Sue Gardner wrote: Talking about board seats... Sue... I'd like to acknowledge the fact that local associations are apparently unable to create a separate mailing list for discussing the nomination of chapter representatives. It did not appear to me to be a huge unaccessible task, but unfortunately, that's a fact. Not the right infrastructure I guess. I even envisionned to create a Google list, that the idea really turned me off :-) Hopefully, in two years from now, for next elections (we can set it up for ourselves as a GOAL), we'll be able to host a list to discuss WMF rep, but since that's not the case right now, I'd like to officially (and humbly) ask that the WMF set up a wiki for us to discuss the issue. After much thinking, it seems to me that setting up a list would not be the easiest way to come to a consensual agreement, whilst a wiki could host at the same time, discussions and votes if necessary. This wiki would not be public. Its members would be chapter board members. Can you make sure that such a wiki is set up ? I know it is a tech issue, but it's also a (sad) political one as well, so I think best to acknowledge here that WMF help is necessary for chapters to be able to reach a common agreement on who their representatives will be on the WMF board. Thanks Ant

Hoi, When you are at, please create the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia that is currently waiting for 108 days now. Thanks, GerardM On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 2:01 PM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com>wrote;wrote:

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 5:55 PM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Problem is that we Okay, I must have missed that request somehow. We're hosted by one of our members and we've already created a couple of wikis for various purposes...give me one or two days to find out, I think wikimedia.ch should really be able to do at least this to help. Michael -- Michael Bimmler mbimmler(a)gmail.com

Really? Cause I didn't get that message at all. What I got out of it was, "The board intends to consolidate the power of the existing big name chapters, and make some gesture of including them on the board, but we're actually not addressing substantively the issue of making it easy for them to actually form and be approve." There's no excuse for blaming the chapters or the people in them when the system for developing and approving them is fundamentally flawed. -Dan On Nov 2, 2008, at 11:55 AM, Florence Devouard wrote:

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 7:39 PM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Well, I asked Manuel, our webmaster, now. I don't see why it shouldn't work, but we'll see ;-) M. -- Michael Bimmler mbimmler(a)gmail.com

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 7:42 PM, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester(a)gmail.com> wrote: Can you expand on this? Seriously...I have heard many criticism on various parts of the Wikimedia "movement", but the chapter approvals process was, I thought, considered to be working all right. What's wrong with it? M. -- Michael Bimmler mbimmler(a)gmail.com

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 7:39 PM, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Update: Yes, Wikimedia CH, through our webmaster and -hoster, will gladly provide both a (MediaWiki) wiki and a (Mailman) list. I can't remember, are all chapter board members supposed to have access or also "delegates" like on internal-l? Or shall we make it "public viewing, restricted editing-posting" now? And: do we have the email addresses of all the chapter board members somewhere in a neat list so that I don't have to pick them manually from internal? I thought Delphine had solicited addresses for a directory once, does that one exist somewhere now? Michael

Thomas Dalton wrote: The request of Florence was for a "collaborative space" for chapters, IMHO but she can confirm, the access should be restricted to the members of local chapters. Ilario

Thomas Dalton wrote: Yes, because there are no barriers to create a new chapter. Ilario

Ilario Valdelli wrote: There are no barriers to create a new organization. There is a barrier to have it recognised as Wikimedia chapter. Ant

(Note, I said approvals and development. The lack of involvement by ChapCom in the active development of chapters is even more concerning than the lack of transparency in the approvals process.) Well for one thing, when I first started questioning the idea of why there were no US chapters either nationally or subnationally (this was before the Pennsylvania chapter started) i was told that it simply wasn't going to happen, that the Chapters Committee could not decide what they wanted to do, and that in fact there was direct opposition on the committee towards certain countries or regions forming chapters. Currently there are only 18 chapters (excluding UK). There should be far more, and I seriously suspect the Chapters Committee is the problem. WM Venezuela still drafting bylaws since November 2006 WM Canada has been "finishing up by-laws" since March. WM Hrvatske (Croatia I assume? The page says something about Zagreb) has been translating bylaws since December last year. WM India still in bylaws discussion since November of last year. WM Norge listed as awaiting approval since July. WM Portugal listed as "bylaws ready, discussing how to constitute" since March. WM NYC still figuring things out since Jan. 07, WM Penn. still listed as figuring stuff out since June 07. WM DC has not heard a peep from the chapters committee since May. Nine chapters languishing in development for an unacceptable length of time. This is not to say that the chapters themselves hold no responsibility, but I've seen no evidence of the Chapters Committee proactively reaching out to say "What can we do to help you guys get moving". I suspect if they did, we'd have quite a few more chapters. A couple of Wikimeetups ago, I discussed with some people what their interests in developing a chapter were. Quite a few people expressed no interest, either because they believed the Chapters Committee was unable or unwilling to help, or because they simply believed that it was impossible for them to get a chapter approved and they didn't want to waste the effort. The fact that people even think that sort of thing speaks for itself that the Chapters Committee has failed on some level. The Local Chapter FAQ has a "Do not translate until ChapCom has had an opportunity to update it" message since Feb. 2006. The Chapter Creation Guide has not been updated in over a year. In over two years of existence, the line that says "The details of this process are given in the [[Chapter approval process]] document." are STILL a red link. So prospective chapters have ZERO idea of what the approval process is. These are just some of the criticisms of the chapters process. -Dan On Nov 2, 2008, at 2:06 PM, Michael Bimmler wrote:

I'm going a little off-topic here, but how does that work? Surely you need to know what form the chapter is going to take before you can draft bylaws? If they're doing things backwards, that might explain why they haven't got very far...

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 10:12 PM, Dan Rosenthal &lt;swatjester(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: And surely, because you're involved with every chapter and/or on the ChapCom mailinglist, you are able to make that judgment. (Yes, You have been involved with DC. That's a special case, see below). This is untrue. The issue of sub-national chapters has been discussed for a long time intra-ChapCom (because it is not a light issue which can be decided about in a couple days, sorry). We have also solicited board input for quite some time, but the board was for a long time not really willing to make principal decisions on this matter. This has now changed and a general framework has, for the first time, been developed. which is good and which also means that we can now really work on the approval of sub-national chapters. How so? Could it not also be that the Chapter groups themselves are somewhat less than active? Back when we founded WmCH, yes, I considered ChapCom to be a "barrier" too and a slowly rising one, alas. But now that I believe to know both sides, I think that ChapCom has become much faster and more organised, not least also due to the great work by our new communications advisor (and general reminder person) Peter / privatemusings. Well, yes. With all due respect, what do you expect us to do? We can't draft bylaws *for the chapters*, for this, we'd need to know all the legislations of the world, which we don't. We can only afterwards look at the scope/aim/goal part of the bylaws but they really have to figure all the practical proceduralities themselves. Yes. I happen to be on the wikimedia-canada list and, from what I see there, not all too much is going on. See, there is a limited amount of things Chapcom can do: We're always happy to help with advice, and yes, we might need to get more proactive, but we can't "replace a community". Either people are there and willing to do this or they aren0t. We can't help much here, not speaking Croatian. If they have serious problems, I believe the WMF would consider a request for the funding of professional translations. as above. The ChapCom has already been voting on this, but the vote had been stalled, as somehow, our new membership resolution had not been considered by the board and therefore, we suspended voting until knowing who was actually entitled to vote and who not. This has now been cleared, we expect that the board can vote on Norge at its next meeting. This strikes me as odd, similarly to Thomas. But we're glad to provide help if approached, but in many cases, we don't even have email address etc. from people so it's much easier for us, if they write a mail to *our non-filtered mailinglist* chapterscommittee-l at wikimedia punto org as explained above - sub-national chapters had been not individually considered until the general framework was set. We now have this and there is also a sub-national chapters working group, so I expect this to be dealt with speedily. I'm not sure whether this is really the major issue here. We can't guide every chapter in a step-by-step procedure "Now you do this, now you do that, now you do that". On the one hand, there are too many local specialities, which rather require input from lawyers or law-savvy people from these jurisdictions (ahem, Wikimedia UK, I wouldn't know how ChapCom could have helped much there, we know zero about UK Company Law...), on the other hand, it *must* be possible. I have seen many chapters form without any "real-time guidance" by ChapCom (in fact, I co-established one in that manner) and it *does* work. It needs an active community, a few people who really want to invest time in doing tedious things like writing bylaws and translating them, it requires local meetups etc. etc. But, as much as we enjoy giving advice, we cannot be "facilitators" for every local group, I can't write bylaws for WM Venezuela and I can't organise a pub-wikimeet for Wikimedia Canada (random examples, no offence). Well, maybe you should have a look at how many chapters were approved in the last 9 months. Quite a few, I daresay. And this, although ChapCom takes its role seriously and actually considers all bylaws in depth before submitting an official recognition to the board. On a PR level, possibly. That's why I am very glad that we have privatemusings with us now. Ouch. I'm sure many people have noted this now and we'll have a look at this. Why, that's not good, I agree. But it can't be that bad, because we still do get mails which simply say "Dear ChapCom, this <permalink> are the English translations of our bylaws, please review and comment and then approve, if you may". And this is exactly how it should be done. If you want to, you can write two sentences to that effect on meta to make it a bluelink. Else, we'll see that we can do it as soon as someone finds time. But it's a wiki. I tried to address them as detailedly as possibly (although we might want to make a new thread for further discussion of it), hope this helps. Michael -- Michael Bimmler mbimmler(a)gmail.com

2008/11/2 Florence Devouard &lt;Anthere9(a)yahoo.com&gt;om>: Nope I just spoke to manuel to decide who should do it (as I was about to install), so no competition with WM CH, just cooperation ! :)

Thomas Dalton wrote: Please re-read my email: there are no barriers to create a new chapter (except bureaucratic problems) and/or to take part in another national chapter. A lot of chapters give the opportunity to have members outside national borders. Ilario

About this list and wiki to be created: would the would be chapters with a chance of being approved before a Board approval on this question be invited? I am speaking of WM Norway and WM Hungary, that are either already incorporated or 99% percent likely to finish incorporation process in less than 3 months' time. About ChapCom transparency: the ChapCom members have been helpful, but I don't find their work transparent. How does one chapter get approved by them (or even the Board) before incorporation, or just faster then the chapters presenting their bylaws roughly at the same time? Is the slowness in some cases deliberate to test the endurance and capabilities of a given community or even a contactperson? I don't think the answer is yes, yet without transparency and clear criteria, one cannot help to wonder, what is he doing wrong, and can have no idea how to correct his mistakes if the Chapcom is not approving the chapter, while other chapters "zoom by" at the same time. On WM Hrvatska: Hrvatska means Croatia, you guessed right. Last time I looked at their meta page, the bylaws seemed to be in English. Thus they might fall into the category of inactive would be chapters. Best regards, Bence Damokos On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 10:32 PM, Michael Bimmler &lt;mbimmler(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

I hate doing so, but I addressed things inline. On Nov 2, 2008, at 4:32 PM, Michael Bimmler wrote: That's a terrible argument and you know it. I don't need to be intimately involved with every chapter or on ChapCom's mailing list to know that things are not as they should be. You ought to know better than that. Nobody suggested a couple days. How long has it been discussed for intra-ChapCom? Years now? Are you seriously suggesting that the ChapCom has been doing EVERYTHING in it's power to pursue more chapters? As for untrue, I know what I was told. Whether they were correct or not is less important than the fact that this is a public perception problem of the ChapCom (and yes, privatemusings may help fix it, but some of the damage is done already). I suggest as much below in my post. I'm not saying that ChapCom is not better now than it was in the past. But there certainly have been problems with it. Sure you can. Why can't you help the chapters draft their bylaws for the general things that do not require specific legal knowledge of that particular country? Surely ChapCom has a relatively standard framework that they can provide for the chapters to modify as they need. If not, that's a failure on the committee's part for not being proactive enough. Nobody's suggesting replacing an community. But what has ChapCom done to proactively find out where the WMF Canada chapter is currently at, what help they need, what ChapCom can do to speed things up etc? Has ChapCom made such a request? What efforts have they made to ask members of the proposed chapter (in whatever language a connection can be made in) how they can be helped, and find out if the WMF can fund such translations? As above myself. Precisely how long does it take for ChapCom to vote? This didn't strike anyone as odd at all since March? Is nobody keeping an eye out for these things? I view it as a failure that it took so long for even a general framework to have been set. So if you can only give very limited advice, and if you can't actively help, what exactly do you do? Six or seven? That's hardly "Quite a few". All it does is establish that now things are somewhat better now than they were the year before. Good. That's a step in the right direction. Writing two sentences is not a solution to a lack of a "chapter approval process" document. That can only come from ChapCom or the foundation themselves as they are the ones who approve things. Two years of no public guidelines is unacceptable. You have helped a lot. -Dan

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:27 AM, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: We followed a similar route, and looking at the other chapters' homepages, they have done the same, but one thing is common through all the differences: the part that says what are the given chapter's goals and activities. I believe a guide stating, that these are the sample goals that you should incorporate into your bylaws, would be very helpful. Also a list of activities based on the other chapters, in a choose-all-that-applies fashion would also be helpful. Having such a framework would actually speed up the drafting time of most bylaws I believe (as valuable time could be devoted to the other minutia of the sample bylaws a community is working with). This framework on the other hand would remove any room for the ChapCom to decide, as the bylaws per definition would be approvable. Yet, I believe an enthusiastic community, determination and some other human factors might be more important than to have the best bylaws (you can always modify them later; if there's a legal problem the Court will just give it back to you for correction) Best regards, Bence Damokos

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 4:17 PM, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: Could be a jurisdictional thing. Here in Florida I don't see a problem with drafting the bylaws first and figuring out the exact organizational form second. In fact, in some ways the bylaws can help suggest the proper organizational form.

On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 11:06 PM, Bence Damokos &lt;bdamokos(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I personally don't oppose it (though, in order to be fair, we would need to draw a line, like "All those who have been recommended for approval by ChapCom already") but I think this is something that the chapters need to decide. As a general comment (and I can thus avoid separately replying to Thomas Dalton): This is prima facie a chapters matter, as the seats are called "board seats to be appointed by the chapters". Yes, the board will eventually have to approve them de iure etc. but as said, the main idea was: The chapters figure out a process and then appoint two people. Therefore, I strongly urge that first we have all the chapter board members together on the wiki and on the list and then, we can discuss there whether there is a consensus agreement to open it up to the public. I would personally be okay with discussing the appointment processus in public, but I don't see much value in having a public foundation-l-type discussion on whom we appoint, because then, we're back to a general community appointments (read: quasi-election), which was explicitly not what these seats were created for. This is not a vote against transparency. But we have seats to be filled by NomCom, seats to be elected, seats to be appointed by chapters, maybe we'll once have a seat appointed by server admins, whatever. But we should distinguish, otherwise, we'll just say that we have a 100%-elected board, which is certainly worth considering, but for the moment, the board decided against it. It's very easy: Some bylaws are easier & shorter, some are less. This doesn't mean that some are "better", but it's just that some bylaws are very closely modelled on existing ones, and can therefore be approved much more quickly, while others have a completely novel structure which needs somewhat more time to understand, if we want to do our job properly. Michael -- Michael Bimmler mbimmler(a)gmail.com

General comment first: Although I'm providing explanations (or call them excuses, whatever, I don't mind) below, this is not Question Time: I'm not saying we're perfect and that you're all wrong, I absolutely agree that we can still become better and I (really) appreciate feedback and input and suggestions and I'm also glad to say when I agree with suggestions. I just think it is unfair to dismiss ChapCom's work in its entirety, whereas I believe that it has become much better than it was, say, end 2005. On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 11:40 PM, Dan Rosenthal &lt;swatjester(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Thanks! I'm not a quoting styles evangelist and do top-posting at times as well, but I believe it is adequate here. Half granted...you obviously know about the "PR" side and how we're perceived by the community, but I believe that, as you're not on ChapCom and are involved in a chapter which was, unfortunately, one of the victims of the general sub-national-chapters standstill, you do not know everything about our actual work. But okay, weak argument. Probably. The sequence was along the lines of "spikes of ChapCom discussion --> silence, sometimes waiting for board input although sometimes it wasn't even communicated to the board that we'd like input --> discussion again --> general feeling that we can't decide this and that the board would need to make a principal strategy decision, which it didn't want to until recently etc." This is suboptimal, it is in fact the opposite of optimal, yes. But that's about how it happened. I'm glad, that we have reached a milestone now and especially Andrew has been tirelessly campaigning on this issue. This might sound stupid now, but could I suggest that we do not just want "more" chapters in any case? What I'd hate to see is: Dormant chapter-in-preparation, chapcom pushing and pushing until finally they get their things together, write down bylaws and have the official establishment ceremony incl. WMF approval stamp, and, as soon as this is done, it falls dormant again, because there was no zealous-enthusiastic community to start with. Do you honestly believe that a chapter which can't even write bylaws of its own resp. organise a meetup to move forward, will afterwards be very active just because it's been supported by ChapCom until it got its rubberstamp? I believe, the chapters which are known as "active" now (Germany, France, many others) didn't need ChapCom input to get these things done, because they had a thriving community. If there is no community and no one spending time, it's pointless to push this chapter to approval, just to have "one chapter more". It will already be doomed to be a failure. But that's my opinion, you may disagree. We don't have this and I agree, it would be a nice-to-have. More than that, actually, I agree we should make it a priority. But are you really sure that this is the time-consuming thing? I can again only speak out of my own experience in establishing a chapter: We were able to copy-paste-adapt the general aims from Wikimedia Germany's bylaws (yes, see, we took the quasi-standard framework back then too), what we spent much time on were really the technical details, making sure that everything is compliant with Swiss law (and that we can get tax exemption), making sure that we've got all the election and votes details properly written down etc etc. And this is really something where ChapCom can only be of limited help because this differs just too much country-by-country. Nothing, frankly. A couple of months ago, we circulated the idea that we could "assign" ChapCom members to each prospective chapters, so that every chapter has its own point-of-contact for minor things (because it's easier to ask one person that to ask an entire group=mailinglist) *and* so that these ChapCom people can regularly follow-up on "their" chapters if things appear to be stalled. I just remember this now, to be honest, and I'm somewhat surprised that this was completely forgotten again, I think we need to revive this idea again. No, I believe the request would be for the chapter to make, because we don't even know how much the translation would cost... I believe (but I may stand corrected) that it's written in the step-by-step chapters creation guide that the WMF would cover certain expenses on request and if appropriate. If not, we definitely need to make this more public, but we also need to rely on people reading at least the things which are there. Yes, they are few and not up-to-date, we're working on this. Depends entirely on the availability of people, whether they are in holidays or not. It is often a bit of an arbitrary decision "Are we going to wait another couple days for X to cast his vote or not?", maybe we should standardise this once but we want to keep this as process-free as we can. But then, if you care to reread what you quoted: I wrote that Norway and Hungary were the unfortunate victims of the fact, that voting was generally stalled in ChapCom as long as we didn't know who could vote now and who not. I myself didn't vote on these until a couple of weeks ago, because the board was actually supposed to confirm my "promotion" from non-voting advisor to voting member, but somehow there was a miscommunication and the board didn't receive our request to vote on this. See above. Yes, see above again. We can help with experience, (we can at the end recommend approval or disapproval, but this should not be our primary function), we can guide in general terms and regarding specific things that we know about (I believe Andrew was even in a kind of Election Committee of WmUK 2.0) , we CANNOT provide jurisdiction-specific advice, we CANNOT write and translate bylaws and we CANNOT organise meetups for them. This is both an expertise and a time question - I know how much work it is to establish *one* chapter, writing one piece of bylaws etc., you can't expect the committee to do this for all chapters. And seriously, I do wonder a bit why it works so well with some chapters and so badly with others... Why, yes, that was my point. And now that we have more new members/advisors, it should be even better, but they still need time to get the "lay of the land" ;-) Sorry, here we seem to differ a bit: If I once see a process in the Wikimedia world which takes two sentences to describe, then I'm happy. The process is as simple as I wrote: Get a group together, write bylaws, translate, send in via email. If I use three paragraphs to describe this, surely the only thing that can happen is that the process becomes more complicated and more formal, and I oppose that. Yes, zero is not good. But you really failed to convince me why "two sentences" are not a solution - honestly, I'd have no idea how to fill an entire "chapter approval process" document, we're not using scheduling hearings, pre-trial motions, subpoenas and what not here, sorry. There is just not that much to write. Michael -- Michael Bimmler mbimmler(a)gmail.com

Agreed. The question of what the process is going to be is a separate question to the one of who will be appointed to the chapter seats. We're only on the former at the moment and there is no need to restrict that (although I would advise against trying to form a consensus of the general community or holding a general vote or whatever - the final decision on what to forward to the WMF board should be made by the chapter boards). Who gets to take part in appointing people is part of the process and shouldn't be discussed at this stage (otherwise we'll end up with discussion split over multiple venues).

I'm only responding to the following two segments because these appear to be the only parts where we actually disagree. On Nov 3, 2008, at 4:33 AM, Michael Bimmler wrote: I'm not talking about length for length's sake. Simply saying "Write bylaws, send them in english, done" does not cut it as a chapter approval process because it does not at all discuss what happens after that point, how ChapCom decides things, by what standard they use to determine if a chapter should be created and what litmus tests they use to determine the quantitative values of that, how the WMF actually approves a chapter, and then what happens next after that. That's all information that is part of the chapter approval process, and writing two lines simply fails to address any of that. See above. I'm referring to the process, not the procedure. I'm not saying it needs to say "Connect line 4a to form 12b" but it does need to say the things I mentioned in the paragraph above. -Dan