Hello everyone,
There has been a bit of discussion recently about Non Profit Foundations and their organisation. Michael Davis has been discussing a lot in the past few days with a lawyer we are working with, and amongst various conclusions, it was recommanded that we try to anticipate the best we could our growth curve and to get a strong legal framework in place asap. Which seems to involve good functioning structure... and sticking a bit more to traditional board governance procedures, with some evolution in the way we handle agendas, minutes, bylaws, resolution, board manual, insurance and so on.
We are currently working on all this very much. Each according to its own ability. Some of this can only be done by board members proper, other tasks can also be supported by officers, and some can involve anyone who is serious and supportive.
Amongst the tasks I will try to take care of in the next few weeks (or months...) is documentation, such as typically board manual. Michael has provided us with some documentation (such as http://www.boardsource.org/FullAnswer.asp?ID=98) and I gathered some more as well. Most of what is typically required on a board manual, we already have, but it is dispersed on at least 3 different wikis and poorly organised. This is unfortunate.
Board governance is not something new and there is no reason for us to reinvent the wheel. When I looked at some of these pages, I recognised areas where we have indeed tried to reinvent the wheel... other areas we have never explored at all, areas where we found our own balance and areas which are still a mess :-)
I invite you to join and help the way you can if you have such a desire. Either help to organise the structure of the future document (and more generally Foundation website), help to gather what already exist, help write what does *not* exist, help fix poor english, help translate (much later) some of the pages.
If you are interested, please, let's talk about this on meta or by irc. I presume this will be very boring for most editors here, so it will probably rarely be mentionned on the list, but if you wish to help, please jump in any time.
thanks
Ant