RFC: Adding some management structure, particularly for decisions about our donation account

[Geert Janssens]

On maandag 30 mei 2011, Christian Stimming wrote:
> IMHO this means we can probably leave the account as-is, but start to work
> out a new and durable decision structure for the management of the gnucash
> donation account. I am thinking of something like a charter with a similar
> structure as a usual non-profit organization: We should appoint a board
> (or committee, or similarly named group of people) of 2-5 people who will
> then have the mandate to decide and take action.
> 
I am generally in favor of this proposal, but I do have a practical question:

You propose a charter and a committee. Would this also have legal implications 
for the GnuCash project ? As far as I know a non-profit is required to keep 
books and report income and pay taxes. If we form a committee will that also 
imply we'll need to start keeping books and all that follows ?

> That board should IMHO be elected by votes from all the project members,
> and it should have a defined length of a term such as 1 or 2 years. We
> would then need a definition of "project member" to see who is asked to
> vote and who isn't. Based on the charter of the GNOME Foundation, I've
> created an initial draft for such a charter for gnucash at
> http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Charter . Everyone, please feel free to edit
> that proposal heavily.
> 
I have read the initial draft. Thanks for doing the initial effort.

The first thing that struck me is the lack of a project goal. I have inserted 
a first proposal:
to provide easy to use, yet powerful and flexible tool to track bank accounts, 
stocks, income and expenses for personal and small business accounting
In my opinion this definition may be way too narrow though. Items that are IMO 
still missing are for example "fostering a community", "promoting the project" 
and so on. But perhaps these are more related to "how to achieve the goal" 
then to "what's the goal".

Other than that, I don't have much to add so far. Most of the charter appears 
to be fairly balanced.

I note that there are several "edit me" markers though, some of which I don't 
know why they are there. Did you leave some of them around because you had 
particular questions or uncertainties in mind ? Perhaps you could add those as 
well.

Geert