We are close to getting approval from WMF Legal for the name Cascadia Wikimedians User Group. We're just waiting for the final sign-off through Stephen LaPorte.

In the meantime, I wanted to let board members know that I'm working on a more detailed accounting of what our startup costs will be. So far I have an estimate of about $1100 for our first year, but I need to do some research on getting us proper insurance so that if something happens (for example, someone slips and falls at an event that we're hosting, or someone is driving on CWUG business and they get into a car accident) we will have decent insurance. These legal and finance considerations are probably more tedious than we need to discuss on the Cascadia email list, but I wanted to let people know that I'm working on them in the background. For our startup costs we may approach Wikimedia DC (thanks Kirill for the info about DC's grants program) and/or the Project and Event Grants program at WMF (which is why I'm also sending this email to Alex Wang who is the grantmaking officer for that program, so she can anticipate that we may approach PEG/GAC for funding).

Additionally, I'm hoping that we can get a small grant of $50 or so for covering food and non-alcoholic beverages at our joint holiday party in December with TA3M Seattle.

I hope that we have approval for the CWUG name from WMF Legal next week.