I think that in-person meetings are very useful for working on specific projects, but for the WMC in general I agree with Ec that we want to make sure people from across the country are included in the circle of trust.
I also mostly agree with Ec that titles are premature. We definitely do not now need titles that imply rank, like "president" or "chairperson". However, I think that titles relating to specific tasks are a good motivating tool. If we want to assign someone to go talk to a lawyer or register a website, I've found that it gets done faster if we call them the "legal co-ordinator" or "website manager" respectively.
-Jeffery Nichols (Arcitc.gnome)
On 15-Jul-09, at 3:05 AM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
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.
It's not unusual for amateurs to seem amateur.
Sure there's a value to in-person meetings, but credibility is not necessarily one of those values. One cannot escape the fact that a meeting held in one place will have only limited credibility in more distant locations. There are clear efficiencies to in-person meetings; the instant back and forth on various details definitely works more efficiently than tedious waits for on-wiki responses that never appear. In-person meetings provide an opportunity for participants to build trustful working relationships, but those who do not or cannot attend these meetings never feel themselves a part of that circle of trust. Unlike most other countries with chapters Canada has a big geography problem.
I don't think we are yet at a stage where we have a need for a lawyer. If someone says that we need to have the by-laws reviewed by a lawyer, my response would be and has been, "Fine, if you think we need that, do it and report back." We don't need to meet with a bank unless we have money, and when it comes to banking by-laws the banks just ignore the organization's own by-laws, and demand that you accept what they tell you. An accountant comes still later in the process when there are finances to report about. On this score we would do better bringing ideas together about what kind of budget we want to have. Where will the money come from? What will be our spending priorities?
Your observation that establishing the chapter keeps grinding to a halt at the same stage is accurate. I have no difficulty with the notion of a steering committee, but when one of the first things done by such a committee is to give each other formal titles in the organization, I can already feel the chasm between the committee and the other interested people. Any title beyond "committee member" is a little premature.
Ec
2009/7/14 Jeffery Nichols <arctic.gnome@gmail.com mailto: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 mailto: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 doingfirst, 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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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 BuenosAires.
-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 thedetails on that talk page. Several issues require very
careful considerationthat cannot be achieved in an online meeting.
I get bored waiting for responses, and the very
few people who haveanything to say make me think that only those few
have any interest atall in a chapter. I plan to be in Buenos Aires
for Wikimania, and itwould certainly help if I could go there with an
understanding of whatpeople want out of this process.
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