On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 2:03 PM, Wily D wilydoppelganger@gmail.com wrote:
And America, of course, is not the only country terribly unsuited to a national chapter. As noted Russia, but also Canada, Brazil, Australia, India and so on make national chapters implausible.
I disagree.
Vancouver to Halifax is a 4500 km *flight* - even splitting the difference and meeting in Winnipeg would mean also every Canadian editor would have to fly (perhaps 3% of the population lives within a 10 hour drive) Even provincial chapters in Canada would be a terrible burdern - Thunder Bay to Toronto (presumably where we'd have Ontario meetings) is a mere 1383 km drive along what are probably the worst maintained roads south of 60 (you can drive it in ~16 hours if you're good at patching a gas tank). The flights are only 2 hours and $415 - this is a nontrivial barrier for a lot of the wikipedia types (I certainly couldn't afford that).
A "general solution" for excessively large (and especially excessively large, empty countries) is really needed here, so let's not focus too much on the American case.
See, that's interesting. Because as far as I know, Australia now has a national chapter, Russia has just finished putting together their bylaws and they have gone for approval to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, Canada and India have mostly talked about national chapters in their ongoing efforts about creating a chapter. Argentina, which is another rather large country, has also a national chapter, and they, from the start integrated the idea that there could be regional "sections".
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that in the Wikimedia case, the US is unique not because it is large, but rather because the Foundation is there to start with. Let us try and imagine for a moment that the Wikimedia Foundation was not a US based organisation, but a... Andorran based one. Would people in the US start with metro-area chapters, state-based chapters, regional sections? Or with a national one?
I thin it's actually worth thinking about. Maybe we could also look at other international organisations and learn from their own organisation within the US. Andrew gave a few hints about Girls scouts etc. What is the reality? How do world-wide present organisations work within the US? Red Cross, Greenpeace, SOS children villages etc? Do they have one national organisation and then more targeted sections that act within the national organisation? Are they a constellation of many independant organisations?
Any help on this truly welcome.
Delphine