Dear colleagues, collaborators and friends of free knowledge, After three eventful years I left the board of Wikimedia Nederland; yesterday was the General Assembly in Utrecht. This means a 'goodbye'.
In this time, I had the privilege and pleasure to work with many great people in many different organisations. We saw a lot of small steps and some bigger ones directed to our common goal, the support of free knowledge. Certainly, not everything we as a movement or parts of the movement was achieved, though. Between many WMNL members and me, there were two grades of separation: coming from the humanities, my geekiness differs a little from the average Wikipedianess; having the German Wikipedia as my home wiki, I was never a very active or 'true' part of the Dutch editing community. And when I quoted in my speeches from medieval quests or Prussian literary realism, I received therefore some strange looks from some members. But I remain firmly convinced that good governance and respect have no nationality. Indeed, stroopwafels do have, and so I adopted the Dutch custom to bring them with me to Wikimedian meetings abroad. Wikimedia Nederland has experienced and overcome a difficult period of transition. Office space and employees, more members including more members without Wikipedia background, more activities, more money, more responsibility; more need for an association to mature and focus on what is necessary (and not always easy, cool or fun). We achieved that as a collective, slower than previously expected, but with the appropriate pride and good feelings about the future. Goodbye - and Hello: I am looking forward to see many of you again at whatever wiki, chat or real life meeting. Kind regards Ziko https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Nederland -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Ziko van Dijk Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland Postbus 167 3500 AD Utrecht http://wikimedia.nl -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
