Dear all,
In the past week, I have been reflecting a bit. A lot has happened,
and there was a lot of constructive (and some less constructive)
discussion. I always value it if the community appears to be able to
give additional arguments, both pro and contra, and is able to
intelligently exchange thoughts and ideas.
However, after all this reading work on the foundation-l, things are a
little dizzy to me. There is a looong email of Florence still ahead
(thanks for that, btw) so I think it is best to write down my dizzy
thoughts before moving on to the next topic.
I would like to seperate the discussions about the Volunteer Council
and the Board restructuring process, as I beleive they only have
indirect relations.
About the Board Restructuring Process, I asked the board members
coming from the community to give their reply to my email, and to
state their view on the community's involvement. I have seen a reply
of some of these board members, and I would like to urge at least Kat
and Frieda (both community representatives on the Board) to give their
views too. (Jimmy, you might want to give your view too, as at the
end, you're the one being around the longest ;-) )
The replies I saw were although somewhat diplomatic, not very clear to
me on whatwe should do next time. Florence uses the argument that she
did talk with some people about it. Although I do not have a clou who
might have been that, I take that for obvious. It was the least I
expected actually, I should have worded more carefully. I am glad
though that she seems to admit that it is better to take it to the
broader community too, and I certainly hope she will do that more
often in the future. However, I have to say immediately that she is
the board member doing this the most *by far* and I am grateful for
that. Please note that they are not at all in vain, I've seen several
times that even if a question goes unanswered, it does get discussed
in seperate channels.
But I will immediately agree with you if you state that the
foundation-l is not always a good option to reach out to the
community, and I think it would be good if other options were explored
and exploited. I personally think that elections are an excellent way
of receiving feedback for instance, which could make a good argument
to have elections every year. To discuss with the community every
year.
Michael seems to mainly point out how hard it is to get useful
feedback, and I have to admit that in some cases he has a point.
However, in my opinion he choose a wrong example. I think that the
case of the Volunteer Council was a *good* example of getting
feedback. Although it was not always feedback I read happely, it did
contain a lot of useful arguments and positions. And if that feedback
would have come in an earlier stage, and not after I submitted the
resolution, I would certainly have taken some of it into account.
Also this time about the restructuring I think there is a lot of
useful feedback. Although it is hard to admit sometimes once you've
drafted something, criticism might be just and right, and if you have
the chance, I think you should take it granted and try to adjust to it
if fair. I do not say we should poll on every single subject, but if
we stand for quite big decisions, I do think that we should ask the
community for arguments, criticism and to shoot on it. It is never an
easy process, even hard now and then. But at the end, I am convinced
that there are benifits.
Domas also replied to my email, although mainly on the content of the
resolution, while my post was mainly directed to the followed (or not
followed) procedure. I hope certainly that Domas is willing to
elaborate his views on that too.
Finally, Jimmy made a few comments, also mainly in line of the ongoing
discussion. Jimmy, I hope you will be willing to give your view as
well on the community feedback. I recall still your promise in the
past that if Angela and Florence would agree on a topic, you would
support their side. I have never fully figured out whether you
mentioned that because you thought that they disagreed so often under
normal conditions, that it had to be very important if they agreed, or
that you just valued the community representatives very high. I always
assumed the latter, and one thing in this situation that wonders me is
whether you still stand with that statement and maybe even would like
to renew it. If all community representatives would agree on something
(all three of them in this case) would you still give your support to
them?
Again, I hope that Frieda and Kat will read this as well, and can find
some time to reply to my earlier stated questions and remarks. (I
explicitely put Frieda, Kat and Jimmy in cc:, so I hope they will see
it) Thanks a lot in advance!
One thing which is substantial I would like to propose. Currently (or
in the past, the new bylaws are still not online), the bylaws state
the following provision:
"Section 1. Amendment.
These bylaws may be altered, amended or repealed and new Bylaws may be
adopted by a majority of the entire Board of Trustees at any regular
meeting or special meeting, provided that at least ten days written
notice is given of intention to alter, amend or repeal or to adopt new
Bylaws at such meeting."
I would like to propose to change that, legally or at least
intentionally, to something along the lines of
"Section 1. Amendment.
These bylaws may be altered, amended or repealed and new Bylaws may be
adopted by a majority of the entire Board of Trustees at any regular
meeting or special meeting, provided that at least ten days written
notice is given of intention to alter, amend or repeal or to adopt new
Bylaws at such meeting both to the members and on the Foundations
website."
Of course this would be at least an assurence to the community that
bylaw changes would not go unnoticed and without discussion (again,
the Board is, at least legally, not bound to the outcome of those
discussions, but could use the arguments). It would cost hardly any
extra time in the process, but it would maybe help the Board some
extra to stay aware of the community and their looks on certain
things.
Of course I expect the same personally on any big changes regarding
the community, but this is the easiest to lay down without any legal
implications of any kind (Mike, could you confirm this please?).
With kind regards,
Lodewijk
starting a new thread, as the old one totally drifted away again.
2008/5/1, Sebastian Moleski <sebmol(a)gmail.com>:
> On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 3:09 PM, effe iets anders <effeietsanders(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > A measure by Financial turnover sounds dangerous to me as that would
> > only enthusiast chapters to count everything as money, while the most
> > work is done by volunteers generally. I prefer to think in terms of
> > volunteers and activities over money.
> >
>
> I find representation solely based on members or funding quite problematic.
> The point of chapters is to advance the free sharing of the sum of all
> knowledge. It's not to recruit members or funds (both not that hard to do
> with a little dedication) for the sake of influence on the foundation's
> board. Representation by activities would be interesting although I'm not
> sure how one would objectively assess and compare the level of activity
> between chapters. Perhaps a scoring system might be an option that accounts
> for a multitude of things which would allow chapters to have share of the
> vote based on how they decide to fulfill their purpose (e.g. fundraising,
> membership, volunteer hours, cooperations, press management, lawsuits,
> etc.).
>
> Sebastian
>
OK, after having given things another thought, and maybe there is a
way to take money as a measure in some weight. We all seem to agree at
least to some extent that members are important as a measure. But I
think we all know that the membership fee is different, which would
give false numbers.
So an easy measure could be the income gathered from membership fees.
It's still not ideal, but it gives a measure how "popular" a chapter
is amongst it's members (how much is it worth to become a member
combined with the number) which will probably be related to the
activity of the chapter.
The bad side is that this only scales very poorly. As long as we only
take Western Europe (or even the whole "First world" in economical
perspective, including Australia, Taiwan etc) into account, sure it is
maybe something to consider. But if there would ever be a Wikimedia
Zimbabwe, this system would very much fail of course.
But does someone have a better idea? This might though be a pro
tempore solution, for the current situation (with Argentina maybe as
the poorest country around, for the rest there is not so much). A more
complicated solution would be to correct this number with the Bruto
National Product (I hope in English you use the same terminology) by
some devision or so to get a factor.
Any better thoughts to find some kind of measure for activity?
Lodewijk
In a message dated 5/2/2008 4:21:15 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com writes:
I'd just like to point out: We don't have a US Wikipedia. We have an
English language Wikipedia. There are places in the world other than
the US where English is spoken (for example, perhaps you've heard of
somewhere called "England"?).
Yes, and the UK accounts for 4.4 percen of traffic, Canada (3/4 English) for
2.6, Australia for 1.6. You'll note I was talking about traffic.
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Delphine writes:
> Would people in the US
> start with metro-area chapters, state-based chapters, regional
> sections? Or with a national one?
That's an interesting question. When we started EFF (now 18 years
ago), the organization itself was not chapter-based, although we did
initiate memberships within a year. But at least three groups of
individuals -- in California, Texas, and New York City -- started down
the road to forming chapters pretty quickly thereafter. One of them,
EFF-Austin, is still around. It's separately incorporated and
conducts its own activities within Texas independent of EFF's national
and international activities. (There are also EFF-like organizations
in Canada and Australia and elsewhere, I believe.)
--Mike
I think that it would be useful to organize a page or a group of pages
(if it doesn't exist) where we should collect common Wikimedian and
near-to-Wikimedian resources.
At a couple of different places I realized that we have:
* Toolserver (OK, it is known as known fact is that we have WMF
servers, as well as the Office has something), operated by WM DE.
* Polish Toolserver, operated by WM PL.
* WM CH has ability to host mailing lists (I don't know much more;
possibly, they have a server, too).
* Betawiki is not hosted at WMF servers.
* There are some bot servers, operated by volunteers.
* It is possible that some other volunteers or groups would offer
their resources for Wikimedia-related things.
Offices and other kinds of space
* WM DE has the office (WMF has the office, too)
* WM RS is generally able to get a variety of conference rooms,
festival places, even some bigger places *for free*. At the smaller
scale (for up to around 1000 participants), it is able to organize a
place even just one month in advance.
* (Other chapters?)
Other resources
* I heard that Finnish Wikiversity is organized in cooperation with
(some of) their university. So, it means that someone who needs
something (of course, not anything) from one university may ask people
from fi.wv): some data, some bibliography...
* WM RS will have access to archive of all press archive from 2001 up
to present.
* (I am sure that we have a lot of similar deals.)
This is a very divergent list of our common resources... I think that
it would be useful to gather all of them at one or a couple of Meta
pages.
Community,
I was reading some of the discussion surrounding chapters, particularly
a chapter residing in the United States. As people have mentioned before
there are some issues to address in founding such a chapter, but I
believe I've come up with a proposal that helps deal with such issues. I
look forward to feedback.
The main issue with a US chapter is the size of the United States. While
in Europe, it is common for people to travel by rail and oftentimes see
other parts of the country, the US lacks such a well-designed public
transportation system. Driving from Florida to New York is quite a trip,
not even thinking about the trip across country. Trains in the US are
overpriced and slow; not to mention their slowly dying popularity as
a transportation mechanism. Flying is cost-prohibitive to the majority
of Americans. This presents us with a curious issue: How to coordinate
a nationwide chapter when meeting people from other parts of the
country is so difficult? The suggest has come up for state chapters, but
this presents two issues in and of themselves.
1) What do you do for areas like NYC? It would be much easier to
coordinate a chapter for its metropolitan area as opposed to "New
York State Chapter" or "New Jersey Chapter." For this, I would suggest
we have a fairly fluid system of allowing chapters to form. While a
"Virginia" chapter might not be workable, a DC Metropolitan Area one
would work (2 hours is not unreasonable for me to drive for a meeting,
at least). This brings us to our second issue:
2) Representation. If we allow per-state or per-region chapters, how much
of a say do each of them have in the Foundation? Is each state given a
voice? For this, I would say that the US gets *one* voice, much as the
German chapter is given *one* voice, or any of the others. While this
creates a logistical issue (how do many chapters present 1 voice?),
I believe it will create a system in which US Wikimedians can have
chapters to organize, without fear of over-representation in WMF issues.
The only final issue I've seen is that of funding. Who do you donate to?
Does an American donate to the WMF or to the local American Chapter?
In Germany, this isn't as much of an issue (as, if I understand this right,
non-profit money raised in Germany must be used *in* Germany, so
WM DE cannot send money to the US WMF. Someone correct me if
I'm terribly wrong here). As a proposal, I would say this: money donated
to the Foundation is clearly earmarked for them as such. It goes to servers,
salaries, etc., the same as it always has. WM US would need to simply
make it known and understood that money donated to them would be
for the sole purpose of facilitating WM US activities, and not to the
Foundation. This would help keep the issue of "where is my donation
going" from being so muddled.
If in fact we are going to have Chapter-based seats and they are
considered community seats, we need to insure that our community
remains enfranchised and the first step to that is facilitating chapters
in the countries that do not have them. Up until now, there has been
no definitive progress towards a US-based chapter, but I think I've come
up with a decent compromise we can work with. I look forward to other
ideas.
Always,
Chad
Dear community and future trustees,
4 years ago, in june 2004, I had the privilege of being elected by the
community to be a trustee on the board of Wikimedia Foundation.
Needless to say, I felt very honored.
I also remember that I had no idea what "fiduciary duties" meant. I do
not think the words were even mentionned at that time. Very likely, most
candidates at that time had no idea either.
To be fair, the Foundation at that time was hardly more than a couple of
papers in an administration (articles of incorporation), a couple of
servers and domain names and three trustees (including two I had never
talked to, Tim and Michael). Probably a bank account as well (though, I
am not even sure). And that was it.
There was no board manual. There were few meetings. There was no
decision making procedure. No minutes. No financial statements. No
policies. No charters. No guidelines.
There were no vehicules for communication between board members, beyond
our private email addresses. No board wiki. No board list.
There was no office. No staff.
I think you get the idea :-)
Most chapters as of today, probably are more organized than the
Foundation was in june 2004.
Presumably, most potential candidates to the board this year, will know
little more than what I knew back in 2004 of trustees role and duties.
Over the years, I tried to overcome my own ignorance, and I would like
to offer my own simplified knowledge to future candidates. Incidently,
as Chair, it is my role to "orient" new Trustees. Over the past 18
months, I tried to collect information so that new Trustees may join the
board with a better understanding of what the role encompasses, and so
that they be more efficient early on.
------------
What are the responsibilities of a Trustee.
First link: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Board_member
This page summarizes the responsibilities of the Board (in its
entirety), and provides some additional insights. I could not be more
clear in saying that CANDIDATES FOR THE POSITION SHOULD READ THIS PAGE.
------------
Board manual
Second link: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_manual
I started building this page a long time ago. It is now more or less
complete, and of course, it should be a work in progress. It is
certainly not perfect (by far) but as April 2008, this is the more
accurate and complete document to orient a new Trustee.
Again, I do think candidates should read this page before candidating.
It might open their eyes on what the job is about.
-------------
Third consideration: fiduciary duties.
Directors are subject to two fiduciary duties in carrying out their
governance responsibilities: the duty of care and the duty of loyalty.
Sometimes, there is also reference to the duty of obedience as well (I
never heard it said in the contact of WMF).
Here are the definitions given by www.boardsource.org.
Duty of Care
The duty of care describes the level of competence that is expected of a
board member, and is commonly expressed as the duty of "care that an
ordinarily prudent person would exercise in a like position and under
similar circumstances." This means that a board member owes the duty to
exercise reasonable care when he or she makes a decision as a steward of
the organization.
Duty of Loyalty
The duty of loyalty is a standard of faithfulness; a board member must
give undivided allegiance when making decisions affecting the
organization. This means that a board member can never use information
obtained as a member for personal gain, but must act in the best
interests of the organization.
Duty of Obedience
The duty of obedience requires board members to be faithful to the
organization's mission. They are not permitted to act in a way that is
inconsistent with the central goals of the organization. A basis for
this rule lies in the public's trust that the organization will manage
donated funds to fulfill the organization's mission.
I am not quite sure why the duty of Obedience is no more mentionned
generally. I would argue that this duty is actually precisely at the
center of our current controversy regarding Trustee appointment or
election.
In requesting that all Trustees be already wikipedians of some sort (a
request from many wikipedians), the underlying request is that we should
make sure all Trustees actually AGREE with our mission. The underlying
request is that ALL board members should BELIEVE in our values.
However, some WMF trustees and apparently our ED consider that the duty
of loyalty and care are sufficient to make a good board member. Note
that this seems to be a general trend these days.
I am not entirely sure what my own position is on the matter. I fear
that we may have difficulties to find Trustees who deeply agree with our
vision and values, to fill certain expertises. The same issue is of
course valid with staff members. It would be difficult to expect all
staff members to be wikipedians, however, we intuitively consider they
should be faithful to our mission.
So, I would argue that though we do not list this duty as a
*requirement*, there is nevertheless an expectation that the Trustee
will be faithful to the organization.
This is the main reason why I actually wished that we outline clearly
the MISSION (done last year) and the VALUES (done this year) of the
organization. We can not expect a new trustee (in particular an
appointed one) to have these values in mind when joining; but we expect
him to be completely familiar with them and to respect them as much as
possible. I would similarly expect the ED and the staff to make their
best to have these values in mind, EACH TIME they have to make a
operational decision.
As a reminder: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Values
Summary
A board of directors has certain legal obligations, known as duties.
* Take reasonable care when making decisions for the organization
(called “duty of care”)
* Act in the best interest of the organization (called “duty of loyalty”)
* Act in accordance with the organization’s mission (called “duty of
obedience”)
--------------
With the above principles in mind, let me provide a few comments/examples.
Failure to the duty of care
Failing to attend board meeting is a breach of the duty of care. Failing
to vote is a breach of the duty of care. Failing to act when informed of
an illegal act is a breach of the duty of care. Failing to provide board
minutes is a breach of duty of care. Failing to find a new director when
there is none and it is necessary, is a breach of duty of care etc...
Quite obviously, it is difficult to sometimes identify what is really a
breach.
Family wise, the equivalent of failure would be "not feeding a child to
the point of him getting sick". However, refusal to give him chocolate
every day is okay.
Writing policies is a good way to identify what is okay, what is
borderline and what is non acceptable.
Quite a few policies have been written in the last 2 years. Several are
quite obviously still missing.
An example of a policy missing is this one: what is to be done when a
board member is failing to the duty of care ?
As you may imagine, that's a tough one. I hope the board will handle
this one as early as possible.
Failure to the duty of loyalty
May typically occur when a board member has a business related to the
activity of the Foundation. He may vote in such a way that will improve
his business as a primary reason, whilst another decision would actually
be better for the Foundation. If so, it is a breach to the duty of loyalty.
Incidently, if the community (or chapters) elect a Trustee, whom the
board can estimate would be/is non-loyal or destructive, it would be a
breach to the duty of care to not remove this Trustee.
The conflict of interest policy is meant to help avoid such situations.
As you may guess, the challenge is to identify when the Trustee action
was done with a higher loyalty to another organization.
Failure to the duty of obedience
Voting to stop providing free dumps would be a failure to the duty of
obedience. This one looks like an easy one.
But when you really look at it, that duty is the one worrying the
community. This is the area of decision related to "changes of licence",
"putting advertisement on the website", "not providing financial
statements to the community", selling out to Mitrocosf, etc...
There are other duties not listed here.
*Duties of oversight
*Ethics
* etc...
This would be very long to list, so I thought it best to rather provide
a summary of major trends applying to non profits. I expect all
candidates will make the effort to think about which areas we currently
cover well, which areas are only partially taken care of, and which
areas are still "not-taken-care of at all".
--------------
The major developments and trends in principles of governance of
nonprofit corporations, which seem to apply easily to our organization
are the following ones:
(source: http://www.icnl.org/knowledge/ijnl/vol7iss1/art_3.htm)
1. The board of directors of a nonprofit corporation must engage in
active, independent, and informed oversight of the activities of the
corporation, particularly those of senior management.
2. Directors with information and analysis relevant to the board’s
decision-making and oversight responsibilities are obligated to disclose
that information and analysis to the board and not sit passively. Senior
management should recognize and fulfill an obligation to disclose
information and analysis relevant to such person’s decision-making and
oversight responsibilities.
3. If the non profit corporation is appointing members to the Board, it
should have a nominating/governance committee composed entirely of
directors who are independent in the sense that they are not part of the
management team and they are not compensated by the corporation for
services rendered to it. The nominating committee is responsible
(amongst other things) for nominating qualified candidates to stand for
election to the board.
4. Every nonprofit corporation with substantial assets or annual
revenues should develop and implement a three-tier annual board
evaluation process whereby the performances of the board as a whole,
each board committee, and each director are evaluated annually. The
board should also develop and implement a process for review and
evaluation of the chief executive officer on an annual basis.
5. Each board of directors is responsible for overseeing corporate
ethics. Ethical conduct, including compliance with the requirements of
law, is vital to a corporation’s sustainability and long-term success.
This includes considerations such as Conflict of Interest Policy,
6. Every nonprofit corporation with substantial assets or annual
revenue should be audited annually by an independent auditing firm. The
corporation should change auditing firms or the lead and reviewing audit
partner periodically to assure a fresh look at the firm’s financial
statements. The audit committee should be composed of completely
independent directors and should set rules and processes for complaints
concerning accounting and internal control practices. It is responsible
for hiring, setting compensation, and overseeing the auditor’s activities.
7. The chief executive officer and the chief financial officer of every
nonprofit corporation should review Form 990 or Form 990-PF and other
annual information returns filed by the nonprofit organization with
federal and state agencies.
8. Any attorney providing legal services to a nonprofit corporation who
learns of evidence that the attorney reasonably believes indicates a
material breach of fiduciary duty or similar violation should report
that evidence to the chief executive officer of the nonprofit
corporation and, if warranted by the seriousness of the matter, to the
board of directors.
9. Every nonprofit corporation should adopt a written policy setting
forth standards for document integrity, retention, and destruction.
10. Every nonprofit corporation should adopt a written policy to permit
and encourage employees to alert management and the board to ethical
issues and potential violations of law without fear of retribution.
---------
I am sorry, this is very long :-)
This is a little part of my 4 years experience. The main difficulties were
* to always run behind Wikipedia. No time to "step back" and think about
it. There were always more servers to buy, more bills to pay for, more
phone calls, more lawsuits, more press articles etc...
* whilst running, to build a necessary framework
* and to follow duties, not backed up by policies
It is difficult to say someone is failing to the duty of loyalty... when
there is no conflict of interest policy.
It is difficult to say someone is failing to the duty of care... when
there is no expense reimbursement policy.
It is difficult to say someone is failing to the duty of oversight...
when he is doing the job himself (no one can reasonably oversight his
own job)
The future board members will be lucky, because there is now a minimum
of framework. There are policies to refer to. There are guidelines.
There is a staff to take care of operations.
And mostly, there is experience.
Who can guess where the Foundation will be next year ?
I hope this provides some insights to everyone interested.
Ant
Based on concerns raised on this list, the elections committee is changing the requirement from "at least 50 edits between April 1, 2008 and June 1, 2008" to "at least 50 edits between January 1, 2008 and June 1, 2008". We hope this will avoid disenfranchising active community members, while ensuring that longtime-inactive users cannot vote on this important current issue.
The relevant election pages will be updated within the next several hours.
Thank you for your considered feedback and input into this very important decision.
For the election committee,
Philippe
________________________
Philippe Beaudette
Tulsa, OK
http://www.freerice.com - play the game, feed a hungry person.
In a message dated 5/1/2008 4:18:27 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
wknight8111(a)gmail.com writes:
Ill go through this one item at a time:
A million purposes. If a chapter raises money that it does not need,
the simplest solution is to make a lump donation to the WMF. Or,
server hardware could be purchased and donated, or used separately
(think toolserver, which is owned and operated by WMF DE).
Are you suggesting that instead of people donating to the WMF, they donate
to WMF-Nebraska, which then funnels the money to WMF-Int'l. It seems like an
unnecessary amount of work, two sets of books, and two sets of
responsibilities: donation receipts, etc. To be effective, you would want to minimize steps
between the donor and the receiver, not add a middleman.
A local
chapter could similarly maintain servers for a variety of tasks
(toolserving, hosting mirrors, hosting related sites like wikizine,
wikinewsie.org, hosting a chapter homepage with information, etc).
Who would take responsibility for maintaining these servers?
Johnny and I had an idea for purchasing a small fleet of used laptops,
that we could use to teach underprivileged children how to use wikis
and how to access free information.
That is a nice idea. 100 used laptops = $30,000. Then what? Were would you
keep the laptops between gigs? Who would maintain them?
Similarly, we could print materials, like Wikipedia articles or
Wikibooks, or Wikiversity materials, and distribute those printed
books for free to underprivileged students.
Also a nice idea but no context and no consideration of costs, distribution
channels, etc.
Money can be used to host meetups, conferences, seminars and other
public outreach events.
Money could be used to purchase the rights to copyrighted educational
materials, for the express purpose of re-releasing those materials
under a free license. These free materials could then, in turn, be
used to seed books on Wikibooks, courses on Wikiversity, articles on
Wikipedia, and sources on Wikisource.
Money could be used to fund volunteers, such as supplying funding for
a volunteer developer to implement specific software
features/extensions. Volunteer authors and editors could earn grants
to write or edit important educational resources on the various
projects.
Paid editing? Would the community go for that?
Hell, we could start a scholarship trust to help give money
to dedicated wikimedians for college.
This is just the tip of the iceburg, a handful of things that come off
the top of my head. Instead of asking what's the purpose for raising
money, the better question is "can you imagine all the
possibilities?".
I am not saying that these aren't good ideas per se, but they should be much
clearer if you are going to use them to raise money. And this will reflect
on how (and if) money is raised, as well as on the mission of the chapter. To
become a 501 (c) 3 in the US, you have to have a clear mission statement. Is
the mission, then, of the local chapter "To promote the use of free content
materials and wikis, especially among underprivileged youth"? "To facilitate
social interactions between contributors to Wikimedia projects"? "To acquire
copyrighted materials to release into the public domain"?
Consider the implications of each answer.
BTW, I would suggest that an old US chapter list be revived for precisely
this discussion.
Danny
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