[Foundation-l] A question to all board candidates...

Sun May 30 09:01:51 UTC 2004

--- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> > Question : what do you do ?

Thanks for answering Mav

> We need to first look at the formation of the German
> chapter/association in
> order to develop rules and procedures for setting up
> chapters. Once that is
> done we could refer the person to that documentation
> and provide assistance as
> needed.

Nod. That rejoin Angela suggestion to set a page on
meta to "start a local chapter".

This said, that seems to imply that the German
association is a good model.

There would, at the least, have to be enough
> dues-paying Wikimedia
> members in that person's area in order to make it
> possible to have a viable
> chapter.

That is an interesting point.
Is it mandatory that there are enough dues-paying
members, or would not it be more important that there
are enough motivated people in that country ?
It is not necessary mandatory that money is collected
from members, however, it is essential that enough
motivated people set and manage the association
properly ihmo

Once that is the case, and enough of those
> members indicate a
> willingness to actually participate in a chapter,
> then the foundation could
> provide some seed money to set-up the legal
> framework.

Yes, I fully agree with this.
It would be good that Wikimedia foundation provides
the starting money, rather than that foundators of the
association are asked to pay on top of their free work
for this to proceed.
I am dubious of the move that *requires* people to pay
to participate to Wikimedia distribution

Then to stay a Wikimedia
> chapter a *minimal* set of guidelines must be
> adhered to (such as keeping a
> certain set number of active chapter members and
> reporting chapter-specific
> finances and activities to the foundation).

It would be probably enough to have all associations
agree to follow Wikimedia mission status. Which is why
I proposed that this one is carefull reviewed, so that
we could weave proper links between all associations

I would
> also like to see each
> chapter president have at least a honorary role in
> the foundation itself
> (perhaps even as honoray trustees). 

I think it would be correct that some of the money
collected by the chapter goes to the Foundation, if
only to participate to our common frame (servers,
bandwith...). But then it is certainly fair, that
local chapter participate to the decisions in terms of
budget.

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