I may have some time in the next few weeks to get us more organized on Meta. Becoming a
user group looks relatively lightweight and I think we would qualify if we put in an
application. Of course, anyone else who wants to curate the Meta pages and submit a user
group application can do so!
If we start to do regular business, especially with people outside the immediate Wikimedia
volunteer community or if we start to accept grant money, I think we should incorporate
for liability protection and tax reporting reasons. Being an unincorporated nonprofit
association that gets sued, such as because someone in our group made a copyright
violation, would be bad. Also, incorporation may provide us more ability to get grants and
in-kind contributions especially if we qualify for 501(c)(3). Incorporation is not
difficult but it involves some time for applications to be created and processed. What
gets tricky is selecting board members, drafting bylaws, and doing other necessary
administrative work beyond the capacity of volunteers, so we'll need to think about
that when the time comes. We are small enough now that all active participants could be
board members, but if we scale to 30 members we will likely need an elected board. That is
a good problem to have, and the Affiliations Committee can provide guidance for us
throughout the organizing process.
http://nonprofit.about.com/od/faqsthebasics/f/unincorporationassociation.htm
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affcom
Pine