Summary of board- and voting-related discussions, and what comes next

[Gregory Meyer]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2009 at 11:23 AM, Leo Franchi <lfranchi at kde.org> wrote:
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> Hi all,
>
> It has been a week since the last mail on either the topic of legal
> representation or voting systems. I think it is a good time to sum up
> what people have said and where we can go from here.
>
> Legal structure:
>
> Everyone seems to be in favor of using the SFC instead of doing it our
> way. The main concern that I saw brought up was the fact that we can
> only get reimbursed for funds, rather than just disbursing money
> beforehand. However, the SFC allows us to do basically anything as
> long as it is legally OK. They are not putting barriers in front of us
> just because they feel like it. This means that there is a *legal
> reason* for them to not be able to give us money without seeing a
> receipt. This means that *even if we do it ourselves* we would be
> stuck doing the same thing. So this criticism has no effect on the SFC
> vs. on-our-own concept at all. As soon as we are a 501(c)(3) or have
> sponsorship, we simply have some legalities that we need to follow.
>
It seems to me that the SFC is really the best option for practicality
purposes, and as Leo said, the drawback seems to be the loss of
flexibility with respect to advances.  There are ways around this, but
they are a bit of an administrative headache to do properly, and
people getting the advances are never cooperative with follow-up
reporting, so it can get messy for someone quickly.  I've been able to
be a bit flexible in that regard because of our informal association,
but as a real corporation (not-for-profit or otherwise) the rules
exist whether they are followed or not.

One of my clients uses a system for travel advances where a form is
turned in detailing how the funds are going to be used, then the
person receiving the funds must turn in receipts, any excess cash and
a final accounting later.  If this documentation is not turned in, the
amount gets added to that persons compensation and they end up having
to pay tax on it.  So there is some incentive to turn the paperwork
in.

I imagine with the right authorization, we could work something like
that out with the SFC, but judging by my difficulty in getting
documentation about expenses rom many of you over the years I'm pretty
sure this wouldn't work very well.


> Voting:
>
> Mark is the only proponent of the 1 vote + bonus scheme. The other
> responses have varied in their reasons for supporting the 1-vote-1-
> person system ( how to determine length of involvement, voters don't
> actually do much, unecessary complexity, loss of anonymity are some
> examples ) but are all fundamentally agreed.
>
> As more than a majority voice agrees on the 1-vote per person model,
> that is the way forward. I also offer another (i think) compelling
> reason: the work required to implement the more-complex 1+bonus system
> is not insubstantial (if it is to be conducted anonymously). we would
> need someone to volunteer for this task.
>

As I said in my other mail, I understand what Mark is trying to
accomplish, I just don't think this particular method does it, as he
himself cautioned us about.  How about something along the lines of a
two-tier system, where there are members that get 2 votes and
contributors that get 1, or something like that.  Although it would
seem that is fraught with danger with regard to creating an
impenetrable inner-circle that discourages people from contributing
(think XFree86)


--
Greg