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

Christian Stimming christian at cstimming.de
Mon May 30 06:43:06 EDT 2011


Dear developers,

I have a proposal for adding some management structure to our project, 
particularly for the handling of our project money. Currently there is a 
"donation account", to which money from the "Donate!" button of the 
sourceforge website is directed. This account - in case you didn't know - is a 
paypal account which is managed by Derek Atkins. The account receives approx. 
1000-2000 USD income donations per year. This money is used occasionally for 
some hardware expenses of the gnucash.org server, and last year a holiday gift 
to the core developers was paid from there. There are no further expenses 
right now, especially no regular expenses.

I've discussed this privately with Derek before and I'll summarize below.. My 
main request is to find a better decision and information structure of the 
project. One possibility would be to create our own non-profit association, or 
join an existing one such as the Software Freedom Conservancy [1] in the U.S. 
or Freies Office Deutschland e.V. [2] in Germany. Going into the direction of 
a non-profit will immediately give us a better decision structure, because any 
non-profit has a charter which states exactly those rules.

On the other hand, the managing of the bank or paypal account itself does not 
necessarily have to be linked to the existence of a non-profit organization. 
Nevertheless, we might as well see that even here we don't have to reinvent 
the wheel and instead accept that those questions are handled well by having a 
non-profit with a charter and certain appointed posts. But this is just one 
out of several potential ways for the future.

Derek replied:
> I agree with this.  I think we definitely should have a better decision
> structure.  As for information, I agree that I've been lax about taking
> the donation information and publishing it.  I'd certainly be willing to
> publish more information more often if we decided that was desired, and
> if someone (preferably not me) came up with the format and location for
> the desired information.
> 
> Managing a bank account does require having someone to back it up,
> because it requires a Tax ID.  Admittedly, all the GnuCash money is in
> the PayPal account.  The bank account was only used to validate the
> paypal account.  I've tried very hard to keep them as separate as
> possible.
>
> cstimming wrote:
> > I would like to see some improvements in that situation, especially as
> > we had the committment from the PackPub publisher to donate some more
> > money to the gnucash project. So there will actually be some money
> > flow that is non- negligible, and on our side I would kindly ask to
> > find some structure that is actually able to handle this with
> > responsibility.
> 
> I agree completely that we need more structure in how to handle money
> flowing into the project.
>
> I'm still willing to maintain the paypal account, and I promise to be
> more responsive if we decide to stick with what we have.

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.

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 Doundation, 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.

The goal is clearly that the board will be the decision-making body about the 
usage of the donation account money. This was my motivation for starting this 
discussion. In the long run, such a board will of course have a number of 
different tasks, where handling of the money is only one out of many, but 
that's just the situation we try to improve right now.

Feel free to edit the text and to continue the discussion here. Comments? 
Questions? More Ideas?

Best Regards,

Christian


[1] http://sfconservancy.org/members/services/
[2] http://www.frodev.org/


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