Hi,
Doing a bit more analysis on your suggestion.
On 7 September 2014 13:15, Pradeep Mohandas <pradeep.mohandas(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
The activity of the Chapter and the User Groups should flow to forward the
movement.
It does not appear that way. Your suggestion seems to point to a more
anarchist approach which has failed in the Indian context.
Chapter is not democratically elected by the Community. It is a subset of
the Community, recognised by WMF. There is a large
Community member pool
who are not Chapter members, whose membership stands between 130-150 people
at last count. The Chapter has to consider why this continues to be the
case after 4 years of its existence.
There are people who want to be a part of the chapter and there are people
who want to stay away. The chapter was created to be inclusive and not
exclusive as you are constantly trying to portray. For example, I am not a
part of the chapter simply because I find it difficult to transfer the
membership amount and form but I still consider the chapter to speak for
me. The current Govt at the Centre was not elected by a majority ie
greater than fifty percent. Rather it got the largest number of votes and
hence formed the govt. Trying to say that it was not democratically
elected would be a fallacy and one that I keep seeing in all your emails.
User Groups are a group of people who also similarly
get affiliation from
WMF and hence has a standing equivalent to the Indian Chapter in India.
Here -
http://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_user_groups
Quoting from the above link "User groups may or may not be legally
incorporated entities" which means that they can die at any moment the main
person who started it decides to do something else. Also, from the same
above link, there is nothing which says that they are democratic and
nothing which says that it is competing with the chapter. In fact it seems
that user groups can be formed in places where there are no chapter
activities.
My original email is only for Wikimedians in India to not consider the
Chapter as an eternal entity based on a mandate given
to it in 2010.
hmm seems very anarchistic but such an approach has failed before and will
fail again. For examples please look at all the FOSS groups in India that
are now dead.
SIGs can be formed only by members of the Chapter and not outside it. Till
Vishwa's email today, the Chapter has been
unwilling to support creation of
User Groups stating that SIGs can perform the same role. My clarification
in this case is only that this forces a Wikimedian to become a Chapter
member.
So now that you have a clarification in the positive direction on user
groups I hope all of you will start working :)
Regards