James D. Forrester wrote:
On Friday, March 25, 2005 08:42 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
At this moment I am researching setting up a Dutch
chapter.
[Snip]
Please give me feedback, is this something that we
want. Is this
something also possible in other European countries ??
Yes, I think that having chapters in countries in the EU is worthwhile for
two reasons - firstly, it helps with donations by providing a tax-relieved
method of donating (at least, in some countries), and secondly, it helps
foster a sense of community and belonging in the members.
Currently just France and Germany have chapters set up, but we are looking
at setting one up for the UK soon-ish. Eventually we may want to form a
Wikimedia Europe organisation to liase and so on at a larger level, but for
now this will suffice.
One this that you may want to look out for is what exactly you can do whilst
retaining the special tax status - for example, a UK chapter will not be
able to merely blindly collect money for the main Foundation, but instead
have charitable aims in and of itself (which might in practice not make a
great deal of difference, of course - collecting money for international
Internet-based education and learning projects vs. collecting money for the
Wikimedia Foundation).
Of course, you will need to have a quite large group of people willing and
able to put in the amount of work required to run the chapter, which I
imagine is not entirely simple (especially if none of you have done this
sort of thing before), and are able to stick with the chapter through the
longer term.
Very best of luck.
Yours,
Hoi,
You miss the point of the my mail.
The point is that it IS possible to have the Foundation be registered in
the Netherlands and in France as well (in principle as I understood
from Soufron). This allows us to do collect money directly by the
Foundation. It means that the monies collected can be used by the board
as it sees fit. It means that we do not need a chapter to REPRESENT the
Foundation..
With this potential being true for the Netherlands and other European
countries, we can have local banking accounts, have tax exemption in so
far as is possible under the tax laws of a country. Chapters exist as a
backbone for activities in a country. Consequently we need less people
to administrate all these efforts but we need a high quality
administration to do this.
*Do we want to go this way.
*Do we accept and understand the need for high quality administration.
*What are the problems for the Foundation to go into contracts in the
Netherlands and other countries.
*Divorcing the chapters from the representation of the Foundation in
countries.
Those are the things that are at issue. Whatever we choose it will have
a major impact on our future organisation.
PS The need for a high quality administration is imho a given. At this
moment many issues cannot be dealt with without the personal involvment
of Jimbo. Jimbo does not scale he is a demi-God not a God. I am of the
opinion that there is a need for a secretary to the board and some staff
that do admin and answer all things that have an answer according to the
policies of the board.
Thanks,
Gerard