Interesting thoughts...

I should caution that starting a new 501(c)(3) is not a trivial task. The process itself requires several hundred dollars and a true dedication to cutting through paperwork.

It helps if you're related to people who do this sort of thing for a living :).

Perhaps we can try

completing the incorporation process via a wiki? Or at least documenting our progress as to assist other chapters?

That's a *really* good idea, but it would depend on how our lawyer feels about it. OTOH, we have some of the best law schools in the world here in Pennsylvania, and if we could do a bit of outreach we might be able to convince a professor or two to make a class project out of this using Wikibooks and Wikiversity. Wikibooks in particular has had a few projects where students collaborate to write a textbook as their major assignment, and Wikiversity has an active outreach program of its own for developing associations with "brick and mortar" universities. That would be an ideal project in some ways, at it would be doing an outreach project that helps us build our outreach capacity, while at the same time leaving a trail that the next chapter can follow. We'd also almost certainly get some good press out of such a project.

-johnny.

____________________________________________________________________________________ Sick sense of humor? Visit Yahoo! TV's Comedy with an Edge to see what's on, when. http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/222