Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Österreich/July 2011

New Treasurer

Since 1st of July we have a new treasurer, Reiner Strubert. He is an IT professional with work experience as financial controller. After the resignation of Tilman Keskinöz he has been appointed as a new treasurer by the board. Reiner is a new member and have not been on the board before. He has been selected from several candidates because of his professional skills in this field and his will to support Wikimedia Österreich as a volunteer in this position.

We thank him very much for his support. But we don't want to forget about Tilman who served as the treasurer of Wikimedia Österreich for three years, since the establishment of the chapter. When he started he had very little ressources and help us building the chapter and the structures needed for it.

CiviCRM

Holger from Wikimedia Sweden visited Manuel to setup CiviCRM for Wikimedia Österreich. Holger has developed several modules to collect donations, handle online membership applications, a MediaWiki parser in Drupal, Reports and Bookkeeping.

During the Fundraising Summit in Vienna he showed the system to Manuel and it was clear that it was very useful for Wikimedia Österreich. Many things would be automated and having an online bookkeeping system - even integrated with the donation platform is exactly what was needed. These modules from Wikimedia Sweden are also very useful for other chapters. Therefore the Wikimedia Foundation provided Holger with access to the Subversion server so he could upload his code there:

• http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/wikimedia/branches/wmse_civicrm/

Wikimedia Österreich paid for travel costs for Holger to fly from Stockholm to Basel and stay a weekend as Manuel's home to hack up the code. They ported the code to Drupal 7 and CiviCRM 4 and rewrote parts of it, made it more modular and added submodules to support more payment providers.

The current codebase consists of several modules:

• wmse_base: some base functionality used by several modules, a few settings algorithms
• wmse_donate: a donation form that registers a donation in CiviCRM and calls a payment submodule. The donation form can be enhance automatically by the payment submodule. Existing payment modules are:
  • bank transfer: just registers a donor and his donation and shows the bank details for a manual transfer by the donor
  • direct debit: registers a donation and bank details of a donor so it can be collected later
  • payson: online payment provider similar to Paypal, very common in Sweden
• wmse_mediawikiparser: a modules that provides a new content type in Drupal, MediaWiki Syntax. The wikicode will be piped through a MediaWiki instance via the API. The API can set up individually, that way by using template syntax even contents from the MediaWiki instance can be transcluded into Drupal, including images which might also be transcluded from Commons or Wikipedia by the wiki.
• wmse_membership: provides a form to sign up for memberships. It also registers the membership payment on the spot and forwards the new member to the payment provider, using the same payment submodules as wmse_donate. With a special, personalised link it can also be used to renew memberships.
• wmse_potd: includes the Picture of the Day of a given Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons.

The modules are not completely ready yet, a second weekend will be needed to finish up.

LinuxDay

We heard about LinuxDay in Dornbirn, organised by Linux Usergroup Vorarlberg.

Manuel knows the group as he was invited to their Linux Kongress in 2004 as a speaker. Wikimedia Österreich does not have members in this area and the LinuxDay is a well-established event, known throughout Europe. Even though the Linux comminity is not exactly the target group of Wikimedia, the communities are partly overlapping. Therefore it seems helpful to use such an event to built up a community base, especially in this geographic region. As a booth is for free the costs are not high and Manuel offered to go there, just with a small table, a notebook, some give-aways (Wikimedia Österreich has lanyards, stickers, t-shirts) and the big roll-up displays and look for people to talk to, discuss Wikipedia and the Wikimedia mission and hopefully get some new members. It is also important that Wikimedia Österreich is known to the general public.

The organisers of LinuxDay where were happy to receive our application for a booth and already approved it on the spot.

The LinuxDay 2011 will be on November 26th at the Higher Technical Institute (technical college) of Dornbirn.

• http://www.linuxday.at/

Wiki Loves Monuments

first steps to the contest in september

• very constructive meeting with the Bundesdenkmalamt ("federal office for monuments")
  • fixed 2 meetings in August (one for technical stuff and one for the contest)
  • we will cooperate for WLM support and prizes
  • we will get unique ID so changes (new Monuments etc.) will be easier to find
• lists, about 50% are ready for WLM
• planning website and flyer for Austria