There have been a few disjoint discussions about US chapter formation recently. Austin mentioned this in a foundation-l thread last month; Alex756 yesterday mentioned the idea of a regional chapter, and I note he had started a page about "wikimedia new york", reminding me that there is a [dormant] mailing list for such discussions. Those who are interested, please sign up for the mailing list, and use Meta, so the discussions do not get too fragmented.
Outstanding issues : Does it make sense to have regional chapters? How could a national chapter work in a large country with distributed clusters of users? What are the legal issues involved? (Alex can help here). What are possible projects to take on?
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaus-l http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_United_States_of_America http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_New_York
Cheers, SJ
[cc:ing others who have recently brought up related ideas but aren't yet on that list.]