Re: second draft of Charter for Foundation

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Hi everyone,

Sorry I stepped away from the list after posting the second draft of the
Charter.  I went to the OSS conference in Monterey, which was a lot of fun.
It was especially great to watch the Sun OpenOffice announcement and to see
them demo OpenOffice demo'd within Nautilus using bonobo!

I haven't read all the posts yet but will respond shortly.  Meanwhile, I did
want to acknowledge Jim's feedback about not locking too many things in in a
charter document.  I *totally* agree.  For this document, I tried to outline
how we see the foundation operating at launch.  I wasn't tried to draft a
binding legal document.  If we've got consensus on the basics (and it looks
like we're getting close), we can start drafting the articles of
incorporation of the foundation and its bylaws, and then we need to be
careful to craft things so that we'll be able to change things over time.

Bart



Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 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
>
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