[Wikimediaau-l] WMAU incorporation update: new Statement of Purposes

[Brianna Laugher]

Hi all,

 An update on our incorporation process.
 As you may know, we members held our incorporation meeting over a week
 ago, to approve our rules
 <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Australia/Rules_for_Wikimedia_Australia_Inc>
 to ask Consumer Affairs Victoria (CAV) to allow us to incorporate. We
 also appointed Brian Salter-Duke as the Public Officer to carry out
 that process with CAV.

 Brian did this and CAV have not accepted our rules, saying that that
 our Statement of Purposes (SoP) was "not sufficient". (As a reminder,
 it was "Wikimedia Australia Inc. is an independent non-profit
 association that aims to support and promote the creation and
 distribution of freely licensed cultural works, especially the
 projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, and the technology that supports
 those projects.") Apparently it was not long or definitive enough.
 Brian may wish to expand on his communications with them...

 Now, should we have known this would happen? Not really. Our original
 SoP was based on the Swedish one. There are no restrictions in the Act
 about how a SoP is supposed to be. There are some suggestions on CAV's
 website, but there is no strong guide. So perhaps we took a bit of a
 gamble by having a quite short SoP, but that's about it. It's kind of
 a pain, but not the end of the world.


 So, what next? Do we need to have another incorporation meeting, or
 something like an SGM?

 According to CAV, (John spoke to them), we don't. We (the committee)
 find this quite surprising, because if we were applying our rules, we
 would need a meeting to change them, and if we're not, then, we just
 need the standard incorporation meeting. But hey, if we save one
 meeting, that saves a lot of fuss.

 Before we submit to CAV again, though, we still need two levels of
 approval - members, and chapcom. Luckily our chapcom approval doesn't
 need to go to the WMF Board again, so we will do both levels of
 approval concurrently.

 So, there is a new draft Statement of Purposes at
 <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Australia/SoP>. This one is
 heavily based on the German chapter's equivalent statement.

 I suggest we have 1 week of feedback and tweaking, then 1 week of
 voting via email. If positive votes are more than the negative votes,
 the committee will submit the new SoP to CAV.
 If people feel that is overkill, we could just have 1 or 2 weeks of
 collective mulling-over, but a vote may be useful as this is a rather
 "out of order" process.

 So:
 * please go read the proposed new statement of purposes at
 <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Australia/SoP>
 * Please give feedback about it here or on the talk page, if you find
 it acceptable or not (and if not, why!)

 thanks,
 Brianna
 WMAU Secretary


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