On 4/17/07, gerald lists geraldablists@gmail.com wrote:
Hopefully we now have all 10 people on board the list, as well as some from before.
Welcome, all.
The next steps are contact with legal entities (lawyer(s)?) to find out
what needs to be done to get this happening from a legal viewpoint. I want to get some guesstimates about the cost of the process, so we can start to pencil together a budget for this process.
Ok, I've contacted one law firm on this, and their "ballpark" figure was about $1000. So, to be safe, let's guess this is $1,200. I will contact a few other firms, to make sure this is a reasonable guess.
None of them would do it pro-bono? Wikimedia has a pro-bono PR firm, that does it just so they can add us to their client list. (Frankly, the firm's done diddly-squat as far as I know, but...) It's quite possible if you dazzle some of the firms with the 10th most visited website, 3000 page views per second stat, they'll be so awestruck they'll agree.
('cause free is almost always good.)
We should also think about a couple of "vision" points ... what Wikimedia
Canada wants to do, what we want to achieve. There are already a number of great ideas on Meta about this, and I have some too.
One vision point which has already been discussed is community benefit. After all, the WMF's goal is to bring knowledge to the masses for free. And that is pretty special.
Now we have to draw up a bit of a timetable, and plan what has to happen when. All initial 10 people I approached have a flexible commitment to moving this forward, but we should start soliciting for people who may want to be on the board. The board isn't going to be that much work -- I guess a few e-mails and possibly a conference call in a month. If you can spare an hour, or know someone who can commit to that in a month, I think that should be great for now.
From reading the various bits, it seems like the best way to pursue this is as a Federal non profit. We have to make sure that makes us nonprofit in all Canadian jurisdictions.
Definitely, it should definitely be legally national.
Here is what has been started, so far: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Canada/Incorporation
Let's see if we can come up with the needed bylaws. I will be looking for some examples, if anyone has some references feel free to add them.
We might be able to get Wikimedia UK's bylaws as reference. Otherwise, all the other chapters aren't English.
Thanks, Gerald.
Good stuff. Nick