Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Österreich/February 2011

Scholarships for Photoworkshop in Nuremberg

We received an inquiry from one of our members if we would pay for travel costs for members who participate in the Photoworkshop. The Photoworkshop is a successful tradition among German Wikipedians to teach themselves how to take better photographs, exchange information on new cameras or bring together special equipment in so everyone can make use of it. For the eighth time this workshop takes place. As this is a successful event and Wikimedia Deutschland is providing funds for German Wikipedians who want to participate it was a simple decision for us to support that on request from the community as well. Additionally we made our offer public to allow others to join in.

Important for us was that we reached a consensus within the board is we are not yet sure how much of our yearly budget we want to or should invest into events and travel expenses.

Wikimania Scholarships enhanced to Slovakia

One of our members was in touch with Wikipedians from Slovakia. To support the local community which does not have its own Wikimedia chapter so far, we have been asked if Wikimedia Österreich would be willing to provide Wikimania scholarships for Sloval Wikimedians as well.

The board decided to give up to four scholarhips for Slovak Wikimedians.

Fundraising Report

We raised about 66.000 EUR with the fundraiser between November 2010 and January 2011. This means that 50% - 33.000 EUR - will make the budget of Wikimedia Österreich for 2011.

Chapters Agreement

We received a new chapters agreement to be signed until the end of February. Until now Wikimedia Österreich didn't have any chapters agreement, there was only the formal recognition as Wikimedia chapter by the Wikimedia Foundation board.

We presented the chapters agreement to the members and invited them to discuss it on our mailinglist. One member put all the text into our members wiki to allow comments directly under each paragraph. Four members engaged in commenting the text, mostly in a positive way. The only possible issue was item 4.3 - "Where necessary to disambiguate, a logo depicting the name of the Chapter (localized logo)may be used. Any such logo must be approved in advance by the Foundation.". This would mean that the Wikimedia Österreich logo which has already been used for three years needs to get an approval. That shouldn't be a problem, though, as the logo was created by Wikimedia Foundation staff and published on Wikimedia Commons, a discussion with Moushira El-Amrawy from the Wikimedia Foundation came to the same result. Anyway, she will take care so Wikimedia Österreich receives a formal approval for its logo.

10th Anniversary of German Wikipedia

We are aiming towards an event on March 15th, the 10th anniversary of the german Wikipedia. Café Landtmann in Vienna, a very famous location for press conferences and political meetings, will provide us with a room.

The event will start at 15:00 with a get-together, from 16:00 to 19:00 there will be a few talks on different topics. Keynote will be given by Peter Pfläging, Head of IT of the municipality of Vienna. At 19:00 there will be a big birthday cake for everyone.

Currently we are arranging the talks and design additional marketing material. We decided to use that opportunity to buy two rollup displays with Wikimedia and Wikipedia logo, get some more stickers, laneyards and t-shirts to hand out for free during the event.

Administrative Work / Challenges

We are still working on fixing the accounting situation. The fundraiser has put the current accounting system under big pressure. Several solutions are being considered at the moment, getting a better software that can handle real accounting with accounts and budgets and can hook up with the bank account is one option. A challenge is the fact that several people currently make payments and do the accounting from different places. An alternative is to outsource the accounting completely.