Re: Election Boycott

[Adrian Custer <acuster nature berkeley edu>]

On Tue, 2004-11-23 at 12:26 -0500, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> I disagree.  The foundation is a non-profit organization and all of
> it's tax filings are publicly available via guidestar.
>     http://www.guidestar.org
> under 'GNOME foundation'
> 

Jody, 

I respect your judgment immensely but on this issue we disagree. I don't
know GUIDESTAR and have no desire to go through their registration
process to get information which should be 'transparently' available. 

If the docs the foundation submits to the government are in a
'transparent' i.e. publicly readable format, then the effort of posting
those docs into a directory on the web site is \approx zero. Why this
has not been done, after all my requests, puzzles me.

In toto, my knowledge of the foundation's finances is:
        
        FISCAL YEAR 2002
        
        Revenue 137751
        Expenses 104952
        Assets 32799
        Liabilities 0

obtained *not* from the foundation itself but from this GUIDESTAR third
party. 

Given that the foundation was originally formed, *for the purpose* of
getting money and then spending it to further the purposes of the GNOME
project, you will understand that I have no idea if the foundation is
effective or not. Given that lack of knowledge, I can't possibly
participate in yet another election on the hope that the foundation will
one day provide me with a basis to evaluate its work.

Also, I would encourage you to think beyond 'regulatory filings' for
your metric of financial disclosure. Your question should be, "Given the
limited amount of time that anyone wants to spend on this, what is the
most information and analysis we can provide the members of the
foundation to empower them to understand and evaluate what the
foundation does?" Like free software projects, free software foundations
will have to invent new, more effective ways to achieve their goals,

all the best,
adrian