Friday, August 22, 2008

Some chapters-related news

This post isn't strictly on-topic, but news has been scarce in the area of USA chapter development so I am trying to fill in the gaps with other related news.

First and foremost, the Chapters committee is looking for new applicants to fill it's ranks. We are looking to fill spots for both members and advisers. We don't have a set quota of seats to fill, but at the moment we are probably looking to fill more seats then we have received applications. Ideal candidates will have some interest in existing chapters and in the development of new chapters. We would like people who are multilingual to help in communications, but we really need people who have some level of english fluency to communicate with the committee.

If you're going to send in an application, we would like to hear a little bit about you. Where do you live? What languages do you speak/read/understand? What are your opinions on chapters as they currently are? What do you think we can do with chapters in the future? What is your level of participation in WMF projects and, if any, the open content movement at large? Send an email to chaptercommittee-l@lists.wikimedia.org with the answers to these questions, if you're interested.

In other news, yesterday we had a second meeting with organizers from the Catalan group. As a recap, the Catalan language is spoken in a large area of Europe that includes parts of Spain, France, Italy, and Andorra. The Catalonians want to create their own chapter, but this would obviously overlap with existing chapters in France and Italy, and a chapter in development in Spain. I need to go over chat logs again to make sure I know all the details (I was working at the time and could only pay partial attention) but it looks like things are moving ahead slowly and cautiously. In the worst case, they create a non-profit organization but are never recognized as an official chapter. In the best case, we find some agreement between all parties involved and we get a new Catalonia chapter (or "metachapter", or some other term that shows they are recognized but not a traditional "Chapter"). It will be interesting to see where things go with this.