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

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 5:12 PM,  <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
>  Ill go through this one item at a time:

There's basically no sense in that, these aren't well thought-out
ideas, just pulled from the tip-top of my head. Think of them more as
ephemiral "visions" then concrete "strategies". Some may be garbage,
but likely most are not.

>  Are you suggesting that instead of people donating to the WMF, they donate
>  to WMF-Nebraska, which then funnels the money to WMF-Int'l.

Think about it like the girl scouts. When Girl Scout National
Headquarters (or whatever it is called) needs money, it sends the
girls out door-to-door to sell cookies. The girls are not all part of
an amorphous blob organization, they are organized into little local
troops. If I am not mistaken, a portion of proceeds goes to the local
organization, and the remainder goes to the national one.

The WMF does not currently have a door-to-door donation soliciting
apparatus. Of course, door-to-door might not be the best strategy
anyway, but it's a good example of the kinds of hands-on donation
strategy that we could employ. The Salvation army stands people with a
bell outside shopping malls. The Red Cross makes calls down it's list
of known donors. Purple Heart operates donation centers where people
can drop off clothes or other donatables.

Some or none of these strategies may work for us, but an on-the-ground
membership presence makes them all possible.

There are two major scenarios that I can think of right now, and
probably others that are a hybrid of these two, or something
completely different:
1) A large fundraiser, where people donate to "Wikimedia", with the
understanding that the proceeds are split as needed among local,
national, and international levels.
2) Multiple fundraisers, a big annual organized one where volunteers
collect for the national level, and smaller bake-sale style
fundraisers to benefit the local organization, as needed.

>  Who would take responsibility for maintaining these servers?

Who takes responsibility for maintaining the toolserver? If Chapter A
sets up a server to provide support for the WMF projects, I would
assume that Chapter A would maintain it unless an explicit agreement
is reached otherwise.

>  That is a nice idea. 100 used laptops = $30,000. Then what? Were would you
>  keep the laptops between gigs? Who would maintain them?

We were thinking about 30 laptops, and run a drive to have them
donated. They would be kept at a location designated by the chapter,
and would be maintained by volunteers from the chapter.

The WMF is filled to the brim with enthusiastic volunteers with a wide
variety of skills, hobbies, etc. There are people who would maintain
these laptops for fun, and there are people who would do it if the
chapter brass would write a nice recommendation on their next college
application/resume/whatever. Asking "who is going to do job X?" in a
volunteer organization as large and varied as ours is a little
unnecessary.

>  Paid editing? Would the community go for that?

Open source software groups have been supplying funding and grants to
volunteer developers for a long time. A chapter could post a bounty
for a particular task that it wants to see completed: a page/article
being written, a set of pictures taken, some source documents
faithfully uploaded, etc. Applicants write proposals, complete the
task to a prescribed standard of quality within a certain time frame,
and collect the bounty.

This is an idea that has even been kicked around by the developers,
using a similar bounty system to motivate people to develop certain
software features. I think Brion opposed the idea because of the
logistics behind it, but it's not unheard of.

>  I am not saying that these aren't good ideas per se, but they should be  much
>  clearer if you are going to use them to raise money. And this will reflect
>  on how (and if) money is raised, as well as on the mission of the chapter. To
>  become a 501 (c) 3 in the US, you have to have a clear mission statement. Is
>  the  mission, then, of the local chapter "To promote the use of free content
>  materials and wikis, especially among underprivileged youth"? "To facilitate
>  social interactions between contributors to Wikimedia projects"? "To acquire
>  copyrighted materials to release into the public domain"?

These problems that you are raising are common to all chapters, not
just the proposed US ones. The mission, in a nutshell, is to provide
and facilitate access to free information and educational materials.
There are many ways to pursue these goals, and as volunteers we are
all going to pick the ways that we think is best. We probably can't do
them all, but we can do some and some is better then the virtual none
that we are doing right now.

--Andrew Whitworth