On the long term, when the chapters chose board members, there will raise the question how many votes a chapter has, if there will be one vote per chapter etc. Whether a country has one or several chapters might become important, and I wonder whether other chapters will be fond of multiple chapters in another country. On the other side, when the Foundation has to deal with chapters, it will be easier if the number of chapters cannot be theoretically unlimited. Therefore there should be the rule "one country, one chapter", to avoid several problems. If necessary you can have local afiliates within one chapter. A chapter is free regarding its internal structure. I can imagine that in a couple of years, when the German chapter has grown, there will be a regional afiliation in each of the 16 federal countries. Ziko
2008/5/3 Pharos pharosofalexandria@gmail.com:
On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 6:17 PM, Sue Gardner sgardner@wikimedia.org wrote:
Pharos wrote:
Although we are all used to interacting with the WMF all on a daily basis, I think we have to recognize that the international organization has a remarkably light footprint in the real world, even in the US, and even in our largest city, which is New York City.
We have been organizing in New York City (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_New_York_City) since November, and there are a number of activities we have started on, and clear room for much further outreach.
We already held our our first outreach event, "Wikpedia Takes Manhattan" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Takes_Manhattan) on April 4, with Columbia University and NYU students. I reached out to the WMF, but their only involvement was pointing us to O'Reilly Media as a willing donor for 'Wikipedia: The Missing Manual' books as prizes. This was certainly appreciated, but our collaborations with local Students for Free Culture groups were rather more significant to getting this event to happen. We also talked to several reporters about this event; obviously there were no official WMF representatives in place to take that role.
We've also made outreach to a local organization for the placing in free content of a Yiddish-language encyclopedia (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_New_York_City/CYCO_Yiddish_Encyclop...). There has been no involvement of the WMF in this activity either, nor is their anyone in the SF office who has a job to do such a thing.
We have also had preliminary discussions about a free content photography contest at the Brooklyn Museum.
And for the Fall, we are planning a "Wiki Week" or wikiconference, again with organizing by local Students for Free Culture groups. This will probably include another "Wikipedia Takes Manhattan", a small-scale "Wikipedia Academy", and high-profile speakers if we can get them. So far, there has been no direct WMF involvement in this initiative either (admittedly, we only started planning on Wednesday).
So, I would say there is an awful lot that local affiliates in the US can do. And the fact that we can meet in person and coordinate with other local groups on a regular basis is great contributor toward that work.
Thanks, Pharos
I agree. Chapters, because they are defined by geography, are particularly well-suited to staging geographically-based outreach activities such as Wikipedia Takes Manhattan, and to liaising with nearby organizations (e.g., Brooklyn Museum). The Foundation, on the other hand, has an international mandate, so it wouldn't make sense for it to focus on events that are confined to a single location. Essentially, any F2F event the Foundation supports needs to be scalable, repeatable, templateable - something where we are facilitating the work of volunteers, rather than duplicating it.
So I don't see anything wrong with the situation you describe, Pharos: do you? Whether the New York group is ultimately defined as a chapter, a chapter-like organization, a local affiliate or something else entirely - it sounds like it's doing good, useful, needed work.
I certainly don't see anything wrong; things are going quite well, except that there is not yet a mechanism for US groups to officially affiliate with the WMF. If we had that, it might be easier for us to work with larger local institutions, and it would also be possible, though the "group exemption" in US tax law, to fundraise as a non-profit, both for the WMF and for our local activities.
Having said that, I would like to see the Foundation grow better able to support chapter activities with advice and expertise. (I'm not necessarily suggesting the Foundation itself be positioned as the expert, nor that we would be the only entity playing this role - sometimes, for example, I expect we'd be facilitating or supporting expertise-sharing among other groups.) So far, probably our best example of this is Frank Schulenburg's Wikipedia Academies - but I hope that, over time, we will develop other good models as well.
I have suggested in another thread that our "Volunteer Coordinator" be co-designated "Wikimedia US Affiliates Coordinator". Certainly such a move would open up greater comunication between the WMF and local US groups.
Thanks, Pharos
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