KDE e.V. transparency (was: Re: Voting rights - the GNOME way)

[Rob Kaper]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2002 at 06:47:54AM -0600, Andreas Pour wrote:
> The crux of the problem IMO is that the decision was made to make the
> Board of limited size and secret.  Certainly that has alienated me from
> KDE eV.  The lack of activity from the Board confirms my belief that the
> Board is too small to handle its responsibilities, such as communicating
> with the world.  Lack of communication has also plagued the KDE League.

<snip>

> An effort was made to fix this but it was botched.  The essential problem is
> some severe restrictions placed on what an eV can do.  When I suggested a
> Delaware corp. or similar, which is much more flexible (e.g., all decisions
> could be made by email), I got a brush-off.

<snip>

> Well, the other alternative is to have an in-person meeting in Germany.  An
> effort was made at the Hamburg meeting to permit decisions (other than certain
> onces which German law requires to occur in person) to be made via Internet
> voting, but that effort was botched.

Well, that sucks. So the e.V. is too small to do anything and at the same
time doesn't succeed to make it easier for KDE contributers to sign up.
In normal evolution theories, that means it's at the end of its life cycle.

> I don't KDE eV yet owns any domain names.

Ah. It looks like konqueror.org and koffice.org are owned by Trolltech. I
thought kde.org was eV, turns out it is MieTerra, just like the .com.

My point about the donations stands though. If the eV has alienated itself
from the KDE community, I highly object to having any kind of eV presence on
kde.org, let alone sending donation money that-a-way.

I'm hoping to get a clarifying answer from one of the eV board members
soon about their budget, plans, concrete goals and membership applications
(I know of at least two people who were promised to get an answer about
their membership before the end of October)..

If the e.V. cannot provide us with any relevant information, I might
consider starting my own organization with the purpose of aiding KDE. As
open en accessible as KDE itself. Our primary virtue is that we are an open
source project and I see no reason to abandon that quality when it comes to
organizational issues.

> The ones that were updated recently are not the statutes, not sure why they were
> put there.

Me neither. And many with us are unclear about this, so I am cc:ing the e.V.
board for answers. It's not fun to be so inquisitive and negative, but it
seems like there is cause for concern.

Rob
-- 
Rob Kaper     | Gimme some love, gimme some skin,
cap@capsi.com | if we ain't got that then we ain't got much
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