[Foundation-l] Wikimedia Pennsylvania

[GerardM]

Hoi,
When you create many "chapters" not based on legal necessity, the
administrative overhead is such that it would be mind boggling. You can
organise it in any way you like within a national chapter and only when
there is a need or a use to coordinate activities you do.

I do not think it makes sense to allow such local chapters the same status
as national chapters. It does not make sense to give them all some rights to
use the WMF trademarks. Restricting this to the WMF for the USA only does
also not make sense, it seems to me not what the WMF is there for.
Thanks,
    GerardM

On 7/11/07, Robert Horning <robert_horning at netzero.net> wrote:
>
> FloNight wrote:
> > I suggest a national chapter with state chapters and then local regional
> > chapters inside the state chapters. This is the way most national U S
> > organizations are organized.
> >
> > Sydney
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
> Hardly.  Far more (especially non-profit) groups are organized along
> metro areas.  The earlier suggestion of using the regional airport code
> as a shorthand for the name of the chapter does seem far more appealing.
>
> I can think of a dozen different non-profit organizations who have
> significant local bureaucracy on a local level in America that often
> stick to metro areas.  And the U.S. Census Bureau defined metropolitan
> statistical areas (see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Statistical_Area) are very
> legitimate and non-arbitrary ways of breaking up the USA.
>
> Particularly when it comes to marketing research and establishing branch
> offices for corporations, it is very common to work with MSAs to
> determine what areas you ought to be serving.  Working on a
> state-by-state basis only seems to make sense in a political context
> such as state chapters of political parties.  Or if you have to deal
> with legal issues such as state bar associations.
>
> Most Americans live and work in certain regional cities and don't really
> give too much attention to what particular state they happen to live or
> work in... and often will live in one state and work in another, and go
> to church sometimes in a third state.  Seriously.  The newspapers and
> television stations cover the whole of each metro area.
>
> I am strongly supportive of the idea of having metro-area based chapters
> for sub-national chapters in the USA, and their charters can mention
> explicitly by name the particular MSA that they are intending to
> cover... if there is concern about overlapping coverage of multiple
> chapters.  If you look on that Wikipedia page, nine of the top 25 MSA
> cover multiple states (this isn't that unusual), and of note is also
> California and Texas, who both have multiple MSAs that would make as
> much sense to break up chapter-type organizations.  This isn't to say
> that a Los Angeles-based Wikimedia chapter can't help the San Francisco
> chapter get going, but in terms of coordinating efforts to market
> Wikimedia projects or host meetups and local versions of Wikimania, it
> makes much more sense to work on a metro area basis.
>
> How this applies to other countries is something that can be debated,
> although would Wikimedia-de be averse to allowing separate groups
> organizing in Munich and Berlin?  That is as close as I can get for a
> comparison to Pennsylvania, even though it would make more sense to
> compare Vladivostok and St. Petersburg if you were talking about a
> national chapter that included Wikimedia users from New York City and
> Honolulu.  National chapters for all of America is just a bit too much
> of a chunk to bite at once, and why it hasn't happened yet.
>
> -- Robert Horning
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>