Re: Membership dues [ was: Re: Advisory Board Letter ]

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Hi Owen,

I initiated a private discussion about this among reps from initial corporate
members because, well, they have to agree to pay the membership fee, so we
have to  come up with something that'll be acceptable to them.  But now it's
time to open up the discussion, so here we are.

I agree that the official step on that will be taken by the board of
directors, and it probably doesn't belong in the by-laws.  However, since
we're in the process of signing up initial members, we have to tell them how
much this will cost.  So we need some initial number.

A number of people have suggested that the foundation should have an
executive director to handle the adminstrative tasks involved with moving
Gnome forward: set up meetings, deal with the advisory board, help set up
technical conferences, coordinate press releases etc.  So I have been
assuming that the foundation will need to raise approximately $100,000 per
year (a salary + overhead and some misc).  Based on that, and looking at the
list of likely corporate members of the advisory board, I came up with the
$0/$10k/$20k proposal.    I figure that will allow us to raise approximately
$120k.  At this point, it looks like all  the initial corporate members are
comfortable with this approach.

Based on my experience helping get the foundation off the ground, and being
part of the Gnome community, I would say that it's not a bad idea to have one
paid staff person, but that's certainly not set in stone.  I'd love to hear
your, and others', opinion on this.

BTW, at this point, it looks like initial corporate members of the Advisory
Board will be Sun, Red Hat, Helix Code, Eazel + at least 2 (more likely 3 or
4) major PC OEMs.  We haven't received clearance yet to release those names
here.

I do want to flag that we have private list with a group of PR people (which
also includes the Gnome steering committee) and the current proposal is to
have representatives from all the corporate advisory members on stage at the
press event, in addition to Gnome hackers.  So a big part of the announcement
on 8/15 would be to showcase major industry support for Gnome.  I want to
flag that here because a number of people have raised concerns about
corporate influence in the Gnome Foundation.  The corporate members would be
on the advisory board only, but it will be a terrific endorsement of the work
the Gnome hackers have been doing.  I think this is the right way to go, but
I'm sure a number of people will have concerns about this.  So let's talk
about that.

Bart


Owen Taylor wrote:

> Robert Humphreys <rob@collab.net> writes:
>
> > Corporate members with more than ten full time employees will pay
> > $20,000 a year for membership dues, and companies with less than ten
> > full time employees will pay $10,000 a year for membership dues. Special
> > considerations for non profit organizations, early stage start ups, etc.
> > can be made and are subject to approval by the Board of Directors.
>
> I've been told there been some discussion of the membership dues
> in private email, but so far I've not seen any public discussion,
> so I wanted to bring it up here.
>
> I have several concerns here:
>
> - Who decides (decided???) the fees? This would either be
>   part of the bylaws, or decided by the elected board of
>   directors.
>
>   I don't think hard-coding it into the bylaws is a good
>   idea, and the board of directors has not been elected
>   yet...
>
> - $10,000 or $20,000 doesn't seem to jibe with making the
>   advisory board "open". These aren't huge amounts of
>   money, but I think it is certainly large enough to act
>   as a discouraging factor to some companies.
>
> - Do we need a foundation with this much funding? One thing
>   I think we're all agreed on is that we don't want this
>   to become the OSF ... we won't be doing development, we
>   don't need a management structure, etc.
>
>   I think, in general, accountability, responsiveness, and
>   "community spirit" are going to be a lot higher if member
>   companies donate marketing, infrastructure, etc, resources
>   rather than donating money and trying to build those
>   up at the foundation.
>
>   (Clearly, the proposed membership dues are not big enough
>   to become a new OSF - but I think they are possibly big
>   enough to get in the way of lean, mean, thin, flexible
>   foundation.)
>
> Regards,
>                                         Owen
>
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