Daniel Mayer wrote:

Alex756 wrote:

...

If Wikipedia was to start to do any lobbying for legislation, a strict policy would need to be implemented so that any such activities don't jeapardize its proposed 501(c)(3) tax exemption.

Isn't the Free Software Foundation a 501(c)(3)? They do /a lot/ of lobbying.

Yeah, but they seem to manage to stay on the right side of the line (or at least the tax attorneys haven't said otherwise, yet). Even closer to the line are the 501(c)(3) environmentalist groups, like the Sierra Club (indeed, these groups are often referred to as 'environmental lobbyists'). IANAL, so take this with a grain of salt, but I've done a bit of reading on the subject, and my understanding is; -- 501(c)(3) groups can't do overt political lobbying. That is, they cannot advocate for or against a particular candidate, party, or piece of legislation. There is some sort of an exemption for "self-defense" -- if there were legislation introduced to ban Free Software, for example, the FSF might be able to lobby against that specific piece of legislation without jeopardizing its status. -- What they *can* do is essentially lobbying construed as promoting their educational focus. For example, the FSF's focus is to promote free software, so it can ask people in general terms to support within the political system legislation amenable to its purposes. The Sierra Club, similarly, can ask people to support environmental legislation, and even lay out what sorts of legislation it thinks might be helpful. -- This is all easier if it's kept a small part. If lobbying takes up 80% of the organization's budget, it may start getting problematic. If it takes up 5% of the budget, it'd be much less of a problem.

Something really cloes to the grey line are "scorecards" some organizations make listing which politicians voted in accordance with their issues. They claim these are merely informational, but some claim that they're explicit lobbying, saying in essence "vote against these people: [people with low scores]; vote for these people: [people with high scores]". So far the courts seem to say that as long as they don't explicitly actually say "please vote against Tom DeLay in the next election," and instead are just listing factual information about him, it's okay.

In any case, I don't think we really want to get embroiled in all this.

-Mark