I'm not sure about Andrew's idea for using ideas as a membership requirement. It has a certain elegance, but some sort of follow-up on ideas would impress me more :).
Never take my first idea on a subject seriously! Brainstorming is supposed to be more of a traumatic event.
I don't know that we need to incorporate before announcing on mailinglists, but we certainly should if we're going to announce on newspapers (in fact, it would be nicer to have tax-exemption status before we start raising money for official press releases). I'll be happy to help write a mailinglist announcement later today (when it gets too hot to do real work).
...In my haste I already sent out a message to the foundation-l, announcing that we were working on a new chapter, what our intentions were, and that we would appreciate input. If you check foundation-l posts from late last night and this morning there are already a few replies. Sorry for jumping the gun on this!
Simple money-raising at this point should really be on the back burner, along with all talk of incorporation. They are both definite goals that we should be working on, but we need to get our priorities straight: Get approval from the WMF, generate lots of interest, attract lots of potential members, and brainstorm for lots of ideas of projects and fundraisers, etc. Once we have plenty of momentum, we can do things like incorporate more fluidly and more publicly.
--Andrew Whitworth
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