Table of Contents
Governance: Formal structure sub-committee
Resources
Non-profit structures
- Podcast discussing non-profit organization structures in the United States and their reporting requirements, with some discussion about the difference between 501©(3) and 501©(6).
Examples of other free/open-source foundations
Software Freedom Conservancy member project governance models
- SugarLabs governance model (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Governance)
- SugarLabs formed a seven-member “Oversight Board” responsible for the regular operations of the project (and explicitly _not_ getting involved in technical discussions); the board has regular meetings via IRC that are open, publicly logged, and posted
- the members of the SugarLabs Oversight Board all sign the agreement with the Conservancy, but choose one member of the Oversight Board to represent the project in their communications with the Conservancy
- Inkscape project has just one representative who signed the Conservancy agreement - of course, he is one of the founders of the Inkscape project, so there's a high level of trust implicit in that relationship. In general, Inkscape seems to have less formal structure (http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ContactInfo seems to ssum that up - lightweight but with well defined roles).
- Wine (http://www.mail-archive.com/wine-devel@winehq.org/msg49777.html). Also note the Wine conference tie-in (which might be of interest to the broader governance committee):
"... all spending by the SFC on Wine's behalf for the last few years has been related to Wineconf. That has either been to pay for conference expenses directly (as in Reading, 2 years ago), or to help defray travel costs for Wine contributors to come to Wineconf (as happened this year)"
- Twisted Software Foundation (http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/TwistedSoftwareFoundation) - very informal. Note the push for sponsorship, with the benefit of getting front-page linkage from the project home page dangled for such sponsorship, along with the (far more dubious to me) access to a “sponsor-only mailing list”.
