2009/6/5 Vincent Untz <vu...@gnome.org>: > Le vendredi 05 juin 2009, à 00:29 -0400, Germán Póo-Caamaño a écrit : >> I have some concerns, it seems longer than is needed (it defines roles >> as president, vice-president, agents and things that does not seem to >> fit with our Foundation. However, IANAL). > > Luis had started something to update the by-laws, I believe. He can > probably comment on this.
I was working on this, but it was low priority. If you search co-ment.net for 'GNOME bylaws' I believe you'll find the start of that work. I am writing this offline and not on my primary machine so no access to the documents. There are a couple different issues here, from memory: (1) some of the issues German mentions are just unfortunate artifacts of standard cut'n'paste corporate formation. Some of them probably could be simplified, but many probably could not. I (and everyone else) should be very loathe to touch any of those things without the advice of a California non-profit law expert. (2) Some parts of it are horribly vague because of poor drafting on our part originally. For example, if I recall correctly the voting provisions refer to a webpage as the primary determinant of how we vote, so to change how we vote, just find the webpage in git, commit the change, and voila! you've changed how the Foundation votes. (I wish I was kidding.) These things can and should be adjusted and changed. Brian also had helped create a useful list of these (which I think, again, are in co-ment.net.) (3) amendments are not incorporated into the body in a single place. If nothing else, this needs to be done, for the sake of documentation/readability. (4) We still refer in a number of places to the charter, which needs revision, not because it is unclear (it is quite well written for what it is) but to update it to reflect who we are now, nearly 10 years later- which is a different beast than what we were then. This may also suggest some parallel changes to the bylaws. All that said, I think reading the bylaws is overrated. Obviously we have legal obligations which should be understood and respected, but by and large the bylaws say very little about what we should do or how we should do it. Those are the bigger questions we face, and the bylaws have no answer for them. Luis _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list