So how many people does it take to meet with accountants and lawyers?  I admittedly don't have much experience talking to these professionals, but I don't imagine that we would want to cram an entire steering committee into someone's office to ask questions and sign papers.  Even if we did hold in-person meetings, I imagine that only a couple people would be assigned to "talk to the banker" duty anyway, so I still don't see why those on banker duty have to be in the same city as the rest of the committee.

In any case, I'm starting to think that we are going about this in the wrong order and that maybe we should be organizing something real as we organize the bylaws.  If we start planning our first project before we incorporate, we'll attract the people who want to work on WMC but have no interest in the legal side.  It will give us a better understanding of how to organize our application for non-profit status since we'll know exactly what we're doing.  It shouldn't be too hard nor cost too much to set up a wiki to act as the draft for a Canadian wikisource.  Once that is set up, we'll have a lot more people discussing matters there, and we can use it's policies to be as specific as we need to be on the not-for profit application.

-Jeffery Nichols (Arctic.gnome)



On 14-Jul-09, at 12:04 PM, Alan Walker wrote:

There is value in having in person meetings.  It gives credibility to the group for one thing.  I know when I discussed starting this chapter with other groups that had completed the process it was indicated to me that in person meetings were a critical step.  I appreciate your ambition here, but it seems this project has been ongoing for many years and always gets caught up at the same stage.  At some point the steering committee will need to meet with a bank, a lawyer, accountant, etc.  To think one person in some distant city will conduct these meetings on their own and report back on a talk page seems a bit amateur to me.

2009/7/14 Jeffery Nichols <arctic.gnome@gmail.com>
Changing to in-person meetings would mean cutting a lot of people out of the process; all three of the people putting the most work into the bylaws live in different places, so 2/3 of them would be abandoned.  What tasks of the steering committee cannot be done in online meetings and talk page discussions?  The bylaws have made it this far without in-person meetings.  In fact, the talk page has the advantage of being able to show examples of ideas by coping, pasting, and editing text from the bylaws right in the discussion.  I don't see any advantage of an in-person meeting that would be good enough to abandon more than half of our members.
-Jeffery Nichols (Arctic.gnome)


On 14-Jul-09, at 6:50 AM, Alan Walker wrote:

I understand that there will be members who live in different areas of the country.  However, to start a charity we require a steering committee.  That core group acts as the initial board of directors until the charity is formed.  This group approves the initial plan/bylaws and ensures the formation of the corporation.  This group should form up in one local area that has the greatest number of dedicated people at this time.  This group should meet in person regularly until the task is complete.

2009/7/13 Jeffery Nichols <arctic.gnome@gmail.com>
Unfortunately, a large meeting in person is not a realistic option.  People in the core group literally live up to a 79 hour drive away from each other (Qualicum Beach, BC to St. John's, NL) yet Canada has one of the smaller populations among Wikimedia regions, so we have to work differently from the European groups and the US state groups, which can practically meet in person.  We could have a reasonably-sized meeting in Toronto, but until we have the bylaws done there is not a lot to do in person that could not be done on the talk page.  I have tried to allow our bylaws to accept online meetings as much as possible and allow regional branches to be semi-independent.

Once we have a clearer picture of what projects we will be doing first, I'll try to set up project meetings in addition to founding meetings so we can see who is interested apart from the people interested in bylaw work.

-Jeffery Nichols (Arctic.gnome)


On 13-Jul-09, at 6:54 PM, Alan Walker wrote:

Jeffery, I commend you for your continued efforts to get Wikimedia Canada off the ground.  However, running a successful charity involves a great deal of time invested from people working for little or no pay.  Have you been able to get a core group of people to meet in person?

2009/7/13 Jeffery Nichols <arctic.gnome@gmail.com>
The legal issues in the bylaws are slowly being dealt with, but the other big obstacle we have now is deciding what we will officially be doing with our money.  To be an education-related charity we have to either be running a school, be doing research, or be maintaining a museum, art gallery.  Simply making information available to the public does not count as "education".  We can also call ourselves a "library" if we are a community charity rather than an education charity.  If you have any ideas about what our first project should be, mention it at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Canada/Proposed_by-laws

I, personally, think that the school and research options are too ambitious, though they would make good long-term goals.  For the purpose of our application I think our first objective for our donations should be setting up an online database of Canada-related media and texts to make ourselves fall under the "museum, art gallery, or library" categories.  This database could be distinct from Wikisource and Commons by allowing items that are free for non-commercial use, which seems to be a common copyright of stuff produced by Canadian governments.

-Jeffery Nichols (Arctic.gnome)


On 11-Jul-09, at 4:24 PM, Kevin T wrote:

So the Legal issue is the only block from setting up the organization in reality? BTW, when will be next meeting?

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 6:03 PM, Jeffery Nichols <arctic.gnome@gmail.com> wrote:
To be fair, there are probably a lot of people who are interested in
helping but who don't like reading through the legalese of bylaws.  As
long as a couple of us keep at them, I bet we'll find a lot more
people willing to do work once we actually start doing real-world work.

That being said, I'll speed up my replies so we actually have a clear
mission statement before you leave for Buenos Aires.

-Jeffery Nichols (Arctic.gnome)


On 9-Jul-09, at 7:15 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:

> Jeffery Nichols wrote:
>> Only a couple people made it, so there wasn't much of a meeting.  We
>> just committed to discussing the bylaws on the talk page more and
>> will
>> have another meeting when the current problems with them are
>> resolved.
> What would help is if more people participated in developing the
> details
> on that talk page.  Several issues require very careful consideration
> that cannot be achieved in an online meeting.
>
> I get bored waiting for responses, and the very few people who have
> anything to say make me think that only those few have any interest at
> all in a chapter.  I plan to be in Buenos Aires for Wikimania, and it
> would certainly help if I could go there with an understanding of what
> people want out of this process.
>
> Ec
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia-ca mailing list
> Wikimedia-ca@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-ca


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