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

[Delphine Ménard]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 2:03 PM, Wily D <wilydoppelganger at gmail.com> wrote:
> And America, of course, is not the only country terribly unsuited to a
>  national chapter.  As noted Russia, but also Canada, Brazil,
>  Australia, India and so on make national chapters implausible.

I disagree.

>  Vancouver to Halifax is a 4500 km *flight* - even splitting the
>  difference and meeting in Winnipeg would mean also every Canadian
>  editor would have to fly (perhaps 3% of the population lives within a
>  10 hour drive) Even provincial chapters in Canada would be a terrible
>  burdern - Thunder Bay to Toronto (presumably where we'd have Ontario
>  meetings) is a mere 1383 km drive along what are probably the worst
>  maintained roads south of 60 (you can drive it in ~16 hours if you're
>  good at patching a gas tank).  The flights are only 2 hours and $415 -
>  this is a nontrivial barrier for a lot of the wikipedia types (I
>  certainly couldn't afford that).
>
>  A "general solution" for excessively large (and especially excessively
>  large, empty countries) is really needed here, so let's not focus too
>  much on the American case.


See, that's interesting. Because as far as I know, Australia now has a
national chapter, Russia has just finished putting together their
bylaws and they have gone for approval to the Board of Trustees of the
Wikimedia Foundation, Canada and India have mostly talked about
national chapters in their ongoing efforts about creating a chapter.
Argentina, which is another rather large country, has also a national
chapter, and they, from the start integrated the idea that there could
be regional "sections".

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that in the
Wikimedia case, the US is unique not because it is large, but rather
because the Foundation is there to start with. Let us try and imagine
for a moment that the Wikimedia Foundation was not a US based
organisation, but a... Andorran based one. Would people in the US
start with metro-area chapters, state-based chapters, regional
sections? Or with a national one?

I thin it's actually worth thinking about. Maybe we could also look at
other international organisations and learn from their own
organisation within the US. Andrew gave a few hints about Girls scouts
etc. What is the reality? How do world-wide present organisations work
within the US? Red Cross, Greenpeace, SOS children villages etc? Do
they have one national organisation and then more targeted sections
that act within the national organisation? Are they a constellation of
many independant organisations?

Any help on this truly welcome.


Delphine

-- 
~notafish
http://blog.notanendive.org

NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails sent
to this address will probably get lost.