[Foundation-l] The Foundation is not a wiki (was Re: RfC: Key priorities for my work)

[Delirium]

Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>   
>> I don't think that these special prerequisites for being on the Board 
>> are necessary.  The treasurer should not need to do the bookkeeping 
>> himself; we are big enough that we can hire someone to keep the books, 
>> and prepare preliminary financial statements.  The treasurer should be 
>> able to understand the statements and discuss them with the rest of the 
>> Board, and with an expanded Board it is certainly more likely that there 
>> would be a person who can do this.
>>     
>
> With all due respect, a board of a non-profit needs to know how a non-profit should be run in
> order to perform their oversight and guidance roles. At least some board members also need to know
> a fair deal about how to do professional fundraising; others need legal expertise since the
> foundation is a legal entity; yet others need to know about finances so they could not be easily
> misled by incorrect or fraudulent financial statements from staff (not that would ever happen, but
> it is possible).  
>
> There are some fairly serious legal, financial and privacy issues that the board (on the whole)
> needs to have some training and experience to deal with. A group of people whose only
> qualification is that they are popular community members, is not necessarily going to have the
> needed skill-set. Of course, part of the board should consist of that, but not the whole board, or
> even a majority of it. And, where possible, all board members should be from the community (plenty
> of experts there). 
>   

I take the Debian model as a pretty good example of foundation 
governance in free-culture projects, and they don't seem to have found 
this necessary.  The board of Software in the Public Interest, the 
foundation that owns the Debian assets, is composed primarily of Debian 
developers, including mainly former project leads or major sub-project 
leads.  They do retain a legal advisor to sift through matters they 
aren't personally qualified to examine, but the counsel is not actually 
a board member.

It doesn't seem to have become a major problem, and that organization 
has made SPI very well-respected in the community---certainly nobody 
thinks SPI is some corporate entity trying to hijack Debian or 
anything.  So I wonder why we must go a different route.

-Mark