Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Membership grace period
On 09/02/13 20:43, Richard Symonds wrote: No Jess - each individual is due to renew at a different time each year, depending on when they joined. I joined on 5 December, I think: That means that I am due for renewal on 4 December. I will get an email just before that date. Time to change? Match the membership renewals to the accounting year of Wikimedia UK? Gordon ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Membership grace period
Hi Jess, First of Jan is an awkward time of year - people are most likely to get into debt over Xmas so I'd be cautious about trying to harmonise all our renewals at that time of year. If you have a bunch of regular AGM attenders who pay their memberships in cash then it is obviously easiest to get them to pay when they turn up at the AGM, but I doubt that greatly applies to us and I wouldn't recommend 1st Jan for an AGM. There are many disadvantages to having all renewals on the same date. It means you are always signing up new members on the basis of a part year membership at one price followed hopefully by full year memberships; It concentrates all your membership renewal work in one point of the year; and it means there is a particular point in the year when your membership dips which could be awkward for special AGMs etc. If membership revenue was ever a significant part of our income it would also mean that our cashflow was distorted with a spike in our revenue that didn't coincide with a spike in expenditure. By contrast I'm not aware of any advantage to having them all on the same date. So I'd suggest it is better to have them as evenly spread through the year as possible. WSC On 9 February 2013 22:35, Jessica Taylor jessica.s.taylo...@gmail.comwrote: Richard, thanks for that explanation. I may be barking up the wrong tree but I'll jump in anyway. If memberships became due each 1st of January, fundraising/dues collection could be easier. I realize that there would be many logistical hurdles which may moot this suggestion. Is it plausible that WMUK could ask members if they'd be willing to pay both the membership from their next expiration date to the next normal expiration date PLUS their next year's dues for the year of 2014 with the understanding that their membership period will thenceforth be from January to January and will next be due on 1 January 2015. I realize that some members would say, No. Alternatively, could WMUK ask members if they would voluntarily relinquish their leftover membership periods at midnight on the 31 December 2013 AND start their memberships over the next day? Again I realize some members may say, No, because of the lost value of X months of membership. Final alternative, might WMUK ask members if to anonymously gift part-year memberships on behalf of other anonymous members from the date the membership in question expires. For a membership expiring on 5 September 2013, the donor would pay through 31 December 2013. Then the member receiving the gifted dues could pre-pay their membership for the year of 2014 on 5 September when they would have normally paid anyway. If this sort of thing were agreed to by all, I'd be willing to gift a couple of partial year memberships. Just a thought, Jess On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Richard Symonds richard.symo...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: No Jess - each individual is due to renew at a different time each year, depending on when they joined. I joined on 5 December, I think: That means that I am due for renewal on 4 December. I will get an email just before that date. Richard Symonds Wikimedia UK 0207 065 0992 Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). *Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents.* On 9 February 2013 20:27, Jessica Taylor jessica.s.taylo...@gmail.comwrote: I like the idea of updating the pages regarding membership on the WMUK site. Also, I agree multiple reminders are helpful. I think the idea of changing the address so that the renewal isn't automatically fed to an archive folder would be helpful for people like me. Excuse me for not having checked myself, but all membership dues are due at the same time each year, correct? Thanks, Jess On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 12:09 PM, Michael Peel michael.p...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: I think we need to update the pages on the wiki here. http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership/Help is rather out of date (and there's plenty of questions being asked here that could be answered there), http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership/Process could probably do with expanding, and maybe we even need to revise http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Membership/Rules to include things like paying for membership in advance as Tom is pointing out (maximum number of years, etc.), and some others (e.g. if you renew part-way through the grace period, do you get 12 months from then, or 12 months from the anniversary of your joining date - that's currently a bit ambiguous). Thanks,
Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Membership grace period
I'd agree with Wierspiel. Most large member organizations have natural anniversaries, to give the membership department something to do all year. If you have one renewal date you only find out once a year if people stop renewing, which makes it much harder to try do something about it. You also get the income all in one lump. January is also the run-up to the year-end, the whole period Jan to mid-March is not a time to schedule extra work, as the year-end audit already increase the office workload. I think you naturally discourage people from joining mid-year, unless you get into some complicated pro-rata fee for the first year. Altogether it creates more problems than you solve. But I'd emphasize again the importance of letting people know when their renewal date is, and trying to get as many as possible onto direct debits. John On 10/02/2013 11:53, wikimediauk-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org wrote: Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Membership grace period Message-ID: caaanwp2nwa8ggvjved891jpwze+xvzcgkytksz6dnghelix...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Hi Jess, First of Jan is an awkward time of year - people are most likely to get into debt over Xmas so I'd be cautious about trying to harmonise all our renewals at that time of year. If you have a bunch of regular AGM attenders who pay their memberships in cash then it is obviously easiest to get them to pay when they turn up at the AGM, but I doubt that greatly applies to us and I wouldn't recommend 1st Jan for an AGM. There are many disadvantages to having all renewals on the same date. It means you are always signing up new members on the basis of a part year membership at one price followed hopefully by full year memberships; It concentrates all your membership renewal work in one point of the year; and it means there is a particular point in the year when your membership dips which could be awkward for special AGMs etc. If membership revenue was ever a significant part of our income it would also mean that our cashflow was distorted with a spike in our revenue that didn't coincide with a spike in expenditure. By contrast I'm not aware of any advantage to having them all on the same date. So I'd suggest it is better to have them as evenly spread through the year as possible. WSC On 9 February 2013 22:35, Jessica Taylorjessica.s.taylo...@gmail.comwrote: Richard, thanks for that explanation. I may be barking up the wrong tree but I'll jump in anyway. If memberships became due each 1st of January, fundraising/dues collection could be easier. I realize that there would be many logistical hurdles which may moot this suggestion. Is it plausible that WMUK could ask members if they'd be willing to pay both the membership from their next expiration date to the next normal expiration date PLUS their next year's dues for the year of 2014 with the understanding that their membership period will thenceforth be from January to January and will next be due on 1 January 2015. I realize that some members would say, No. Alternatively, could WMUK ask members if they would voluntarily relinquish their leftover membership periods at midnight on the 31 December 2013 AND start their memberships over the next day? Again I realize some members may say, No, because of the lost value of X months of membership. Final alternative, might WMUK ask members if to anonymously gift part-year memberships on behalf of other anonymous members ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
Re: [Wikimediauk-l] QRpedia
@Joe, you are ahead of me. Wikidata is a great opportunity to improve the successful hit rate when we don't have a translation in icelandic or whatever. We may not have an article on that Finnish politician but we may well be able to tell you wikidata stuff that would tell you when she was born and died. I think I would like that as a good and quick guide to who she was. @Tom - The privacy thing is an optimisation but as you say its a finesse to the security which ha/Davids been 3rd party assessed as good. And I thank you Tom particularly as you have been helping the project since its inception. :@Andy - Attribution? Well of course although though I see in other conversations elsewhere that you should want to hide that you were backing a idea in good faith and assuming that if people said it would be made freely available then they meant it. Thanks very much @Jennifer - can I buy you a beer? Its so nice to see someone who just likes good news. I would like to thank all the people who have created the thousands of new articles and welcomed the new users and editors we have found. It rightly belongs to the community. Roger On 9 February 2013 23:52, Joe Filceolaire filceola...@gmail.com wrote: If we are looking at refactoring code then we should look at eventually moving to wikidata for language links. Joe On Feb 9, 2013 10:39 PM, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: On Saturday, 9 February 2013 at 20:08, Andy Mabbett wrote: On 9 February 2013 18:39, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org (mailto: t...@tommorris.org) wrote: Now this has been transferred to Wikimedia UK, would it be possible to remove the access logging on QRpedia to ensure it complies with both the letter and spirit of the WMF privacy policy. Is it possible to do that and retain the aggregated, anonymised statistics which GLAM institutions and others deploying QRpedia find useful? These may be analogous to Wikipedias page view stats. That seems highly reasonable. The current issue is that the QRpedia database has a complete log of which IPs looked up which pages and when. (Which is fine, I'm not blaming Roger or Terence. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do with something you are starting. This isn't a security hole or a privacy intrusion, it's a standard thing anyone would do when building a project like this. But now it has reached a point of maturity and is being taken under the wing of WMUK, we need to ensure that it is compliant with the expectations of Wikimedia users.) We need to anonymise the access data, aggregate it and then delete the non-anonymised, non-aggregated data. I'm happy to fling code around and figure out a way to do this. I've had a look at the existing code and it's easy enough to understand. We could probably do with refactoring some of the code too. I'd suggest that it would be best for WMUK to adhere completely with the Foundation's privacy policy (mentally substitute chapter and WMUK in the relevant places) even if the chapter is not formally bound by the Foundation policy (I'm not a movement policy wonk, I don't know). In addition, not holding on to access logs but only aggregate, anonymised data means that we minimise the potential for problems under the Data Protection Act or wider European data privacy law. I'd suggest that we resolve these issues as soon as possible. The QRpedia transfer was rather a slow process, it'd be nice if now that the transfer has been agreed, we can make sure that we resolve these kinds of issues in the next week or so (I rather prefer fixing issues when they exist only in my head rather than when people are shouting like maniacs). As I said, I'm happy to provide patches and code review in the next few days. WMUK staff/trustees: are there any plans for transferring the source code over to Wikimedia infrastructure (Gerrit etc.)? -- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/ ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org -- Roger Bamkin QRpedia.org +44 1332 702993 ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
Re: [Wikimediauk-l] QRpedia
On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 11:38 PM, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: On Saturday, 9 February 2013 at 20:08, Andy Mabbett wrote: On 9 February 2013 18:39, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org (mailto:t...@tommorris.org) wrote: Now this has been transferred to Wikimedia UK, would it be possible to remove the access logging on QRpedia to ensure it complies with both the letter and spirit of the WMF privacy policy. Is it possible to do that and retain the aggregated, anonymised statistics which GLAM institutions and others deploying QRpedia find useful? These may be analogous to Wikipedias page view stats. That seems highly reasonable. The current issue is that the QRpedia database has a complete log of which IPs looked up which pages and when. (Which is fine, I'm not blaming Roger or Terence. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do with something you are starting. This isn't a security hole or a privacy intrusion, it's a standard thing anyone would do when building a project like this. But now it has reached a point of maturity and is being taken under the wing of WMUK, we need to ensure that it is compliant with the expectations of Wikimedia users.) We need to anonymise the access data, aggregate it and then delete the non-anonymised, non-aggregated data. I'm happy to fling code around and figure out a way to do this. I've had a look at the existing code and it's easy enough to understand. We could probably do with refactoring some of the code too. I'd suggest that it would be best for WMUK to adhere completely with the Foundation's privacy policy (mentally substitute chapter and WMUK in the relevant places) even if the chapter is not formally bound by the Foundation policy (I'm not a movement policy wonk, I don't know). In addition, not holding on to access logs but only aggregate, anonymised data means that we minimise the potential for problems under the Data Protection Act or wider European data privacy law. ... that we resolve these kinds of issues in the next week or so (I rather prefer fixing issues when they exist only in my head rather than when people are shouting like maniacs). As I said, I'm happy to provide patches and code review in the next few days. i'd highly appreciate this, many thanks tom! and thanks as well for reminding about policies, i suggested a task in the chapters association s task list to make clear(er) in the important policies if they should apply for the movement, and not only for the wmf: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Tasks rupert. ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Membership grace period
Thanks, WSC and John, Now I see the advantages of spacing out membership renewals. Every other organization I'm part of uses 1 January. Instead of prorating for mid-year members they make them pay a full-year. I admit to timing my joining to the first half of the year for that reason. Having been part of dues collection for a small charity, I agree the collection period is a pain. This is obviously something WMUK has deliberated on and come to the most useful conclusion about. Thanks all, Jess On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 6:26 AM, John Byrne j...@bodkinprints.co.uk wrote: I'd agree with Wierspiel. Most large member organizations have natural anniversaries, to give the membership department something to do all year. If you have one renewal date you only find out once a year if people stop renewing, which makes it much harder to try do something about it. You also get the income all in one lump. January is also the run-up to the year-end, the whole period Jan to mid-March is not a time to schedule extra work, as the year-end audit already increase the office workload. I think you naturally discourage people from joining mid-year, unless you get into some complicated pro-rata fee for the first year. Altogether it creates more problems than you solve. But I'd emphasize again the importance of letting people know when their renewal date is, and trying to get as many as possible onto direct debits. John On 10/02/2013 11:53, wikimediauk-l-request@lists.**wikimedia.orgwikimediauk-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.orgwrote: Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Membership grace period Message-ID: CAAanWP2nWa8ggVJvEd891JpwzE+**xVZcgkYTksZ6dNgheLiXWaA@mail.** gmail.comcaaanwp2nwa8ggvjved891jpwze%2bxvzcgkytksz6dnghelix...@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Hi Jess, First of Jan is an awkward time of year - people are most likely to get into debt over Xmas so I'd be cautious about trying to harmonise all our renewals at that time of year. If you have a bunch of regular AGM attenders who pay their memberships in cash then it is obviously easiest to get them to pay when they turn up at the AGM, but I doubt that greatly applies to us and I wouldn't recommend 1st Jan for an AGM. There are many disadvantages to having all renewals on the same date. It means you are always signing up new members on the basis of a part year membership at one price followed hopefully by full year memberships; It concentrates all your membership renewal work in one point of the year; and it means there is a particular point in the year when your membership dips which could be awkward for special AGMs etc. If membership revenue was ever a significant part of our income it would also mean that our cashflow was distorted with a spike in our revenue that didn't coincide with a spike in expenditure. By contrast I'm not aware of any advantage to having them all on the same date. So I'd suggest it is better to have them as evenly spread through the year as possible. WSC On 9 February 2013 22:35, Jessica Taylorjessica.s.taylor71@**gmail.comjessica.s.taylo...@gmail.com wrote: Richard, thanks for that explanation. I may be barking up the wrong tree but I'll jump in anyway. If memberships became due each 1st of January, fundraising/dues collection could be easier. I realize that there would be many logistical hurdles which may moot this suggestion. Is it plausible that WMUK could ask members if they'd be willing to pay both the membership from their next expiration date to the next normal expiration date PLUS their next year's dues for the year of 2014 with the understanding that their membership period will thenceforth be from January to January and will next be due on 1 January 2015. I realize that some members would say, No. Alternatively, could WMUK ask members if they would voluntarily relinquish their leftover membership periods at midnight on the 31 December 2013 AND start their memberships over the next day? Again I realize some members may say, No, because of the lost value of X months of membership. Final alternative, might WMUK ask members if to anonymously gift part-year memberships on behalf of other anonymous members __**_ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-lhttp://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
Re: [Wikimediauk-l] QRpedia
@ Roger, I do like good news and beer. For beer you can call me Jennifer. Jess On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 7:43 AM, rupert THURNER rupert.thur...@gmail.comwrote: On Sat, Feb 9, 2013 at 11:38 PM, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org wrote: On Saturday, 9 February 2013 at 20:08, Andy Mabbett wrote: On 9 February 2013 18:39, Tom Morris t...@tommorris.org (mailto: t...@tommorris.org) wrote: Now this has been transferred to Wikimedia UK, would it be possible to remove the access logging on QRpedia to ensure it complies with both the letter and spirit of the WMF privacy policy. Is it possible to do that and retain the aggregated, anonymised statistics which GLAM institutions and others deploying QRpedia find useful? These may be analogous to Wikipedias page view stats. That seems highly reasonable. The current issue is that the QRpedia database has a complete log of which IPs looked up which pages and when. (Which is fine, I'm not blaming Roger or Terence. That's a perfectly reasonable thing to do with something you are starting. This isn't a security hole or a privacy intrusion, it's a standard thing anyone would do when building a project like this. But now it has reached a point of maturity and is being taken under the wing of WMUK, we need to ensure that it is compliant with the expectations of Wikimedia users.) We need to anonymise the access data, aggregate it and then delete the non-anonymised, non-aggregated data. I'm happy to fling code around and figure out a way to do this. I've had a look at the existing code and it's easy enough to understand. We could probably do with refactoring some of the code too. I'd suggest that it would be best for WMUK to adhere completely with the Foundation's privacy policy (mentally substitute chapter and WMUK in the relevant places) even if the chapter is not formally bound by the Foundation policy (I'm not a movement policy wonk, I don't know). In addition, not holding on to access logs but only aggregate, anonymised data means that we minimise the potential for problems under the Data Protection Act or wider European data privacy law. ... that we resolve these kinds of issues in the next week or so (I rather prefer fixing issues when they exist only in my head rather than when people are shouting like maniacs). As I said, I'm happy to provide patches and code review in the next few days. i'd highly appreciate this, many thanks tom! and thanks as well for reminding about policies, i suggested a task in the chapters association s task list to make clear(er) in the important policies if they should apply for the movement, and not only for the wmf: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Chapters_Association/Tasks rupert. ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
