A great Dutch chapter meeting

Yesterday I was at a Dutch chapter members meeting. It was fun, the board informed about the things that happened in the last year and explained about the things projected for the next year.

In my opinion it was a great meeting. The board was open in the choices it faced and explained about what made projects possible. The Wiki loves art/NL project for instance was possible because one of the partners in the project, had two people available during business hours to call museums or be available for calls. The yearly conference did not happen because much of the energy had gone in preparing for the Wikimania bid.

It was made quite clear that depending on what resources are available, things happen. People do volunteer, but there is only so much that you can ask. The question then became who and what do we do it for; is it for the "community" or is it for the Wikimedia movement. Also how do we do it, would it help when the Dutch chapter had an office or shared an office with other NGO's

One of the brilliant conversations was about the Polygoon news reels. They are now all available under a CC-by-sa license and a subset can be found on Commons. Multichill indicated that he could put them all on line. Then the questions started to flood.. Is there sufficient room on the servers. Can we subtitle them. Would it be possible for a search engine to look at the subtitles to find likely interesting fragments. How do I include video from Commons on my blog?

This is all happening because of the importance given to the Wikimedia movement. Making things possible, the art of choosing opportunities is what provides the community with new information, new material to integrate in our projects, giving relevance of our projects to new people, all this is how the Dutch chapter aims to bring people together in our movement, our community.

I am really happy with how the Dutch chapter is evolving, and I thank all the people who make this possible.
Thanks,
      GerardM