Anthere wrote: I agree with this, even though I also support the creation of local associations where a significant group of people desire it. The issue of official titles is a complete non-issue though. Titles are cheap and easy to generate -- just tell me what you want to be called, and you can be called that. --Jimbo

--- Yann Forget <yann(a)forget-me.net> wrote: Well, after the answer Jimbo gave you "Who do you represent" answer is : I am an official porte-parole from the Wikimedia Foundation "Do you have a local organisation" answer is : Not yet, but we are working on it. Legal and financial implications must be carefully considered before any official structure is set, to guarantee the proper growth of our projects and make best use of the money offered by our donators. The tee-shirts and promotional material : I think Erik had some tee-shirts printed or meant to be anyway. Organising full scale promotional material production will always be less expensive because of the large scale. I think Walter from nl also worked on promotional material at some point. I invite you to make use (and to improve) http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_promotion and in particular http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_T-shirts from cafepress and http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_promotion_material Perhaps Walter, Erik, Tom and you could set a "special promotion team" and work together to set us a full collection of possibilities and promotional material, from which all wikipedias could benefit. It is probably unecessary and financially not so interesting that all promotional material is done independently in each country. Better make use of each other ressources, and enlarge scale when possible. I, for one, would be happy to see these pages improve, and an easy way for each project to quickly have material available. How to find the money to have this material done : well, ask the Foundation for a grant. Certainly, a certain percentage of future budget can be used to print material, in particular since these ones are sold afterwards (hence, it is lending money). I suspect that a donation call will occur quite soon if I draw correct conclusions from my connection time :-) and discussions on irc. Surely, a little reasonable part of this money may be used for promotion. We may also make an extra call on the french wikipedia for money for promotion for your talks. My little left finger tells me we would get enough of it. This is not to say we should not have a french association (I think we should), but to say that once the Foundation is properly and efficiently organised, we can also go through the Foundation for some issues. If I may dare say, you are in particular looking for * support to prove you are not a random speaker * promotional material The proposition above give you that. On the other hand, if we hurry to make an association essentially for this * we risk doing mistake in the setting of the association * some one will have to organise a donation system * some one will have to take care of money issue (treasurer) * some one will have to take care of all these organisational points (like having teeshirt printed) I'd say, not many people are willing to do this. So, what about temporarily making best use of what we have at hand ? *this* is meant to be a solution *now*. I'd like us to think globally rather than locally. When there are few people to take care specifically of one issue, and when less money and sweat can be used to produce, we should just team up. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/