[Wikimedia-Canada] Update on progress: addressing concerns of failure to communicate

[Alan Walker]

I think there may be some confusion regarding the activities of the steering
committee versus those of the community as a whole.  The steering committee
came together to achieve one purpose: starting Wikimedia Canada.  The first
step in that process is to fulfill the legal requirements of the Canadian
Government.  James and I did our best to collect a group of people to meet
the minimum requirements to get that ball rolling.  We have now made a major
step, the paperwork is filed with the Canadian government.  When we realized
we had a document ready for signatures, we posted that update on the Meta
site.

At this stage nothing has been approved by the Canadian Government.
Approval make take several months and in fact may take several attempts on
getting the correct language prepared for approval.  During this phase
public consultation is not necessary as this is a legal formality as much of
the work had already be done.  As we have focused our efforts on completing
this step, we have not invested any time in organizing anything else.
Please be aware that this step has been attempted before and has failed.
The previous group invested a great deal of time in soliciting community
opinion and drafting a rough set of bylaws which has proven invaluable this
time around.  Fortunately, we were able to salvage much of the work done by
the first steering committee and avoided some of the pitfalls that were
encountered.

Having said that, if anyone on this mailing list has any ideas about goals
for this group, please feel free to write them down and share them with the
rest of us.  We will require people to step up and make a time commitment
should they wish to take on a leadership role.  There are plenty of ideas
floating around; what we lack are volunteers to coordinate and organize
them.  Please do not let the activities of the steering committee dissuade
anyone on this list from presenting ideas and discussing them amongst
yourselves.  Most importantly, if anyone is interested in helping us
organize the volunteers, we could really use your help.  Everyone here is a
volunteer and we all have limits as to how much time we can give to the
project.


Respectfully,


Alan Walker
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