[Noisebridge-discuss] FOSS/H in the mission statement

Andy Isaacson adi at hexapodia.org
Tue Jul 1 19:58:30 UTC 2008


On Tue, Jul 01, 2008 at 12:23:34PM -0700, Rachel McConnell wrote:
> People who are having people review the Bylaws: do the reviewers have 
> the bylaws now?  It's probably not a good idea to modify them while 
> they're being officially reviewed, however good the modification is.

Excellent question, I don't know the answer.  Mitch / David?

> At least, we should make sure to point out each particular change so the 
> reviewer does not miss it (and obviously this shouldn't happen more than 
> once or twice).

Also a good point.

> Specific to the mission statement parts.  Should we have a slightly 
> larger change and refer in our Bylaws to an external Mission Statement 
> document, or keep all mission statements in the Bylaws where they'll 
> have to be amended by an act of the Board?

Well, AFAIK we do need to have a Mission in our bylaws for "proving
we're a bona fide nonprofit" purposes.  The IRS and FTB are, in theory,
going to look at whether our purposes are actually in the public benefit
(as opposed to being for the benefit of a few people, for example) when
determining if we qualify for tax exempt status, and are supposed to
review whether we're actually doing the things that the mission
statement says we're going to do as part of that.

So my thinking is, if we explicitly call out in our Mission that we're
developing public benefit software, then it'll be easy to say "we're
doing Good Works, here's the evidence" when we send off to the tax
people.  By contrast, if we just go with the more general umbrella
statement, then it's a bit more work to connect "projects related to art
and technology" to public benefit and thence to free software.

> If the answer to that is, 
> eh, leave them in the Bylaws, we're gonna do whatever we want anyway - 
> then Andy, I think it's probably not worth adding the FOSS language.

It sounds like you're concerned about costs of adding to the mission
statement.  I agree we don't want to be going back and forth with the
lawyers any more than necessary; is there additional cost beyond that?

-andy



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