On Mon, Jun 25, 2007 at 05:04:18PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Does a community group have the power to decide that a monetary > prize is awarded to whoever comes up with the winner?
The way I see it, you're welcome to so declare, but you don't (as a CG) have the ability to collect and disburse funds. The most you could do is probably invite people to make direct gifts to the winner. Whether and how anyone chooses to do so is outside your ability to control. Anyone wishing to give or accept such a gift is responsible for the tax and other legal consequences, and if it passes through your hands, the responsbility and liability are yours, personally, without limitation. There is no foundation or corporation to shield you. > And further to that, does the community group have the power to > award that kind of prize in OpenSolaris's name? No, because the CG can't award money it doesn't have. Of course, I don't see a reason someone couldn't choose to give a gift and tell the recipient that it's "on behalf of the OpenSolaris community" but again that's really a private matter between two individuals. > Or to put it differently, if such a decision was made by the community > and activity understaken that this would happen, who would sign > the cheque for the prize winner on behalf of OpenSolaris? Whoever wants to give such a gift. > Someone from the OGB or someone else? Certainly not the OGB; we don't control a treasury either. > From the very start of this, my position has been that getting this > to properly motivate people requires a competition with a prize at > the end and that for this reason it requires more thought than the > community "just doing it." If you feel strongly about that strategy in general, perhaps you'd like to go do the legwork and find out what's required to set up an independent 501(c)(3) or similar foundation (or a non-US equivalent if that would be advantageous). Without something like that, there's no way to coordinate funding for this sort of thing. I don't know whether you consider ad-hoc individual-to-individual gifts of the type I described above to be adequate; my guess is probably not. > And yes, I feel that some kind of prize or reward is essential, otherwise > we don't stand a very good chance of getting the right result unless we > fluke it and someone already is or someone knows someone who'll do > it for free. "It" in this case being a professionally designed logo or > cartoon'd mascot. Sounds like something to work out within the Advocacy CG. I'm sorry that we can't help you, but we're just not structured in a way that facilitates this type of activity. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
