This Saturday we gathered in Stockholm to form a membership 
association, to become a Swedish chapter of the Wikimedia 
Foundation.  We were 51 people at the meeting, including chapters 
coordinator Delphine Ménard.  The proposed bylaws, which have 
received no protests from the chapters committee, were adopted by 
the meeting with only minor changes in language.  The membership 
fee was set to 100 kronor (roughly 11 euro) for the period until 
the end of 2008. The association already has 36 members -- with 
more expected.  A board was elected with Lennart Guldbrandsson as 
the chairman.  He has already served as "press contact" for the 
Swedish Wikipedia. I'm one of the board members.  More information 
is found on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Sverige

It was a beautiful sunny day and the meeting went very smooth.  
Delphine stayed until the next day, and joined some 10 Swedish 
wikipedians for dinner on Saturday night.  We had a great time.

We're now only waiting for the formal approvement of the Wikimedia 
Foundation before we can officially adopt our name.

Swedish tax law doesn't allow any tax deduction for donations, so 
we don't have to bother with that.  (You can start to donate right 
away!)  So far, we have a Swedish "Bankgiro" account 5822-9915, 
which is the common way for Swedish households to pay their bills. 
(What would be the best way for people outside of Sweden to donate 
money and pay fees? Should we get a Paypal account? Let me know!)

If you consider that Sweden has 1/9 the population of Germany (9 
million vs. 82 million), we already have 1/9 of the membership of 
the German chapter (342 / 9 = 38). We're not in a competition, of 
course, but as a new starting association we're looking for any 
benchmarks, role models and guidelines that we can follow.

Is there any financial information from the Foundation on what 
amount of its costs and incomes can be connected to Sweden? I 
would personally find it interesting to know where we are today, 
so we can see if we're improving or not.  There is a risk of 
course that people donate to the Swedish chapter, where we dillute 
the money on irrelevant or failed campaigns, instead of supporting 
the Foundation as we should.  I certainly hope that we'll do more 
good than harm, but are there any numbers to help us show this?

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars <at> aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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