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Some discussion on legal form.

2004-11-12 07:38:42
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Sorry Terry... I am hijacking your thread because it's a good intro to what we really need to be talking about. NB. I am posting this from my moongroup.com address instead of my redhat.com address as I simply don't have VPN available at the moment. See below for my comments. Sorry to top post but I wanted to apologize to Terry for hijacking the thread before I got into the meat of my comments.

On Fri, 12 Nov 2004, terry(_at_)ashtonwoodshomes(_dot_)com spewed into the 
bitstream:

Why the extra delay?

Why not make this an "authoritative" body amongst ourselves.  No, it does not 
have any legal
standing to force anyone to comply, but neither would the next council.

This council would have to trust that people would comply/abide decisions after 
the council makes
reasoned consideration and a majority vote rules. (like any subsequent council 
would have to anyway)

Making this a body whose only authority is to prepare another body with 
(possibly) actual authority
sounds like more time lost.

Well... this is an interesting line of reasoning. You may actually be right... what occurs to me is that if we don't have any by laws or official organizational structure we have to have some way to get there and that is what seems to be the concern.

When we formed the Linux Professional Institute we went through a phase that was a bit like this. We started with an initial group of people who lead the way through the formation of a legal non-profit entity and all of those persons did end up with seats on the board. The way it actually worked is that once the official incorporation was executed that paperwork included an initial set of officers... those officers had a meeting to elect the "official" board of directors. Because this type of group is rarely formed as a public, or stock issuing organization it has little if any true over sight from person outside the board of directors. So, in essence, what this meant (and with respect to LPI it still holds true) is that the organization is actually more of a "trust" managed by directors who have oversight on it's direction but are not elected as there is no system to accomplish it. When a member of the board wants to resign the other board members must vote in a new member to fill the seat. The way this is usually done is the outgoing member will have been thinking for some time about possible nominees who would do a good job for the organization... in every instance that I am aware of that member would nominate that person and invite their attendance at the outgoing members last meeting where the remaining members can vote up or down on the new member.

In this way LPI was able to "boot strap" from a loose knit collection of internet acquaintances with a common interest to an incorporated body with by-laws and all the usual accoutrements. The upshot is that the group, though it is incorporated, behaves more like a public trust than a typical corporation with a profit motive.

- --
csm(_at_)moongroup(_dot_)com, head geek
http://moongroup.com
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