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

[Christian Stimming]

Am Samstag, 4. Juni 2011 schrieb 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 ?

No, those are two different decisions. 

* If we decide on establishing some legal entity (i.e. a non-profit or a 
foundation or similar), this entity will be set up in order to be able to 1. 
collect tax-deductible donations; 2. buy and own things; 3. employ people. 
Establishing any legal entity will require to set up a charter which in turn 
will require a board (or committee) structure of some sorts. The decision 
process for electing such a board and in the board itself will be laid out in 
the charter.

* However, my main criticism about the current handling is that there isn't 
any decision process at all. Hence, in my opinion we can already improve our 
situation by *only* deciding on a decision process, but *not* (yet) 
establishing a legal entity because that isn't needed. What *is* needed is 
some decision structure, which will look similar to a committee structure of a 
comparable legal entity, but we don't have to go all the way towards a legal 
entity just to get the decision structure.

If we wanted to form a non-profit entity then indeed it will require to do 
book-keeping and all this things, and this is better done by joining an 
existing non-profit such as SF conservancy or Freies Office e.V.. But IMHO 
this isn't needed for us.

> > 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".

Right, there isn't a project goal. I agree this is a drawback. However, I 
don't really see one single commonly agreed-upon goal in the activities around 
this project so far, except that they all work with the same codebase. In the 
community here, there are a bunch of different goals and the developers even 
seem to have diverging goals at times, though this doesn't seem much of a 
problem. On the other hand, maybe it is indeed possible to find a wording for 
a goal which represents the majority of our individual goals. I just didn't 
come up with a good solution myself so far, and this point should maybe 
discussed a bit more.

> 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.

Yes. Thanks.

Regards,

Christian