Specs/membership

Original rough description

Roughly, the goal is

• to add to preferences a mention of default joining the foundation when creating an account, and adding a link to an opt-out option
• : add an option (possibly a tickbox) to the account creation page, allowing the person creating an account to automatically join the Wikimedia Foundation as well.

• set a form to join as a contributing member. The payement itself should be multilingual, include several different amounts, and allow the person to enter a preference for use of part of the fee. Generate a tax receipt for us contributors (deactivated for now).

  have an optionally accessible form allowing people to sign up as a contributing member of the Wikimedia Foundation right at account signup...

  offer people who sign up as contributing members different amounts of recurring contribution/member fees.

  provide an option to get tax receipts for the contributions (which would remain deactivated until the Wikimedia Foundation is fully accredited as tax exempt in all of the U.S. (and thus, by merit of international treaties, abroad as well).

• Find a solution to add as contributing members, editors who paid fees in a local chapter.
• : allow people who have paid membership fees/recurring contributions to local chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation to get registered with the Wikimedia Foundation proper as contributing members without paying twice -- they'd continue to pay the local chapter but would hold equal standing as people who hold their membership directly with the Wikimedia Foundation.

• store all data about the member as "confidential" data (another db or encryption). Make it available automatically for voting.

  mechanisms to allow Wikimedia Foundation members to seamlessly participate in Foundation elections, possibly w/o having to log in separately.

• Generate an access and interface of some sort, so that someone can consult/manage the list of members.

  allow for the list of Wikimedia Foundation members to be retrievable and manageable via an appropriate interface to the database holding that list.

I may forget points of course. Comments welcome :-)
Cheers, Anthere 00:24, 29 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Clarification by Jens

More recent implementation thoughts

Privacy

Information about foundation members will be significantly more complex than information about other Wikimedia users. It may be desirable to restrict the number of developers with access to that private information (below the number who currently have access to the primary user db).

To this end, the information could be stored in a seperate database, even on a separate server. Note that the kind of information (real name, billing address) required for membership is somewhat similar to that required for conference registration (like Wikimania), and could perhaps be stored in the same db / on the same machine / even using the same users table.