Affiliations Committee/Resolutions/2012 Budget requests

Taiwan

Be it resolved that Jeromy Yu Chan is given travel expenses reimbursement from the Committee's budget to the amount of 343 USD (2568 HKD and 300 TWD) (or its equivalent in a different currency) to attend a community meeting in Taiwan.

Passed under the expedited procedure with support from the Chair and Treasurer on 12 October 2012. Forwarded to WMF on 13 October 2012. –Bdamokos (talk) 12:59, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

A full report of the travel was shared internally and with Wikimedia Taiwan.

Belgium

Resolved with the chair and treasurer concurring to fund Lodewijk's trip to Brussels with an estimated cost of $190 USD. –Bdamokos (talk) 11:55, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

Public report

The ceremony I visited was held at the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (Koninklijk Instituut voor Kunstpatrimonium / Institut Royal pour la patrimoine des artes), KIKIRPA. This is a federal institution that carries warm feelings for our mission, volunteer base and the monument photo competition in special.

Once it became clear that there would be more attendees interested, it was organized that KIKIRPA would provide a meeting room and facilities so that we could have an actual meeting of some hours. Including myself, 7 people were present at the meeting. At the ceremony later, some 30 people were present. Given that this meeting was organized at day time on a week day, given the interest on-wiki and at the ceremony, I believe they will not have much trouble with getting 20-25 members once they open formal registration after founding.

First some legal stuff was discussed. It became clear to me that the Belgian legal system is quite complicated, and some hoops are quite unfortunate. I will not bore you with the details, but to give an example: the law requires the bylaws to be published in the Moniteur/Staatsblad (the paper that also contains laws etc). However, this Moniteur only allows publications in French or Dutch – which forces them to choose one (and excluding a significant part of their members from understanding the official version), instead of using English.

We had a good discussion about languages and how that would work out in the day to day business, and they seem to have an idea how to manage that. They set up a timeline for how to get a good set of bylaws and the first step in the process will be to collect more information on some open questions, contact some people with experience who can help them etc. They agreed some action points here. They plan to submit a first draft to the Committee by mid February, asking to give some initial feedback, which they can discuss together with their own open questions at a meeting at the end of Feb. After that meeting, they intend to submit a final set of bylaws.

After talking for some hours on legal, we discussed some initial projects. As you know, they organized a local Wiki Loves Monuments contest twice and although the organization is quite narrow and chaotic, they did get quite nice results and motivation. Antoine is already running collaborations with museums and archives in Mons/Bergen and some more ideas have sparked when I presented the slides which I presented on Wikimania about the 'cool projects' which offered a good inspiration.

(Treasurers' note: Final total expenses were 80.30 euros (105.142 USD))