Community Council/Community fund
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This is still a proposal. No concrete need for funding has yet been identified, but this is precautionary. |
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Background
Nokia has moved MeeGo to an R&D project, and is committing to only release a single device. It has transferred control of maemo.org to the community, with Nemein acting as contractors on behalf of the Community Council.
maemo.org provides the following services:
- VBulletin instance (talk.maemo.org)
- Midgard instance
- maemo.org content management system
- Planet
- News
- Downloads
- Packages & QA infrastructure
- User profiles
- Brainstorm
- Auto-builder
- apt repositories
- maemo-* mailing lists & archives
- Email aliases (for example, council@maemo.org)
- Bugzilla instance (bugs.maemo.org)
- MediaWiki instance (wiki.maemo.org)
- GForge instance (garage.maemo.org)
- VCS (git, svn)
- Web hosting
- Bug tracking
- Mailing lists & archives
Proposal
In the event of a funding crisis, alternative sponsorships and funding mechanisms would be sort (e.g. The Linux Foundation). However, in the event that no funding could be sourced externally, the Community would be able to provide it.
Have a PayPal account, managed by a Council "treasurer", for use at the Council's discretion. Funds may be donated one-off, or regularly, by anyone. The general purpose of the fund will be, in order of priority and non-exhaustively:
- Continuing the provision of the core maemo.org services.
- Purchasing hardware, if Nokia cannot provide it, for particular community projects.
- Rewarding key maemo.org contributors.
Detail
- Use PayPal's "Donations for non-profit organisations".
- Donations could be made by anyone as one-off or regular donations. These would be non-refundable.
- The fund would be managed by the Community Council.
- Upon being elected, the Council would select a Treasurer for their term. This must be completed within four weeks of the election.
- The outgoing Chair and Treasurer will transfer the fund to the incoming Chair and Treasurer. The new Chair and Treasurer will email maemo-community when this occurs, and confirm that the previous Chair & Treasurer no longer have access.
- A majority of the Council will have to agree to the withdrawal of funds.
- Within the first week of every calendar month, the Treasurer will email maemo-community with the state of the fund, including debits & credits.
Outstanding questions
- Does a legally recognised committee or entity need to be establised? In what jurisdiction? Without a registered US non-profit with 501(c)(3) status, normal business rates are charged by PayPal.
- Does PayPal support completely changing the ownership of an account? If not, could it be signed up as "council-fund@maemo.org" which is an email alias for the Chair & Treasurer?
- Should the Council term be increased to 12 months? Is it orthogonal to this proposal, or encourages greater accountability?