2009/5/26 joseph seddon life_is_bitter_sweet@hotmail.co.uk:
2009/5/24 Michael Peel email@mikepeel.net:
If you have any views or suggestions about the agreement, please leave comments on the talk page, or feel free to edit the draft response itself. I hope that a complete response can be written before the next board meeting (this coming Tuesday) so that we can approve it then and get it sent off.
SLOW DOWN! We don't have a lawyer yet. We can't do this until we have one. Informal discussion between chapters is fine, but we aren't ready to form a committee to do anything even vaguely official yet.
Well the committee has been formed. We now have to work as best we can with this commitee to ensure all issues are covered.
I've advised Mike on this in detail, but I'll put a summary here. If this committee is going to be negotiating with WMF before we've spoken to a lawyer, then we want to have nothing to do with it. You do not enter negotiations until you have sought appropriate legal advice. Seeking legal advice after the negotiations is too late. By then you have already agreed to stuff and even if you get the wording of the contract changed what you originally agreed to may still be taken into account when interpreting any ambiguities in the final wording. Finding a lawyer shouldn't take more than 2 or 3 weeks if we put our minds to it, I'll be making a presentation to the board meeting tonight about that, we need to either avoid the committee until then or make sure the committee sticks to discussions within the chapters and doesn't enter into discussions with WMF.