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