Hopefully we now have all 10 people on board the list, as well as some from
before.
Welcome, all.
The next steps are contact with legal entities (lawyer(s)?) to find out what
needs to be done to get this happening from a legal
viewpoint. I want to get
some guesstimates about the cost of the process, so we can start to pencil
together a budget for this process.
Ok, I've contacted one law firm on this, and their "ballpark" figure was
about $1000. So, to be safe, let's guess this is $1,200. I will contact a
few other firms, to make sure this is a reasonable guess.
We should also think about a couple of "vision" points ... what Wikimedia
Canada wants to do, what we want to achieve. There are
already a number of
great ideas on Meta about this, and I have some too.
One vision point which has already been discussed is community benefit.
After all, the WMF's goal is to bring knowledge to the masses for free. And
that is pretty special.
Now we have to draw up a bit of a timetable, and plan what has to happen
when. All initial 10 people I approached have a flexible commitment to
moving this forward, but we should start soliciting for people who may want
to be on the board. The board isn't going to be that much work -- I guess a
few e-mails and possibly a conference call in a month. If you can spare an
hour, or know someone who can commit to that in a month, I think that should
be great for now.
From reading the various bits, it seems like the best
way to pursue this is
as a Federal non profit. We have to make sure that makes us
nonprofit in all
Canadian jurisdictions.
Here is what has been started, so far:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Canada/Incorporation
Let's see if we can come up with the needed bylaws. I will be looking for
some examples, if anyone has some references feel free to add them.
Thanks,
Gerald.