Delphine Ménard wrote:
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.
I won't disagree with that.
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.
Another point is that legal membership in the chapter depends on real names. There could be some difficulty co-ordinating real names and user names. It also muddies the question of when people stop being members. There have been many Wikipedia editors who show up, edit very actively for a while, and completely disappear after a few months. It's also good to ensure Canadian control of the Canadian chapter; that's much more difficult to do in an on-line environment. How so we deal with sockpuppets?
I think that the current Foundation's rules to allow community board members is good, but there are real problems with making it happen on a national basis.
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).
It's not unusual for a board to need to approve all memberships, although many that do this can delegate the function to one executive member who then presents a list of candidates to the board for rubber stamping. Having this option available can be very convenient when serious problem individuals want to become members.
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.
$1 is very low. Membership is never a big revenue source, but it should be at least big enough to cover any expenses connected with the administration of memberships.. $1 per year is barely enough to send out annual renewal notices.
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.
How do they determine whether a person "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 actual amount of the membership fees does not need to be in the by-laws. Having it there makes it more difficult to change in the future. It should be a part of a separate policy document that is revised each year at the AGM.
The bottom line is... KISS (Keep It Super Simple). You want people to join in an easy fashion, and things to be very clear.
I'm familia with that acronym, but as "Keep It Simple, Stupid" :-)
Ray