Re: being incorporated

[Davi Leal]

MJ Ray wrote:
> Donations, and even charitable status, do not need the association to
> be incorporated in England.  However, it may still be desirable.

> In England, you are probably looking at corporation administration fees
> of a few hundred pounds a year.  Is it worth it?  When would it become
> worth it?

All we seem to agree that the project must take some legal form. We can
follow thinking and commenting about it to be ready at the right time.

Proposed steps to follow up to arrive at "the right time":

  1. good hosting

     1.1. good bandwidth/throughput

     1.2. secured user data

          To keep the access to the user data physically secure,
          we have proposed to move the PostgreSQL and HTTP
          service to offices managed by FSF staff.

          Ref.: http://gnuherds.org/development#Roadmap

          I have been working for very important companies
          where sometimes a sysadmin just get a 'personal'
          copy of the data!  I think we must avoid it, and
          a way to try it is using a host managed by
          people 'politically' aligned with us; for example:
             a) FSF sysadmins
             b) Savannah host, owned by the FSF but managed
                by voluntaries
             c) some Debian-project host?
             ...

  2. it be finished and polished

  3. we has done a bit more of marketing to be known and
     allow others to join and contribute before it get
     the legal form.

  4. here is the right time to make the project legal.


As usual, just my current personal opinion.



> >   Well I'm not familiar with Spanish law, but most
> >   countries insist that an incorporated association has
> >   a "executive" (usually 3+ people) who can make
> >   decisions on behalf of the association.
> 
> Sorry, but I don't think that's right: can someone prove it?
> 
> AFAIK, most countries insist only that an incorporated association has
> a defined way of making decisions and gives you (usually nasty)
> default ways, but you could do almost every decision by unanimity if
> you wanted. (It's another discussion whether that's a good idea...)

The current charter reads:
  "... all decisions will be voted upon by the membership."

  Ref.: http://gnuherds.org/charter#Decisions

I personally think direct-democracy is the way to go. To mitigate the possible 
overhead of voting, it is possible delegate the vote or, of course, just do 
not vote. The current Charter explain the details.

  Ref.: http://gnuherds.org/charter#Voting


> Most banks insist on delegating power to order bank transactions to a
> few people.

Those people could be elected by the membership.

Davi