[foundation-board] The chapters question...

Tue Sep 7 10:24:23 UTC 2010

Hi everyone

After spending some time on the ground here in Germany and with some of the people involved in OKF Germany, I'm starting to revisit our earlier decisions on "chapters".  We had some discussion on whether or not to have formal legal entities for "chapters" and their relationship to the core Foundation -- but to my mind we never fully resolved this when OKF Germany was launched.

I think we very much need to revisit this issue and that this has to be a board decision and not one for coord as it has to do with our fundamental company structure.

Some data points to consider on why we need to make this decision ASAP:

-- Several people involved in OKF Germany, for instance, have banded together and have physical space that they rent and hold meetings under the general  banner of OKF Germany.  This makes me nervous as it isn't clear who is doing what here.

-- constantly referring to OKF Germany as a "chapter" potentially can obligate us to be responsible as if they were a formal legal subsidiary.

-- the impression that I have is that the OKF Germany folks are increasingly interested and asking questions around exactly what the group is and if they have a separate legal status.  My feeling is that we need to answer these questions for them soon if for no other reason but to help them grow.

As a sub issue to the above, some items such as the OKF newsletter are starting to broadly use the word "members".  Members for a company limited by guarantee have a very specific meaning.  Our "supporters" are very definitely not "members" in this sense and we need to be clear on this. Perhaps we should create a page on the main site outlining the kinds of language to be used.

My suggestion is that we could:

-- have formal legal chapters after some review on the structure and asking for some input from other organisations such as Apache and Wikimedia on the successes/failures of each.
-- have geographical "meetups" and "working groups" for anyone that is not a formal legal chapter
-- starting a "chapter" should be hard to do in the sense that there must be significant momentum and resources in place for a certain geography to graduate to a "chapter".

I should note that having formal legal chapters means overhead, which means more management, which means having more people at the core of OKF.  I'm conscious of Jo's thoughts in this space in particular around Executive Directors and so think that there's a balance to be struck here.  I'm wary though of leaving this kind of thing to a distributed coord process.

Thanks

~Jordan

____
Mr. Jordan S Hatcher, JD, LLM

More at: <http://www.jordanhatcher.com>
Co-founder:  <http://www.opendatacommons.org>
Open Knowledge: <http://www.okfn.org/>