Ten days left to apply for Chapcom membership

The Chapters Committee is looking to fill five places and is looking for candidates who are able and willing to help groups of Wikimedians self-organize around the world. See the call here.

A year in ChapCom

It was a busy year in the Chapters Committee, the body that is entrusted with guiding groups of enthusiastic Wikimedia volunteers towards greater offline activity. This is usually in the form of forming a local Wikimedia Chapter, but given the technical and bureaucratic difficulties that this may entail, it often takes the form of recommending local activities without a formal legal structure taking advantage of the Wikimedia trademarks policy and grants programme.

Chapters approved in 2011 (dark blue), and those on their way towards chapterhood in 2012 (greenish shade of blue). Germany has become a lake by accident.

Once a group decides to form a chapter, it is the dual duty of the Committee – composed of a group of volunteers with experience in international relations, running chapters and other non-profits and good intercultural skills – to give advice and guide the group through the steps of creating a well-functioning legal association and making sure that the resulting entity conforms to the requirements of official Wikimedia chapterhood.

In 2011 ChapCom finalised 10 chapter applications from 4 continents: from the northern tip of the World in Canada all the way south to Cape Horn (in Chile) and as far east as the 93rd meridian. This makes it the second busiest year for the Committee (after 2008); however, we will not be bored in 2012 either. If the world doesn't end, the Committee will process applications from Brazil, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Slovakia and most likely Croatia (and we are only in January; hopefully, many more communities will approach us over the year).

2012 will also be the year, when anyone can apply to be part of the group that helps new groups around the world in forming chapters (or other affiliated orgs). If you wonder what kind of person we are looking for, see the call from 2010, and please sign up to be notified of the 2012 call!

Wikimedia Chapters Planet

So I have created my first real website, Wikimedia Chapters Planet, a blog aggregator that collects blog posts and reports from the Wikimedia Chapters and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Setting it up was surprisingly easy thanks to the free Planet software (only a small hack was needed to get it to run). The question on how to update it was a bit of a dilemma as it is not trivial to run the Python Planet scripts on the free hosting I had (and I didn't want to spend too much on updated hosting), but I solved it by simply running all the scripts on my PC and having a .bat file do the uploading every hour or so.
The translation part, which is crucial in making the site useful, was sheer luck, as although Google closed its Translation API, it is still available as a free gadget for websites, and it can handle multiple languages in the same page (something, Google Chrome's built in  service can't).

All that was left is to gather the blogs and flip the switch. Currently, I collect blog posts from 19 and reports from eight  chapters(out of 35) plus the Wikimedia Foundation. Hopefully, more chapters will join the list and we can all see the many things that are happening around the world.

Wikimedia Estonia

I’ve met Ivo, a university student of about my age in last October to discuss the possibilities and benefits of setting up a Wikimedia chapter in Estonia.

At the time he has just finished giving a lecture on how to use Wikipedia in the Tartu local library and I was confident that if he could get a couple of more people that share his enthusiasm, they could achieve a lot for free culture in Estonia.

Fast forward to the present, and Wikimedia Eesti has been established and approved by the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation as an official chapter.

This past year has not been spent in vain; however, as a couple of projects, like an image gathering drive and an article writing contest have been started on the Estonian Wikipedia  and from what I gather from their recent grant request, a project involving Estonian schools is well in preparation, as well.

Please join me in welcoming Wikimedia Eesti to the network of Wikimedia chapters and wish them luck for their first projects.