Re: second draft of Charter for Foundation

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@eazel.com> writes: 
> Also, I still don't like having general referendum power, but it seems
> the consensus goes the other way (maybe we could have a straw poll on
> this issue).
>

I don't have strong feelings, but it should be somewhat hard to get a
referendum going (significant number of seconds required to the motion
to vote, so that 3 annoying people don't keep making us vote), and
there should be a provision to prevent identical or near-identical
referendums from coming up over and over.
 
> We should specify who is in charge of determiming what constitutes a
> sufficient contribution (nominating committee, etc).
>

Let's say the board has final say but can delegate to a membership
committee.
 
> We should probably use the official names ("The Debian Project" and
> "The Free Software Foundation" I think?). 

Debian isn't actually incorporated, the corporation is SPI.

> I'm also not sure we should special-case these; how about we just
> say that non-profit organizations that promote free software can be
> given a seat without paying a fee, subject to the approval of the
> board of directors?
>

Agreed.

Also, I guess I mentioned this before, I'm worried that organizations
or individuals will join the board or advisory group while not wanting
to agree to respect the confidentiality of things that are said in
confidence. If we don't mention that in this document, we should at
least have a way to allow these members to "leave the room" during
relevant portions of meetings.

Maybe I'm paranoid; I know there are people on the net who would do
stuff like this, but I don't know how likely it is they'll end up on
one of our boards.
 
> How about we just say the board can delegate decision-making authority
> on various tasks to a committee appointed by them, and not enumerate
> what tasks they may do this for.
>

Yes.

> > Any Member may propose a slate, provided that at least 10 Members
> > endorse the proposed slate.  The maximum number of valid endorsements
> > from Members affiliated (as defined above) with any one corporation or
> > organization shall be 5.
> 
> Maybe we want a higher nomination threshold than that, or perhaps it
> should be a percentage rather than a fixed number.
>

I vote for a percentage.

Havoc