2006/9/26, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>: This is one of the reasons, but there are many others. For example, for us the main reason to create a chapter was to have a bank account which is usefull for organising meetings. You can for example pay for a lecture theatre or book a hotel rooms in advance. The second reason was to have a some sort of quasi-formal representation of Wikipedia community in Poland, with whom journalists and goverment officials may speak. -- Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.poli.toya.net.pl http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html

On 9/26/06, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Yes, this, though, lies in the hands of the chapters. It is a matter of them getting organized and sharing, just like Philipp or Frank did, with the rest of the community, what they do when they do it. The channel #wikimedia-chapters is open to anyone who feels like dropping by and members of the chapters committee are there to answer questions. The experience of the chapters committee proves that there definitely is a lack of communication about what the chapters committee does, and how. Lukasz has addressed those points and given a few potential answers. This should be reinforced and we might want to find a way to make sure that all projects know "about" the chapters committee, but this goes par with a better communication about what the Foundation does, what it is, and how one can get involved. On your idea of advertising chapters on site notices, I will state that I am not sure it is the way to go at all. Chapters must answer the need of a geographical community to get together for reasons that make sense, as Tomasz stated, they should never be the "cool thing to do of the day". I remember Austin spending hours in the channel trying to make understand to one user that creating a chapter was not a one-shot thing, but rather the result of a concertation between people in a country who wished to offer a local face to potential partners, to the press if need be, to political instances etc. This kind of communication should be emphasized, and we should not be giving the wrong impression that chapters are either easy to set up, nor the answer to everyone's questions. All of us have helped people reflect in one country or another about what it was to be a chapter. Many people have started reflecting and gave up, for reasons that were in no way tied either to the Chapters committee or the Foundation. In the end, I believe that we go back to the same old thing, better advertising of what a chapter is, what they do, how they do it, what their relationship to the Foundation AND the projects is, is the first thing to tackle. Having to deal with 100 chapters-to-be that do not know the first thing about this is in my opinion a waste of everybody's time. Delphine -- ~notafish