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

[Milos Rancic]

On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Andrew Whitworth <wknight8111 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  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.

I agree. A big problem in perception is a way of building the
organization. While it matters what WMF needs, much more important is
what do Wikimedians in some area need. Building a dysfunctional
organization just because it looks nice at a paper is not so wise.

I afraid that WM Russia and WM Canada will be equivalents of WM Moscow
and WM South Ontario (the last one will have more contacts with
Wikimedians from Illinois than with Wikimedians from Vancouver) -- if
they don't start to work immediately on federalization of their
chapters.

Note, also, that logistical equivalents for European chapters meeting
will be their national chapters meetings. Even we will have in the
near future WM Russia and WM Canada which function well, it will be
obvious that those chapters will be much more like "European chapters"
than, let's say, WM NL or even WM DE.