeting in Berlin in October 2019 in order to make more efficient use of funds.