[Foundation-l] Serbia and Montenegro

[Erik Moeller]

On 5/24/06, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> What would be neat,
> however, would be the existence of a supra-national organization that could coordinate the
> activities of different national chapters in the same region. Wikimedia Europa, for example,
> and/or even smaller coordinating bodies such as Wikimedia Balkans.

That was my first thought, too, but I don't think this direction is
necessarily right. First of all, you end up with another legal body
with another to-be-(s)elected group of representatives: more
bureaucracy. More importantly, cooperations between chapters are
likely going to be an "ad hoc" thing:
- "Let's have an Eastern Europe meeting."
- "Let's cooperate between DE and AT for a media campaign."
- "Let's start a metadata project for digitized documents in Croatian
and Serbian."
- "Let's approach a Commonwealth organization for a grant."

They can be derived from languages, regions, political associations,
history, personal contacts, etc. Unless you want "meta-organizations"
that model all these potential points of contact between chapters, I
think what is really needed is simply efficient cross-chapter
communication. In cases where you would want to say "Organized by
Wikimedia Europe", you can instead say "Organized by the Wikimedia
chapters of Europe". Where you need a single central organization to
receive money, you can use the WMF.

Is there a real need for anything else?

Erik