[Foundation-l] Chapter-selected Board seats - brainstorming

[Milos Rancic]

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 7:52 PM, effe iets anders
<effeietsanders at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/5/1, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com>:
>
> > Well, some people are talking about US chapterS, but shouldn't there
>  >  be only one chapter per country? Otherwise, other chapters could get
>  >  the idea to split up and have e.g. 16 chapters in Germany.
>  >  Especially when chapters will have the right to vote for Board
>  >  members, one will have to be strict about that.
>  >  Ziko
>  >
>
>  My personal go on this is: Discourage too much splitting up, but
>  further assume good faith and let the chapters work out the most
>  practical solution. At the end, that is what it is all about.

There are significant problems related mostly to area of covering. WM
Serbia was organized quickly because maybe more than 80% of people
interested in chapter are living in Belgrade metropolitan area (2M of
inhabitants; Serbia has something more than 7M of inhabitants), which
is well connected by public transport. Outside of Belgrade we had a
lot of problems to organize anything sensible. Even in the two next
cities by size (200-300K) we had a lot of problems to make any kind of
sustainable organization.

Slovenians, for example, have a problem because the most important
Wikimedians are all over Slovenia and they are not able to have
regular meetings. Because of that, they realized that they should
organize themselves formally through Slovenian LUG.

Canadian Wikimedians have the similar problem. There are ~35M of
Canadians at the territory of the second largest country in the world.
I may imagine that out of big cities they may have a lot of problems
in organizing chapters at the province level.

I heard that even Polish Wikimedians have problem in making regular
meetings. They also have a lot of significant contributors all over
Poland. And, unlike Germany, Poland doesn't have a good amount of good
highways and railways.

So, I really think that it is not rationally to think about one US
chapter. The similar applies for other big countries. However, it
*may* be reasonable to organize national level chapters in, for
example, Russia, China and Brazil. People are concentrated around big
cities and there is not yet a well enough Internet infrastructure all
over those countries. However, those chapters should make a plan how
to initiate subchapters; i.e., to federalize their own chapter. The
same process, but from a particular chapters to the federation at the
national level may be applied to US chapters. (Yes, it is good to have
one common body inside of one country.)

At the other side, I really don't think that WMF should work as
"Wikimedia USA", too. Its role is to be the common body to all of the
chapters and Wikimedians and it should leave national level
organization to some other people.