Hi Bradley,
It was good to meet you last week. Thanks for following up.
I have received the copy of the FSA and I assent to serve on the
Committee.
Tav
On Mon, 2012-10-29 at 13:13 -0400, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
Josh,
Sorry for the delayed reply to this message as well.
Josh Andler wrote on 24 September:
> We held elections last week for the two open spots on the board. The
> results are in and "Johan Engelen" <jbc.engelen@...31...> &
> "Tavmjong Bah" <tavmjong@...47...> have been elected. I'm
guessing that
> you or Tony are the ones to make it all official, so I'm initiating
> the discussion to make it happen.
I can confirm that Johan and Tavmjong are officially now on the Inkscape
Committee in Conservancy's records and they have been added to the
<inkscape@...41...> alias. I also had the pleasure of meeting
and talking with Tavmjong at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit
last weekend. Based on my discussion with him, I realized there were
probably a few things that Conservancy and Inkscape should at this point
discuss:
0. As mentioned in a previous email, we do need an official resignation
from Aaron that actually says he resigns. I've left him on the
Committee for the moment until we get that, just to make sure things
are abundantly clear. However, this creates somewhat of an odd
situation, because the current Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement
(attached) calls for 7 Committee members and Aaron's continued
presence makes 8.
1. The existing FSA doesn't require signatures from anyone who was newly
elected, but it would be useful if Tavmjong and Johan acknowledge via
email their receipt of the attached copy of the FSA (with sha256sum
of a2020dacc0db0bea45aff3239770f3fe8f9aaff0a8f7d4b575e5554c6c2590d3
and their assent to serve on the Committee. Tavmjong and Johan,
could you do that?
2. Meanwhile, now might be a good time to discuss updating the FSA.
There are a number of reasons that I've discussed in the past with
some of you about updating the FSA, and since there's a change in the
Committee, this might be a good opportunity, for these reasons:
(a) The older FSA's have a bug that Tony discovered when he came to
work for Conservancy. Specifically, they don't have a clear
hand-off from the original signatories of the FSA to the
Project's Leadership Committee. Ideally, the Signatories cede
their authority to the Committee, so we don't have to bug
former committee members with getting signatures if they decide
to move on from the project. The new FSA template fixes this.
(b) As I've discussed with a number of you, including Jon, Josh and
Tavmjong, Inkscape has received fiscal sponsorship services
from Conservancy at no charge since 2006. Back when
Conservancy was founded, I was an SFLC employee and SFLC was
subsidizing my time -- effectively donating staff time to
Conservancy. This ceased in early 2008, and I served as a
volunteer for Conservancy on nights/weekends until 2011, when I
became a full-time employee -- which was the only way to keep
it going with the services it promises (the other option would
have been to shut down Conservancy). Since then, to maintain
legal services as part of the service plan once SFLC shrunk
further, we hired Tony as well. We get a lot done with a staff
of two, but obviously we need financial resources to be able to
provide these services.
Conservancy's Board of Directors voted about a year ago that
all member projects should be required to give 10% of their
earmarked revenue to support Conservancy to continue to provide
services. This is a standard way for a fiscal sponsor to
operate, and we were lucky before that we weren't required to
do this, and I'd been waiting to bother Inkscape with this
since you are one of our older members. (We haven't taken a new
member for anything other than 10% in a few years, BTW). I
hope a 10% arrangement as we use with other projects now will
be acceptable to you, and I and Tony are happy to discuss
further this issue.
(c) Now might be a good time to update the Representation section
of the FSA. Right now, as you see from (0) above, it requires
explicit resignations to change the Committee, and perhaps that
is too burdensome and problematic, particularly for people who
have moved on from the project. Conservancy can work with you
to redrafted the Representation section to better reflect your
current realities of leadership. As you see in the template,
there a few suggestions of how to draft Representation
sections.
As mentioned, your current FSA is attached, and the newer FSA
template is actually available publicly at:
http://sfconservancy.org/members/apply/ConservancyFSATemplate.pdf
http://sfconservancy.org/members/apply/conservancy-fsa-template.tex
Please take a look and let me know if you have any
thoughts/suggestions/questions.