Re: [gentoo-project] Groups under the Council or Foundation: the structure & processes thereof

[Kristian Fiskerstrand]

On 10/13/2016 02:05 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 7:04 AM, Kristian Fiskerstrand <k_f@g.o> wrote:
>>
>> This demonstrates a severe lack of leadership, organization and control
>> of the body that first and foremost is responsible for handling this to
>> reduce the burden of it from the rest of the developing community.
>
> I think we also need to be careful here.  Ultimately the Trustees are
> also volunteers.

It is voluntary to stand for election and become a trustee, once someone
become a trustee they have fiduciary responsibilities to the organization.

That said, it can be generalized more than that. It is voluntary to
maintain a package, but after that, if someone is having lingering
security bugs in their packages due to lack of time etc, they need to
re-evaluate whether to be listed as maintainer for said package.

tldr; it is voluntary to sign up, but if saying you're taking
responsibility you need to do it and stand behind the actions.

>
> I think we can be objective about the issues (the IRS doesn't care if
> we're volunteers, though our small size probably also means we're not
> going to be a big priority for them).  However, we need to keep in
> mind the realities of the situation when we talk about solutions/etc.
>
> Having a really strong leader on its own isn't going to cause the
> books to get taken care of.  Historically, it has also been difficult

Leadership doesn't necessarily mean strong single person leader in the
sense of dictatorship, per se, but this is the foundation that is
responsible for finances and legal issues to begin with, if they need to
hire legal or accounting resources to fulfil that role, they are
responsible to actually do it; not let it linger on for years. If
neglecting to file causes harm to the organization there might even be a
legal basis for reimbursement due to the failure of fiduciary duties.

>
> Still, adding further responsibilities probably won't help.  We may
> really need to rethink our metastructure if we think we can't sustain
> the one we have.  Maybe we need to have a governance board that spends
> less time trying to do bookkeeping, etc.
>

In many cases it makes a great deal of sense to have a registered
accountant doing the bookkeeping and filings in order to ensure it is
properly done. Whether the trustees have the necessary competence to do
it in-house instead of outsourcing it is a matter for the trustees. In
the mean time I'm waiting for the annual reports going back a number of
years that are missing.

-- 
Kristian Fiskerstrand
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