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

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 9:28 AM, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com> wrote:
>  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".

A big issue that is being overlooked is that these organizational
efforts are volunteer-based. Volunteers are going to self-organize in
a manner that seems most reasonable to them. Canada is the perfect
example of a country that I felt should not pursue a national chapter,
but instead should pursue provincial ones. Part of my reasoning was
the large size of the country which makes travel prohibitive, but
another was the french/english language barrier that tends to follow
provincial boundaries. Of course as an outsider, what I would expect
and what becomes the reality are two different things. When I posed
the suggestion to the Canadian chapter steering committee, it wasn't
something they wanted to consider in the least.

The important point is that volunteers are going to self organize in a
way  that is good for them. We, as outsiders, might suggest that many
countries try subnational organizations first. However, the people who
are doing the organizing are going to do things as they see fit.
Canada and Russia want to pursue national chapters (and that's
perfectly fine!), but much of the organizational work in the US has
been locally and regionally based. Volunteers know what is best for
them, and it makes little sense for us to try to shoehorn them into a
model that isn't right. The more flexibility we allow, the more
success people are going to have in more countries.

--Andrew Whitworth