Re: second draft of Charter for Foundation (Needs reorganization)

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

I think the next step will be to draft legal documents.  I think we're
going to create three documents:

1)  Articles of incorporation, which will be really basic and hard to
change. Might just define that we're a US membership-based non-profit
organization.  The articles would be pretty hard to change.

2) By-laws, which would be able to be changed by a vote of 2/3 of the board
of directors or something like that.  The by-laws would include what Jim
Gettys describes as 'meta-rules'

3) Implementation rules that are adopted by the board of directors and can
be changed by a simple vote of the board.


Bart

Martin Baulig wrote:

> jg@pa.dec.com (Jim Gettys) writes:
>
> > If things aren't organized this way, we may find that modifications to
> > the processes found unworkable by experience are somewhere to between
> > difficult and impossible.  For example, the rules on voting (I've
> > already commented on why I believe voting should be the process of
> > last resort) may be found to be, in practice, impossible (getting
> > quorum in the small town I live in can be a challenge for the town
> > meetings).  As I understand things (not well), changing the basic
> > rules of an organization after incorporation gets much harder.
>
> Well, my knowledge about such legal details is really very limited
> (better to say, it does not exist at all), so let me ask this question
> and I it's also an important point we need to think about:
>
> It looks to me that creating this foundation is rather "easy" - once
> we finished all the documents and we all (or most of us) agreed on them,
> the foundation will be incorporated by some kind of "magic" (which some
> people may also call a legal process).
>
> So when we have the foundation created, how difficult is it to
>
> a) change some things which are written in the bylaws
> b) throw away all of the charter and rewrite it from scratch
> c) get rid of the foundation and create a new one because
>    neither a) nor b) worked
>
> ?
>
> --
> Martin Baulig
> martin@gnome.org (private)
> baulig@suse.de (work)