Brian Harring wrote: [Thu Sep 08 2005, 01:30:09AM CDT]
> Hola.
> Maybe I'm blind, but haven't seen anything as of late out of 
> foundation; status of 503c fex, etc.
> 
> Perhaps time for an update?

Well, Summer's over (more or less), so it's time for an update on
Foundation stuff.  I've done relatively little the last few months.  I
was supposed to be working on banking stuff, but after calling a number
of banks I was starting to really despair until spyderous talked to
BofA.  It seems that BofA actually will permit us to set up banking that
paypal will validate, and that will allow us to provide access to
non-USians.  There's a bit of paperwork left to be done (and presumably
a vote of trustees on switching banks, although I suspect it will slide
by with a vote by acclamation), and hopefully our banking issues will
finally be decided.

We have a considerable sum of money now.  (I'll leave it to cshields to
provide an accurate figure.)  We need to have a real discussion of how
we want to use this money, since presumably people aren't donating so
that we can earn interest.  In my opinion, the first item on the agenda
should be our infrastructure.  What's needed, and what can we
legitimately provide?  Certainly I would think we should be able to
afford spare drives, but I'm sure that there's more that we need.
Should we just have an annual budget for infra, and let them make the
decisions?  That's probably what I would prefer.

Discussions about copyright transfer are still continuing.  We have a
draft document that's had some discussion, and I'd really like to have
something public for people to comment on.  The people most involved in
this process have been klieber and cshields (and, I suspect, dmwaters,
who just hasn't been quite as visible).  To those folks: can we get
something more broadly posted for review, or are things still too
preliminary?

Dostrow has been looking into relocating the Foundation to someplace
where we either actually have somebody, or that doesn't care whether we
do or not.  Any results there?

I know that cshields has been busy doing all of the other things, so
that the IRS filing is still in the works.  Is there anything that
people can do to help with that?  Note that until our annual income
surpasses a certain amount (which I've forgotten), we need not file
income tax returns, and the IRS filing is not horribly urgent.  We're a
type 6 (?) just by dint of saying that we are and acting appropriately.

The store has been oursourced to cafepress, and is mostly running
itself.  It would be good to have a trustee (and a backup) dedicated to
handling store issues; anybody want to volunteer?  So far we've been
informally answering e-mails as they come along.

I think that's about it for the moment.  We have 13 trustees, so it's
entirely possible that people are working on things that I don't know
about.  We should really fix that.  *Grin*  We have a number of areas
that need stuff done: banking, IRS filing, IP issues, store, budgeting
and spending money, relocation, and stuff that I'm sure I'm missing.
I'm happy to help with banking and the relocation of the Foundation (and
anything else that really needs me).  Can we "divvy" up the rest?

Best,
g2boojum
-- 
Grant Goodyear	
Gentoo Developer
g2boojum@g.o
http://www.gentoo.org/~g2boojum
GPG Fingerprint: D706 9802 1663 DEF5 81B0  9573 A6DC 7152 E0F6 5B76