Hello, In the past few months, the WMF has adopted officially a vision (tagline) and clarified its mission statement. The difference between the two is that the vision is the dream, what we are trying to do, even if that seems impossible. This is the long long long future. The mission is the more practical path we decide to follow to reach our vision. Currently, you may find our vision here:http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vision and the mission there: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission -------- A next step for a non-profit is to define its values. Values are the driving force in a nonprofit. Before you tell me "what's that boring stuff and why on earth would it be useful for", let me explain :-) Values represent the core priorities in the organization’s culture, including what drives people's priorities and how they truly act in the organization, etc. I'd like that we establish four to six core values from which the WMF would operate. These values would not only be the values glueing us all together (such as free culture, commitment to diversity etc...), but should also be the values YOU, as an editing community, want the WMF to have toward the community, the readers, the staff, etc... The more we expand the staff, the more chance there is that part of the staff joins WMF with no single idea of our values. So the more it becomes important for us to make sure the staff understand our values and respect them. As such, writing down them will help. Same for chapters. Until now, we consider that a chapter sharing most of its mission statement with WMF one is a "like minded" organization. But will it always be true in the future when we have 200 chapters ? How will we identify and check that chapters are really on the same "foot" ? Even without going as far, we might meet a problem sooner than we can think of, if a big company just decide to create a BIG encyclopedia for free, which, for whatever reasons, would get good ranks on some search engines.... in this case, what would be important to us ? Probably, it will be important that we explain to the world what is truely important to us. What is truely important are values. ---------- I would like to ask you to have a look at the value page on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Values And add more suggestions there, or different phrasings. Values can be expressed by keywords, or by sentences. Either are fine, as long as they express what is important to us. Or comment on some of the keywords already there. Be careful to notice the difference between our preferred values and the true values (those actually reflected by members behaviors). In this case, just put a note (''we are not very good on this, but I think this value would be very important to us to follow). The current values were defined with the help of the advisory board member, during the board retreat immediately before Wikimania. More on this here: http://advisory.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meeting_August_2007 Thanks to all for your help. Anthere