[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Sweden

[Florence Devouard]

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> This Saturday we gathered in Stockholm to form a membership 
> association, to become a Swedish chapter of the Wikimedia 
> Foundation.  We were 51 people at the meeting, including chapters 
> coordinator Delphine Ménard.  The proposed bylaws, which have 
> received no protests from the chapters committee, were adopted by 
> the meeting with only minor changes in language.  The membership 
> fee was set to 100 kronor (roughly 11 euro) for the period until 
> the end of 2008. The association already has 36 members -- with 
> more expected.  A board was elected with Lennart Guldbrandsson as 
> the chairman.  He has already served as "press contact" for the 
> Swedish Wikipedia. I'm one of the board members.  More information 
> is found on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Sverige
> 
> It was a beautiful sunny day and the meeting went very smooth.  
> Delphine stayed until the next day, and joined some 10 Swedish 
> wikipedians for dinner on Saturday night.  We had a great time.
> 
> We're now only waiting for the formal approvement of the Wikimedia 
> Foundation before we can officially adopt our name.
> 
> Swedish tax law doesn't allow any tax deduction for donations, so 
> we don't have to bother with that.  (You can start to donate right 
> away!)  So far, we have a Swedish "Bankgiro" account 5822-9915, 
> which is the common way for Swedish households to pay their bills. 
> (What would be the best way for people outside of Sweden to donate 
> money and pay fees? Should we get a Paypal account? Let me know!)
> 
> If you consider that Sweden has 1/9 the population of Germany (9 
> million vs. 82 million), we already have 1/9 of the membership of 
> the German chapter (342 / 9 = 38). We're not in a competition, of 
> course, but as a new starting association we're looking for any 
> benchmarks, role models and guidelines that we can follow.
> 
> Is there any financial information from the Foundation on what 
> amount of its costs and incomes can be connected to Sweden? I 
> would personally find it interesting to know where we are today, 
> so we can see if we're improving or not.  There is a risk of 
> course that people donate to the Swedish chapter, where we dillute 
> the money on irrelevant or failed campaigns, instead of supporting 
> the Foundation as we should.  I certainly hope that we'll do more 
> good than harm, but are there any numbers to help us show this?

Great news Lars  :-)
Regarding numbers etc.. join internal-l first.

Ant