But our movement is grassroots. I think that any fixed model has a root problem of being seen as a top down imposed one. I think what we should do is draw guidelines and ideas on few models how things can be organized and then let volunteers to go out of the model if they have good reasons to do it.

2)
I think nobody should have any special right without earning it. For example in Chapter elected board members I think it is not fair that chapters doing almost nothing have the same voting power than others working a lot. Also I cant understand why Glam wiki project that is more active than many chapters doesn’t have its voice. And this is not only a mater of being fair with them this is also a mater of having involved the organizations that can bring more valuable inputs.

If we where to redesign the entire system my proposal would be let the power emerge from the editing communities and let them evaluate the results of each organization and grant those rights accordingly to this evaluation.

3)
My opinion is that chapters and other legal entities are tools to do the job. I think we must start from the end. Once a group has an idea of its goals then they can see what tool is needed and create the simplest one. I guess that the natural way could be start without a legal entity in an informal way. Then if the need of signing agreements and managing continuous flows of money appears go for a legal entity. When the activities of this legal entity continues growing then give them a formal recognition as long as they gain the confidence of the editing communities and then grant them progressively the special rights (or perhaps we should say the tools) they deserve and they need.

First, I think one thing we are missing is cross-project collaboration. I mean there are wikiprojects, and some of them have enough critical mass, but others are just suffer from severe understaffing. To give a fictitional example, if you have two high-energy physicists on en.wp, one on fr.wp, one on de.wp, and one on ja.wp, they can not do much in their projects, but if they come together they will have enough power to organize smth. WLM is a good example of such collaboration, and it shows that (a) the language barrier is not so much of a problem and (b) even if individual projects are doing just fine, there is still some added value in collaboration. But I have never seen this collaboration going beyond GLAM. Chapters together with wikiprojects would be natural entities to organize this collaboration. Indeed, WLM was mainly done by chapters, though some were actively involved, whereas others merely agreed to have their name provided someone takes an initiative. (And some were not interested, and it was the end of WLM in their respective countries). These efforts can be one measure of success.

The second issue is that often there must be a local organization legally representing WMF in a particular country. This is needed for organization, lobbying and other purposes. Chapter is obviously such an organization. Sometimes there have been huge success, like for instance with the German chapter. Sometimes there are problems, like for instance permanent scandals with WMF Brazil or complete untransparency of WMF Russia which does not accept members and doe not have a public mailing list. Obviously every chapter needs to convey some activity, for instance, filing a tax declaration with authorities, or have meetings of the chapter members, but if there is smth beyond this activity, which is clearly directed not to the maintaining the activity of the chapter, but to the legal and organizational activity in line with the WM mission, this is another measure of success. If the chapter only serves to maintain its own existence it is not successful.

Concerning the separation, I believe we need all the branches: community projects, geographically oriented chapters, and also topical groups. We should not forget that bureacracy has a tendency to expand and it never shrinks, which always attracts people not really interested in WM mission, but rather in getting to the center of attention for free.