On 5/24/06, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
What would be neat, however, would be the existence of a supra-national organization that could coordinate the activities of different national chapters in the same region. Wikimedia Europa, for example, and/or even smaller coordinating bodies such as Wikimedia Balkans.
That was my first thought, too, but I don't think this direction is necessarily right. First of all, you end up with another legal body with another to-be-(s)elected group of representatives: more bureaucracy. More importantly, cooperations between chapters are likely going to be an "ad hoc" thing: - "Let's have an Eastern Europe meeting." - "Let's cooperate between DE and AT for a media campaign." - "Let's start a metadata project for digitized documents in Croatian and Serbian." - "Let's approach a Commonwealth organization for a grant."
They can be derived from languages, regions, political associations, history, personal contacts, etc. Unless you want "meta-organizations" that model all these potential points of contact between chapters, I think what is really needed is simply efficient cross-chapter communication. In cases where you would want to say "Organized by Wikimedia Europe", you can instead say "Organized by the Wikimedia chapters of Europe". Where you need a single central organization to receive money, you can use the WMF.
Is there a real need for anything else?
Erik