Discussions about the postgresql.eu statutes

Welcome to this wiki ! You can put here any comment about the future statutes of the European Association

Problems

1- Membership fee

What the statutes say

Article 5 : Any individual or legal entity can be an active member of the association, provided they pay an annual membership fee. The amount of the annual membership fee will be fixed by the Board of Directors.

Problem

dave page says : Why in that case, are we saying that people who wish to contribute and be part of the European Group will have to *pay* for the privilege of doing so? That is the most anti-Open Source way of running part of the project I can possibly imagine, and seems like an exceptionally efficient way to minimise the number of people that decide to help out.

Solution

2- Umbrella Organisation vs. Transnational Organisation

Companies : sponsor or member ?

Problem

Joshua D. Drake : I strongly suggest *not* having companies be members. If you want companies to be *sponsors* that is good but the moment you allow companies to be members, they will *expect* something for that money.

Gabriele Bartolini : I personally am a bit uncertain about allowing private companies to join the association as members

Jean-Paul Argudo : be a member is a stronger act compared to just giving money.

Solution

3- Quorum

In the case we don't reach a quorum by mail/irc/whatever, we have another meeting between 6-30 days which goes without quorum.

Problem

Koen Martens says : It is mentioned “For the General Assembly to be validly constituted a quorum of 30% of the total number of members must be present or represented.”. Is there no danger of the association ending up in dead water if you require such a big amount of members to be present? In my experience, only the 'die hards' ever come to these GA's anyway. I think most GA's i've been to attract maybe one percent of the members, if not less (counting represented members also).

Solutions

3.a : Keep the statutes as they are

3.b : Lower the quorum

Magnus Hagander : How about lowering the quorum, but *also* require approval by the board? Meaning that the GA and the board have to both agree to dissolve?

3.c : Drop the quorum

Koen Martens : Now, a simple solution would be to drop the quorum. This is not uncommon. An objection to dropping the quorum could be democratic validity, but as said I think in practice you will always end up with a non-quorumed GA within 30 days anyway, so democractic calidity is not an argument.

4- takeover protection

Problem

Koen Martens : You might want to think about a safeguard against 'takeovers' too: a rush of new members right before a GA because some malicious party wants to take-over the voting.

Damien Clochard : Actally only the half of the Board of Directors is renewed every year and members of the Board of Directors are elected for 2 years. So a complete takeover would take 2 years

Solutions

4.a Keep statutes as they are

4.b : add more criterium for the member to satisfy

Koen Martens : There could be any other criterium that a member as to satisfy, not necesarilly monetary. Some organisation merely require you to register, others decide membership on a 'approved by the board' basis, or whatever. The crux being that you should have satisfied the chosen criterium for at least x months already to be able to vote.

Other ideas

Financial Controller

Koen Martens says : You might want to add 'financial controllers' to the statutes, who are to check the financial records and report to the GA on their validity.

Condorcet Method

Joshua Drake : SPI uses the Condorcet method of voting. Which at first I thought was dumb but using it for a while it seems reasonably fair.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method

Board turnover

Magnus Hagander : I think a clean way to do that in pgeu is to vote two members for 2 years and one member for 1 year (since we're only getting 3 members in the board for now - the org is small!). That way it solves itself. Doesn't need to be in the statues, but we need to put it in the election info. Easiest way - the two people who have the most votes get two years, the one that gets in third place gets one year ;)

Questions

Will there be certified translations available in other languages? (Koen Martens)

Damien Clochard : Certified translations costs money If we have enough money to do that, why not…

Can you just make the GA electronic ? (Joshua Drake)

yes checkout Article 7

Samples of statutes of statutes and bylaws

IT PUG : http://www.itpug.org/pdf/statuto.en.pdf

PostgreSQLFr : http://wiki.postgresqlfr.org/doku.php/statutes

SPI : http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/by-laws

Mozilla Europe : http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/about/statutes/

— damien clochard 2007/11/04 13:20