Talk:Membership fees/Proposition 1

Current proposal (membership and dues)

various considerations

According to current bylaws, the following membership classes may be found

1. Contributing Active
2. Volunteer Active
3. Life
4. Sustaining
5. Sustaining/Corporate
6. Honorary

Life and honorary are basically not concerned by the discussion below. Both pay no fees, "life" is basically Jimbo, and "honorary" is anyone the board will feel like making making a member for free, in recognition of serious implication. Current proposal hence concerns only the other groups.

According to current bylaws, volunteer are not paying fees. A volunteer member is anyone with at least one account, and should have registered to the Foundation.

If it is legally possible, I think volunteer should not need to "register". Just having an account should be enough, but it may be that real identity is legally recognise to accept some one as a volunteer member. If it is not, I suggest that we update that part of the bylaws.

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A user registering to WMF will be an active member to WMF
A user registering to a local chapter will be an active member to WMF, and the local chapter
The dues paid will be according to the price set either by WMF (first option), or by local chapter (second option). There will be no additional fee to belong to WMF if the user is an active member of the local association.

A contributing member may be anyone who has paid his dues for the year. He may be a participant or not. He may also be a person or a corporation.

Different amounts will be set according to various cases

• we will distinguish physical membership and moral membership (corporation)
• we will set different prices depending on the country
• we will set lower amounts for some categories, such as students, retiree etc...

A paying member of a local chapter will be automatically a paying-member of Wikimedia Foundation.

Dues could be paid once per year, or the member be proposed that a monthly amount is taken on his bank account.

At the same time than registration, we'll suggest that people can donate more (membership due + donation). In case of donation, we'll propose people to indicate possible preferences they could have on its future use.

I'd like to see all membership registration start from the wikimedia website, with choice of the country where the future member is living; When a local chapter exists, the member may be redirected to the local chapter due system. The membership information should perhaps be stored in a separate table, in relation with user table when the member is a participant.

Where to join

Becoming a member will be possible through the wikimediafoundation website, which will host membership related pages and dues paying system.

I propose that membership system is common to WMF and all chapters. This will have several benefits :

• it will be less work for local chapters to organise their membership and dues system. Once the local chapter is registered, all they need is to add references for their chapter on wikimediafoundation website. Translate the pages corresponding to their country (where they can explain the specific goals of their chapter). Have a paypal system or similar system.
• it will allow to keep track more easily of who is member and who is not (especially when we have a user united system)
• it will reinforce the feeling of a world wide project, though respecting diversity

This of course, implies that wikimediafoundation becomes multilingual.

The membership pages

On the web site itself : there will be a link "Membership" on the main page of the foundation website. This link will lead to a page on the wikimediafoundation website itself, with - information about "membership" (such as reminding the difference between a volunteer and an active member etc....) - collection of relevant links (such as the membership FAQ, financial report etc...) - and link to a "become an active member".

The "membership" page should be linked from various places in the project (perhaps in "user preferences" or in "special pages").

We should aim at proposing the "membership" pages in several langues as soon as possible, for example en, de, ja, fr and es. It could be one page only, or a page with several languages depending on complexity (see proposition by CommunityWiki on that matter).

The page "become an active member"

This page will be on the wikimediafoundation website, in several languages if possible (most world wide organisations propose a half dozen languages, we should perhaps aim at this). A limited number of languages can be managed on one page only. It should explain the global organisation of the membership system, and the existence of local chapters. This page should propose a menu, with choice of the country. The person select the country he is living in. He accesses a page "Become an active member - country"

This page "Become an active member - country" could be accessed directly from projects possibly.

The page "become an active member - country

Which will be the benefit of asking participant his country ?
I see three benefits, some of which are immediate, while others are more "long term" vision

First benefit : the dues will be of a different amount depending on the country where the member is living.
For now : we won't necessarily set a different amount for each country, but rather will set 3 or 4 groups of countries.

Second benefit : Membership page will be in a language understandable by any future member from this country
This page will be per default in english to start with, but should over time be in the language(s) spoken in the country. We could at least quickly start with languages such as german, french, japanese and spanish, and have multilingual pages for all countries where these languages are used.

Third benefit : This is a more long term vision. I expect that in a couple of years, we will have a whole bunch of local chapters. It make sense to propose automatically to users of a specific country, to pay membership at the local chapter of his country of choice.
Right now : given that there is only one chapter, I suggest that German membership is proposed per default for all countries where german is spoken (or to Germans from Germany only), and that WMF membership is proposed by default on all other country pages.
In any cases, it should be possible to anyone, at anytime, to support WMF or to support any local chapter of his choice, whatever his country. It may not be sound from a strictly financial perspective for the member, but members should have the opportunity to choose to support directly the Foundation itself (even if they have a local chapter in their country) and members should have the opportunity to support a local chapter even though it is in a different country (for example, a french speaking living in Japan may wish to support the chapter in France, as he knows this latter goal is to broadly support french language). Over time : while keeping possible at any time to join WMF or any chapter directly, I guess that when many chapters are set, most pages will focus on the local chapter(s) available in their country. It can be decided on a case by case option, which countries are redirected to a local chapter/WMF page or to a simple WMF page. For example, German chapter may decide he is primarily meant to cover Germany. In this case, the dual page will only appear when the user select Germany

To summarize, it will be possible to register as a member

• to Wikimedia Foundation itself (in all cases)
• to a local chapter (if there is one)