Charles Matthews Appointed Office Manager

We are happy to announce that we have appointed Charles Matthews as an interim Office Manager, to provide the chapter with administrative support and in particular with the annual fundraiser.

He writes:

I’ve been asked to introduce myself, on my appointment as Wikimedia UK’s part-time Office Manager. Of course, there is no small sparsely-furnished room in which I sit, waiting for the phone to ring, and wondering quite what it is that I’m supposed to be managing. There are no office premises, but there are some back-office functions required for the smooth functioning of the chapter, and I’m being brought in to handle them.

I won’t dwell on biography, any more than on details of admin, but I have been an academic and author, parent and househusband, volunteer and Wikipedia editor under my real name since 2003, living in Cambridge. Wikipedia was not in fact my first wiki, nor my last, since I’m now very active on Wikisource. Just a couple of weeks ago I set up Wikipedia:WikiProject Dictionary of National Biography, unusual because it is “twinned” with a matching sister project on Wikisource.

I’m also going to be involved in communications for the chapter, which means dealing with some of the enquiries it gets from the outside world, press work, and publications. I’m adding time among the chapter’s metaphorical filing cabinets to time in front of the laptop, but this all will be public-facing, as they say these days. Let me just tell here the story of how the meetups in Cambridge got started. It was a bad hair day for Virgin Media, and I couldn’t get online at home. I walked round to the local cybercafé, where User:Dsp13 was sitting having a cup of something. He recognized me from the photo on my Wikipedia user page, and we got talking.

We all benefit, as UK Wikimedians, when we recognize each other a little better.