On 4/20/07, gerald lists <geraldablists(a)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
--
~notafish
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