[Foundation-l] Chapters business from board meeting

[Michael Snow]

Picking up from my earlier message about the board meeting, I still have 
news about chapter-related items on our agenda. First of all, we 
approved two new Wikimedia chapters, one in Indonesia and the other in 
Brazil. Congratulations and welcome to both!

Another quick piece of business is that Frieda was the board's 
representative on the chapters committee. We decided to replace her with 
two people instead of just one - both Ting and Kat will be serving on 
the committee. In a sense, Ting was chosen because of his interest in 
the activity of existing chapters, making sure they function and are 
properly supported at the foundation level, and Kat was chosen for her 
interest in the building of new chapters, including sub-national ones. 
But of course they are equally full members of the committee, not just 
there for some specialized question.

What we did decide to do for specialized questions - specifically, the 
sub-national chapters issue - is create a working group to help with 
those. The board supports the development of sub-national chapters where 
this makes sense. To the extent that official encouragement or approval 
is still needed for this concept, it's there. We'll happily approve 
sub-national chapters that the chapters committee recommends to us. (In 
a way, you could say Hong Kong already is one.)

The working group will consist of Kat representing the board, Andrew 
Whitworth representing the committee, and Erik representing the staff. 
We anticipate that since this approach to creating chapters may prompt 
new questions, we'd like the working group to help answer them, and to 
give advice and support where needed. However, the working group is not 
a separate or additional approval process. Sub-national chapters can 
follow the same development process used by the existing chapters.

The staff also outlined a framework that may help deal with issues as 
they come up. This document has been shared with the committee and the 
other chapters previously. I'll pass along some of the preliminary 
answers it offers to potential sub-national chapters questions in a 
separate message.

--Michael Snow