With respect to the submitted documents of incorporation, they are not
written in stone. Amendments can be filled at any time and may need to
be filled a couple of times to get wording that the Canada Revenue
Agency is willing to except as charitable.
The process is:
1) Incorporate as a non profit
2a) Submit application for charity status to Canadian Revue Agency
2b) Apply to the chapters committee to be recognized as an official chapter
3) If we wish to use ca.wikimedia.org this would be the time when we
would get the domain I assume.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, B.Sc.
WRT being part of the "steering committee" it was set up only for getting
this organization through the incorporation process. The documents has been
submitted. Only if it fails will more input be needed. If does pass the
bureaucratic hurtles and people disagree with any of the bylaw we can than
discuss amendments. Some of the previous email contain personal information.
While I am open to sharing this others may be less so.
WRT where we go next everyone has an equal opportunity to provide input. As
we are not formally an organization at this point there is no official
membership and no one to give official approval to carry something out. This
also means that any funding needed will be personally provided. Once we have
a bank account and a formal link with Wikimedia opportunities for funding
may appear. We will eventually need a site which will accept donations. I
think Alan Walker has expressed interest in creating something like this. It
is my hope that it will eventually go live at an address such as .
ca.wikimedia.org Wiki UK has a good design that we could emulate here
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK
If anyone has projects they wish to pursue please feel free to begin
discussion either here or on the meta site. The meta site of course could
use further development. Someone able to maintain translation into French
would be nice. Once incorporation has taken place I have a friend who has
agreed to help with this.
Projects I have been working on getting up and running include: 1) A
Wikimedia club at UBC. Another faculty member and Wikipedian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jbmurray has expressed interest in this.
2) Pushing for release of material by the Canadian government into the
creative common. A bunch of other great suggestions are listed here
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Canada/Potential_Projects
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, B.Sc.
There have been some concerns raised that not enough discussion has taken
place wrt incorporation before documents where submitted.
WRT contacting the chapters committee:
June13 2010 I contact Cary Bass about setting up Wiki Canada.
June 14th 2010 he sent this message to chap comm
I email chap comm list again July 21st, 2010 as I had heard no reply from
June, Jerry Yuyu replyed
I send this gentleman our bylaws Aug 4th, 2010
I email Sue Gardner July 30th, 2010 and she replied that she would help find
us someone from chap comm. for an ongoing interactions
Oct 6th 2010 I send all the documents of incorporation to Sue Gardner as I
had not heard further from chap comm
On Oct 18th this was forwarded to Erik Moeller and Barry Newstead
Documents of incorporatation where sent in to the Federal govenment early
Nov. 2010
I meat in San Fransisco with Barry newstead in mid Nov 2010
WRT getting other involved I have made hundreds of edits over the last year
to the meta site as seen here
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Canada making explicitly clear of
my desire to get Wiki Canada incorporated. I send personally emails to
everyone on the previous steering committee questioning them about a desire
to get the process rolling again. I think I emailed a few of them twice.
Anyone at any time has always been free to jump on in and help. The precess
has always been exceedingly open.
I am very excited to see the reply from Lodewijk and am looking forwards to
the chap comm getting involved in this process. Our documents and statement
of purpose are on the meta site. I would be happy to email chap comm our
most recent copy if they wish to contact me.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, B.Sc.
If the government rejects Wiki Canada ( as the name could be potentially
confused with the federal government ) we can discuss what other name we
should us.
The name of incorporation however is not that important as we will be
operating under the name "Wikimedia Canada" once we have signed a chapters
agreement. The reason we are incorporating under a different name is to keep
the government happy. We need to be at arms lenght from other organizations
to be a charity.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, B.Sc.
Hi everyone,
We are looking to set up a web site for use by this project. I recall that
some individuals had identified they had registered some Internet domains
that might be used by the organization when the need arose. If you do have
any domains registered that may be of use to the organization, please
contact me directly by email. As well, if you have an interest in helping
setup/maintain the web site, please indicate your interest in an email to
me.
Respectfully,
Alan Walker
--
View Alan Walker's profile on LinkedIn
[http://fastalan.com]
I think there may be some confusion regarding the activities of the steering
committee versus those of the community as a whole. The steering committee
came together to achieve one purpose: starting Wikimedia Canada. The first
step in that process is to fulfill the legal requirements of the Canadian
Government. James and I did our best to collect a group of people to meet
the minimum requirements to get that ball rolling. We have now made a major
step, the paperwork is filed with the Canadian government. When we realized
we had a document ready for signatures, we posted that update on the Meta
site.
At this stage nothing has been approved by the Canadian Government.
Approval make take several months and in fact may take several attempts on
getting the correct language prepared for approval. During this phase
public consultation is not necessary as this is a legal formality as much of
the work had already be done. As we have focused our efforts on completing
this step, we have not invested any time in organizing anything else.
Please be aware that this step has been attempted before and has failed.
The previous group invested a great deal of time in soliciting community
opinion and drafting a rough set of bylaws which has proven invaluable this
time around. Fortunately, we were able to salvage much of the work done by
the first steering committee and avoided some of the pitfalls that were
encountered.
Having said that, if anyone on this mailing list has any ideas about goals
for this group, please feel free to write them down and share them with the
rest of us. We will require people to step up and make a time commitment
should they wish to take on a leadership role. There are plenty of ideas
floating around; what we lack are volunteers to coordinate and organize
them. Please do not let the activities of the steering committee dissuade
anyone on this list from presenting ideas and discussing them amongst
yourselves. Most importantly, if anyone is interested in helping us
organize the volunteers, we could really use your help. Everyone here is a
volunteer and we all have limits as to how much time we can give to the
project.
Respectfully,
Alan Walker
Hi all,
Has there been any movement on a Toronto meet up in February or sooner?
I recently wrote this article in a Toronto weekly about how there
really needs to a Canadian chapter, and there's been some good
response.
http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/webjam.cfm?content=177996
I didn't actually know so much work had been done already into Wiki
Canada. It would be foolish to start a Toronto chapter with no
Canadian chapter... Or would it?
Anyway, I have a bunch of Wikipedians emailing me about starting a
Toronto chapter, wanting to meet soon, so I thought I should check in
here...
--
Josh
Hey Guys
Thought I would send out a up date for those who have not seen the meta
page. We have submitted the documents of incorporation ( as was the purpose
of the steering committee ). Have not heard back from the Federal government
yet and this could take another month or two. Was down in San Fransisco 1-2
weeks ago and met with people from Wikimedia. They look forwards to having
us on board.
To be clear the steering committee was only to deal with the legal process
of incorporation and charity application. With respect to project ( ie. what
do we plan to do ) discussion has been taking place here
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Canada/Potential_Projects and have
been ongoing for some time. More comments and involvement is welcome.
While we have ideas regarding what we wish to accomplish we still need to
figure out how to best accomplish them. Different people of course having
different interests. One of my top interests is increases Wikimedia
project's visibility in the academic environment. A number of us have a
paper in publication encouraging physicians to contribute to Wikimedia.
Once incorporated there may be potential to submit proposals for funding for
projects from Wikimedia Inc. Currently Wiki Canada has no resources other
than the volunteer efforts of those among us. Once we get a chapters
agreement signed we will than be able to us Wikipedia Canada in our
promotional efforts.
Anyway as with anything bureaucratic things go slow. We plan to have a
conference call in January.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, B.Sc.
Just to clarify.
I am suggesting we incorporate as Wiki Canada ( if that name is still
available ) and than operate as Wikimedia Canada. Thus we get the best of
both worlds.
--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, B.Sc.