Thanks for doing this. I've my comments inline below.
<quote who="Gabriel Fishman" date="Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 06:13:19PM
-0400">
We are an organized group of volunteers supporting
Wikipedia outreach in
New England.
Great. I would also say that we're editors and contributors to
Wikipedia and a series of other wiki projects.
We are currently in the process of forming a regional
chapter
of the Wikimedia Foundation, the international non-profit organization that
runs Wikipedia and its sister projects, including Wiktionary, Wikiquote and
Wikinews.
I think we can lose this part. They don't need to know that we're not
an official organization yet and this probably isn't the time to educate
them about all the other WMF projects.
We would like to meet with you to discuss changing the
licensing of the
photos your office already posts online on Flickr. Right now, the license
terms your office uses prevent us from using these photos on
Wikipedia.
Great. I think you should just say, "we would like to ask you to
change" and then, in the end of the letter, say we'll meet if
necessary. We don't want people to brush us off because they don't
want a meeting or think we want to take up their time.
By making this change, you can help insure that
Wikipedia can use
high-quality photographs to illustrate articles on public officials,
government agencies and programs.
We should move this sentence to the end. It's weird to ask thm about
"this change" before we've told them what it is.
Your office is currently releasing these photos under
<>, but we would
like you to release the images under a CC-BY or CC-BY-SA license. CC-BY
allows anyone, including commercial entities, to distribute the work and to
adapt or remix it, under the condition that the work be attributed to the
original creator. CC-BY-SA adds an additional condition that anyone who
alters your photograph must release their version under the same license.
Implementing this change is trivial – it simply requires adjusting a
setting on your office’s Flickr account.
Great. Maybe we should emphasize some of the positive benfits of free
licensing. Something like, "allowing all citizens and organizations in
the commonwealth to use the material you're publish."
Regards,
Mako
--
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako(a)atdot.cc
http://mako.cc/
Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far
as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto