Hello Pine,

Although we cannot commit to a systematic 14-day response time for all inquiries, I do think that would be reasonable for routine inquiries, depending on the amount of collaboration outside of the legal department. As mentioned, AffCom is independent from the legal department, so I cannot make a commitment for them, but AffCom has made a few recent changes that aim to improve the process for user groups overall. I think that the legal team does respond well within 14 days for the vast majority of inquiries that we receive, and we will reemphasize the importance of this point with our attorneys at our next biweekly legal meeting.

The legal team does not publish our quarterly goals because we do not want to show our strategy to adverse parties, such as cases where we litigate to defend WMF or to support the defense of users. That said, our public goals are linked to standard ongoing workflows, much of which you can find in the WMF's FDC proposal (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2013-2014_round2/Wikimedia_Foundation/Proposal_form/Ongoing_work_areas#Legal).

Best,

Stephen

On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 11:42 AM, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Nemo, Cascadia Wikimedians' current discussions with Affcom and WMF Legal are about some wording on the Affiliation Agreement document. We have not discussed becoming a chapter in any great detail, and as you note the WMF Board created a longevity requirement. We have had informal meetings in Cascadia for such a long time that I wonder if the WMF Board would consider a waiver in our case, but so far I think being a user group will be adequate for our needs in the near future.
Hi Asaf, thanks for the info. I have previously heard comments from other affiliates about Affcom taking a long time to make decisions, but until now investigating that has been low on my priority stack.

Pine

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Stephen LaPorte

Legal Counsel

Wikimedia Foundation

NOTICE: As an attorney for the Wikimedia Foundation, for legal and ethical reasons, I cannot give legal advice to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see our legal disclaimer.