Ziko van Dijk, 29/12/2012 17:36:
I'm confident to see soon a Wikimedia Medicine as the model for some other thematic organizations, and I am curious how it will evolve. Maybe I will never understand what is a "foundation" in the US. In the Netherlands or Germany, we distinguish between an association (with members) and a foundation (without members, only the board members). In the US, it seems, both can be a "foundation" and decide wether to allow members or not.
Members are not really the point, those are things which can vary a lot across countries and different kinds of foundations in the same country. In extremely general terms, I think it can be safely said that a foundation exists for the sole purpose of preserving its assets for a scope, while an association is a group of persons with some common scope. [Of course I know nothing on the topic and terms/forms can be stretched so much... but no less than Machiavelli (1511) supports this according to my etymological dictionary, and he's even more esteemed in USA than Italy/continental Europe. ;-)] See e.g. the WMF whose sole scope is preserving and increasing the value of the trademarks and whose board is self-appointed and self-perpetuating.
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