On 4/20/07, gerald lists geraldablists@gmail.com wrote:
I've mulled this over a bit, and here is my proposal, if it is legally feasible.
We have two kinds of members. "Voting" members can vote for the board, stand for election on the board, and the like. They have to pay a nominal fee (I'm thinking $1, but you get the idea). These members may also have to fill other conditions (contribs to WM projects? etc), as determined from time to time by the board (and maybe a referendum of voting members).
Non voting members can either be project contributors or donors, or both, but are people who don't want a voice in the operations of the board
My line of thought here is to introduce a low barrier to being involved. Now, we would encourage _donations_ (suggested donation $25?) to become either a voting or non-voting member, but the idea is to detach the membership being coupled money (in a direct fashion). Does anyone know if membership fees are tax deductible? (I'm not sure on that).
I'd like to see donors encouraged to donate as much as they can, while having members and contributors be able to belong and help out without having a lot of headaches.
From reviewing, this looks like a bit of Delphine's suggestions 1 & 2 combined, with a bit more added in.
We're brainstorming now, so if anyone has a feeling of how this might be done, though it out there.
Now that i've given the facts, let me give the opinion ;-)
The most important thing to learn about chapters is that they are legally based, and this subject to a national law.
The first thing to do is thus to make sure that you start off with standard bylaws, standard procedures, and adapt them to Wikimedia. Not the other way around.
On the subject of members, I am personally (but I've never "prevented" it) against tying any kind of membership to participation in the wikimedia projects. You soon end up, in my opinion, with weird problems such as "what's gonna be the threshold of contributions to call someone a contributor" (can a bot be a member?), or "how long do you have to have contributed before you can become a member?'. These kind of barriers make sense on a wiki, they make less sense in a real life organisation. At the same time, if you do this, it either pushes people to make fake participations, or prevents other people to join in if they don't have the wiki experience. With the time, you will be surprised how many people are interested in the organisation who have never edited a wiki.
If you are to restrict the membership, I would go for a broad acceptance of members to start with and choose a veto option (if the board does not want X to become member, they have to say so in the course of xxx days after X proposed their membership).
Fees for $1, in a country like Canada, seem to me very low. I always understand the idea that one does not want the fees to be a barrier for anyone to join, but again, these are people who are going to elect a board which is going to handle donations, talk to national institutions and sponsors, etc. You want people to be dedicated to the task, and not just become a member because it is so easy and so cheap. I am caricaturing here, but I hope you see my point.
You can always have different levels of membership fees. Wikimedia France or Wikimedia Deutschland for example, have student/unemployed/employed rates for membership. And there can always be exceptions made if people *really* can't pay.
Mind you, this is not about collecting money, because membership fees, unless they're really really high, are rarely the primary source of funding of an organisation (we'll exclude National Geographic at this stage ;) ). But they are a good thing to use, especially in the starting times, to buy paper, and stamps, and whatnots.
The bottom line is... KISS (Keep It Super Simple). You want people to join in an easy fashion, and things to be very clear.
Delphine