On 11/02/14 06:33, phoebe ayers wrote:
I want to draw your attention to two Wikimedia Board of Trustees decisions that were recently published, regarding funds allocated to the FDC/Annual plan grant process and Board approval of chapter/thematic organization status. In a nutshell, the Board decided to allocate approximately the same amount of funding to the FDC for the next two years.
Some chapters have asked to consider the possibility for multi-year funding, in order to make planning easier. The WMF indicated that it was something difficult to do since the funding of the whole movement is planned on an annual basis. Does it mean that this argument is now moot ?
The Board also decided that new organizations should first form as a user group and have two years of programmatic experience before being approved as a legally incorporated entity (either a chapter or thematic organization).
My first reaction to this: why is the WMF board pretending to be more and more a board overseeing the whole community ? I can understand concerns "about new groups legally incorporating before they need to or are ready to", but this remains up to the groups to decide -- and one thing about which there is no doubt is that they will know better than the WMF board if they need to be incorporated and when (if only because they know they local legal landscape much better than the WMF does).
It is indeed up to the WMF to decide the conditions a group must have achieved before being recognized as a chapter or thematic organization. However, this is an assessment at a given point in time. How the group actually got there should have no influence on the result.
I see that the WMF ED suggested the change, and that it was not endorsed by the Affcom (which is interesting in itself). But why doesn't the community have a chance to comment on how it should organize itself ?
So if you had asked the Swiss chapter, for example, we would have mentioned that a "user group" would be close to useless in our country. That would basically be a group of people having meetings in a restaurant once in a while, but it just does not exist as a group: it can not get access to grants (it can not even have a bank account, so any money received would be received by a single member in his own name -- making the user group useless), can not be granted trademark usage. This is why creating an association in Switzerland is an extremely light process: take 2 people, get them to write one page of bylaws and voilà, the association is incorporated and it can open a bank account. So long for "becoming a chapter or thematic organization involves much more corporate overhead".
Maybe the board's reasoning makes sense in the US, I don't know (I will not pretend that I know how people in other country should operate). It does not makes sense in Switzerland, and likely nor in other countries. But alas, this does not seem to be taken into account by the board when it takes decision.
Frédéric