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

[GerardM]

Hoi,
At this moment there is a controversy around Debian and Firefox. The
dogmatic stance of Debian in this is enough to for me to consider Debian not
to be that great a model. In some aspects it is like our situation with the
WMF logos in Commons ..

Definitely this whole thing makes the Debian model a disputed model.

Thanks,
    Gerardm

http://ze-dinosaur.livejournal.com/12083.html

On 9/25/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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