Jeffery Nichols wrote:

After all that discussion, what is it that we have to do before we submit this to the WMF? If we want bylaws that are acceptable to get charitable status in Canada, we have to fill in the red parts in the example bylaws, and then check the final draft against the minimum requirements of the new law (hopefully against an English version rather than a legalese version) and against the WMF's requirements (which I think is done). Is there anything else? If not, I'll try to get some of that done next week, but I'd appreciate some more eyes and keyboards. It might be a good idea to set a final deadline, that can sometimes push people, though my schedule is already close to the breaking point.

Until the new law is proclaimed I don't feel any need to rush this. I periodically monitor the situation. When that is done, however, we should be ready to proceed immediately. Remember that by going this route we do not need to submit the by-laws with the application.

I have avoided changing or adding anything to the draft so as not to be in the middle of conflicts. Unfortunately, there has not been much activity on this front, so perhaps I will need to be a little more pro-active on the parts of the articles of incorporation that need cleaning-up. I'm not going to touch the rest for now.

The dissolution clause need to make clear that remaining assets are to be distributed to a charitable organization(s) in Canada. "Charitable" is a more restrictive sub-division of "non-profits.

Where will the head office of the corporation be?

The proposed by-laws already call for at least four directors, they must be ready to accept the necessary legal responsibility. We need to know who those four people will be, and they should be willing to sign a legal consent to be a director for inclusion in the minute books of the corporation.

The costs for incorporation should be somewhere between $200 and $300. The expense of a lawyer, if any, would be in addition to that. The best way to finance that is to have each of the initial four directors send $75 along with the consent form This will also provide a little seed money for starting the bank account. (As a bookkeeping offset, if we set a membership fee of $15, this could be treated as pre-paid memberships for five years.)

I am still puzzled by how much WMF needs to approve. Purposes consistent with those of the WMF are fine. Establishing some kind of membership rights for online contributors to Wikipedia projects is fine too, but that is difficult to define in a legal way without encountering technical problems. Having a solid core group is important too. (Remember that the online participants do not have a controlling interest in WMF,) Canadian Wikipedia participation rates are among the highest in the world, but waiting for a dozen willing people to pre-commit to legal participation still doesn't happen. It may be more important to have four trusted people as the first directors and proceed from there. People here tend to be more willing to join an organization that exists.

There is nothing to prevent WMC from changing its by-laws from those approved by WMF; as long as the WMC is not incorporated no-one here is in a legal position to contract on behalf of WMC. The real power that they have is in licensing WMF's trademarks. So what it really should be doing is negotiating licensing terms.

The only other thing I can think of is a discussion on how we allow in our bylaws for potential cooperation and member-list-sharing with a future local branch (Wikimedia Quebec has been in the works for a while).

It will be easier to accommodate Quebec when WMC finally has its own existence. The language relating to "wings" should be adequate to the task. The worst possible outcome would be to have two separate corporations divided along linguistic lines, with francophones outside of Quebec not feeling that they belong to either group.

By the way, did you know that the federal government has internal wikis running Mediawiki? The years I spent doing templates and categorization on Wikipedia has earned me a fancy government co-op job! :D

In Alexandria there was a speaker from the US State Department outlining how that department uses wikis.

Ray