[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Pennsylvania

[Andrew Lih]

On 7/10/07, Dan Rosenthal <swatjester at gmail.com> wrote:
> I already forgot who it was but someone raised a very good point:
> What to do about the District of Columbia? It shares so much of it's
> area with Maryland and Virginia. You almost have to do it regionally
> there.
>
> Which leads to a second point: is membership in one state or regional
> chapter going to be made exclusive from membership in another one? Or
> will that be left up to the chapters to determine (i.e. WM Montana
> may require you to be a montana resident, WM Arizona may not)?

The way that Chris has described it so far, it doesn't much matter, as
there are no dues or formal membership guidelines. If it does come
down to dues and a chapter getting a share of the dues payments, and
providing benefits (discounts, privileges) and membership assistance,
then it will be an issue.

There are plenty of nonprofit community and membership organizations
in the US that have regional chapters that can tackle the legal issues
so that it's not just a state-law-oriented partitioning. I'm confident
we can learn from those endeavours and have the option to have logical
metro-area groupings rather than strict state groupings, or a mix of
the two.

-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)