This damn discussion format doesn't allow long posts (1000 chars max), so I will break this down into a few different posts.

Since we have a thead about long term goals, I wanted to start one about the here and now and share my thoughts about this.

1) establish the name of the club (or association or whatever we call it).
1A) establish our mission statement - if people are ok with the one I've propsed with 85HP's addition, we can roll with that. If we need to get more specific we can amend it later.

2) select the officers of said club. I figure we could start small and we can always change and add roles when the club grows. As I see it, perhaps we can start with:
President, vice president, treasurer and secretary (the basic American leadership package). Maybe a skeleton board of directors so that we have a spread of geographical representation. CORSA has geography broken down into Eastern, Central and Western, with Canada and other countries associated with one of these three regions as geographically appropriate. I saw the breakdown recently and if I can come across it I'll share it. But maybe for now since we're small we can have one person representing each region to be expanded when we actually have some traction.

3) Given the name and leadership, we can then file ourselves as a non-profit.

4) we should talk about dues. If we don't have a strong handle on expenses we could take a shot in the dark and suggest something we think we all is reasonable and put the money in escrow until we start incurring expenses. CORSA charges $45/year to members who opt for the printed magazine and $37 for those who just get it electronically. Even though our expenses will be significantly less than CORSA's our size to start with will be much smaller (CORSA has about 4000 members), so charging something similar would help to get a few nickels together to spend on things we need to spend money on (and is about the cost of a tank of gas in my LW300).

4) Continued:

Also I'd like to have some dues established before we start wide-scale recruitment. We'd like to recruit high "quality" members, meaning ones who care enough to spend a few bucks to join a club with our club's mission rather than a whole bunch of transient people who pop in and try to influence the club's direction then pop out. So reasonable dues shouldn't be a barrier to those committed to the mission.

CORSA's local/regional clubs charge their own dues and operate somewhat independently but are recognized by CORSA. We may want to talk about how we want to manage the local clubs/chapters (I have a lot of experience with the way CORSA does this both the good and the bad and have some thoughts I can share in its own thread).

After the above, we will be an actual club, so we can actively recruit people beyond our little SF.com social club. We can have a discussion about the best way to go about doing that.

Looks like a good outline so far.

I'm starting to get some content in the Forming a nonprofit thread that should speak to (3). Trying to use the "divide and conquer" approach there, breaking the problem down into a series of steps.

Not real sure why there is any interest in going through the hassle of becoming a IRS recognized non-profit.

Yeah, I agree with OldNuc. No doubt let's be aware of the process for incorporating, but in the meantime focus on creating the structure for the club and recruiting.

OK, so I think we're pretty close on (1) and (1a) that Karl outlined above.

So, what's the next step?

I'll also ask: What services will the club provide to its membership? What order do we tackle these thing in? Who wants to do what?

I figure the "divide and conquer" approach is the way to go here... everyone can take ownership of something they want to do.

I'd like to offer my services setting up the historical research part of it.

We could probably nail a ton of this stuff in a conversation... message board is a kinda clunky way to do this, but it has the advantage of being self-documenting.