[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Pennsylvania

[Robert Horning]

FloNight wrote:
> I suggest a national chapter with state chapters and then local regional
> chapters inside the state chapters. This is the way most national U S
> organizations are organized.
>
> Sydney
>
>
>
>   

Hardly.  Far more (especially non-profit) groups are organized along 
metro areas.  The earlier suggestion of using the regional airport code 
as a shorthand for the name of the chapter does seem far more appealing.

I can think of a dozen different non-profit organizations who have 
significant local bureaucracy on a local level in America that often 
stick to metro areas.  And the U.S. Census Bureau defined metropolitan 
statistical areas (see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Statistical_Area) are very 
legitimate and non-arbitrary ways of breaking up the USA.

Particularly when it comes to marketing research and establishing branch 
offices for corporations, it is very common to work with MSAs to 
determine what areas you ought to be serving.  Working on a 
state-by-state basis only seems to make sense in a political context 
such as state chapters of political parties.  Or if you have to deal 
with legal issues such as state bar associations.

Most Americans live and work in certain regional cities and don't really 
give too much attention to what particular state they happen to live or 
work in... and often will live in one state and work in another, and go 
to church sometimes in a third state.  Seriously.  The newspapers and 
television stations cover the whole of each metro area.

I am strongly supportive of the idea of having metro-area based chapters 
for sub-national chapters in the USA, and their charters can mention 
explicitly by name the particular MSA that they are intending to 
cover... if there is concern about overlapping coverage of multiple 
chapters.  If you look on that Wikipedia page, nine of the top 25 MSA 
cover multiple states (this isn't that unusual), and of note is also 
California and Texas, who both have multiple MSAs that would make as 
much sense to break up chapter-type organizations.  This isn't to say 
that a Los Angeles-based Wikimedia chapter can't help the San Francisco 
chapter get going, but in terms of coordinating efforts to market 
Wikimedia projects or host meetups and local versions of Wikimania, it 
makes much more sense to work on a metro area basis.

How this applies to other countries is something that can be debated, 
although would Wikimedia-de be averse to allowing separate groups 
organizing in Munich and Berlin?  That is as close as I can get for a 
comparison to Pennsylvania, even though it would make more sense to 
compare Vladivostok and St. Petersburg if you were talking about a 
national chapter that included Wikimedia users from New York City and 
Honolulu.  National chapters for all of America is just a bit too much 
of a chunk to bite at once, and why it hasn't happened yet.

-- Robert Horning