Re: Mission Statement

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi Joanie;

On 6 August 2014 18:25, Joanmarie Diggs <jdiggs igalia com> wrote:

> > > If GNOME continued to be one of the participating organizations, but the
> > > administration -- and only the administration -- was moved to a
> > > different organization, would this negatively impact GNOME?
> >
> > it would remove a source of income for GNOME — granted: we're not
> > making a massive profit out of it; we could (should?) increase the
> > administrative fee, if that allowed us to hire another part-time
> > assistant to handle the issue.
>
> If GNOME continues to administer the program, being able to hire someone
> to manage it sounds like a good idea. It's extremely awesome that
> Karen's and Marina's employers are donating/funding their time to GNOME
> to work on this, but we're still without an Executive Director so
> presumably Karen and Marina also have their fair share of work to do
> that would normally be done by the ED.

the OPW is also a fund raising chance for GNOME, so by handling that,
Marina and Karen can work on raising the profile of GNOME as a
project, not just as a way to get more organizations into OPW.

you're absolutely right on the count of the Foundation missing an ED
going out and raising funds; we'd still need that even without the
OPW, and it may even be slightly more difficult.

as usual, volunteer work is not fungible; I strongly suspect that
Karen and Marina would still be working on OPW matters even if we spun
off that particular bit of our organization. instead of dividing
resources further, we should probably find more volunteer time for OPW
administration and awareness.

> > it would also dilute our position of leadership in outreach.
>
> I don't think it has to. The other participating organizations, at least
> in my mind, are also leaders in FLOSS outreach. I think that leadership
> comes from being active and visible; not from issuing invoices and checks.

our position as the administrative center and main organizer of the
OPW is what makes us stand out among all the participants to the
program.

> > creating a foundation is not an easy task; people would have to show
> > up and handle the administrative load, as well as the financial one.
>
> Yeah, I wasn't suggesting creating a foundation for this; merely
> wondering if some other existing organization with more resources might
> be able to serve as the umbrella organization.

instead of delegating to another organization, maybe we could share
the load across the various non-profits that participate; for
instance, in exchange of volunteer time we could waive the
administrative fee.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

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