By-Laws Draft Collaboration Needed | Legal issues | Forum

With regards to the issue of meetings, does anybody know if these need to occur in meatspace or if an IRC meeting or the like will do?  If we need to physically meet, getting more than a certain percentage of the board or members in one place once a year could be difficult since we are so spread out.  We don't want to waste too much of our money on transport just for routine meetings.

Regarding the issue of dues, while it would be a good way to make money, I feel like having to pay money to be involved in CSTART (the legal entity) is somewhat contrary to our spirit of openess and collaboration.  I doubt many people beyond the board and committees will actually join, anyway, since it won't be at all necessary to participate in the fun stuff.

Do we need to put in something more explicit about how much money can be released when and for what purposes?  I can think of two broad categories here: general running of the org (paying for our PO box, bank account fees, costs involved in setting up fundraising events, etc) and money spent on specific projects (like CLLARE).  To help lock the money down, do we want to require that specific projects have an official status?  i.e. should the bylaws state that "there shall be a list of Approved Projects for the organisation at all times.  Projects may be added or removed from the list by [these people] under [these conditions].  All money released not related to the day-to-day running of the org must be in direct service of one of the Approved Projects"?  This would mean that one of the very first acts of the org would be to make CLLARE (and perhaps a smaller rocket project, as I've discussed elsewhere) an Approved Project.  Does this make sense?

Do we need permanent committees?  What sort of things to non-profits tend to use these for?  If we went ahead with the Approved Project structure above, would we form a Project Management Committee, or is that too heavyweight of an approach?  Would we want a Fundraising Committee?  Will we even have enough people to sustain these committees, can people be on the board and on a committee too?

We may want to draw Johnnyping's attention to this thread, but if he is too busy with study or doesn't know enough specific details about setting up non-profits we will have to find somebody else, ideally a specialist.

Obvious oversight: we should have a by-law stating that the activities of CSTART are to be constrained by our Social Contract.  This also means that we need to actually finalise the first version of that and make sure we are happy with it and that it is not too constraining for us to be able to work.  We will also need by-laws outlining the process for changing the social contract.

Thoughts on officer positions:

Do we want a publicity/communications officer whose job it is to maintain the Twitter feed, Facebook page, blog, and any future things like that which may come along?

Do we want a web systems officer whose job it is to make sure that our webpage, forum, wiki are reliably backed up at all times?  This would be an actual contractual obligation to make sure our data is safely redundant.  There should also be some sort of process for making sure there is no way of losing control of our web systems.  At the moment I am a little worried about this.  I know it is not likely, but right now if Rizwan were to be hit by a bus or fall seriously ill or something like that, I don't think anybody else would have access to the CSTART webservers, which could be quite a problem.  There should definitely be a clear, formal procedure in place for making sure we can recover from situations like this.

In response to the social contract, since our members are volunteers do we have any real way of preventing people from taking out patents on ideas that they come up with? If they were employees then the would be bound by intellectual property rights but since we are free and open I don't think that we will have the ability to prevent this from happening.

I don't think we do, but if they posted the idea to the forum first, wouldn't that prevent them from later patenting it since the idea had been openly disclosed?  This may not work if they post the idea in a level of detail too vague to be patentable.  If they post a vague idea openly and then patent a detailed version themselves later we can simply refuse to use it unless they put an extremely open (non-CSTART specific) license on the patent.

Re: your list of positions:

• Communications officer – I think this is a good idea, for sure
• Standards compliance officer – sounds scary to me, like top-down authority.  Maybe I have the wrong idea?
• Web systems officer – another definitely good idea
• Wiki officer – I think this is a good idea provided the Wiki officer has authority to give interested and seemingly trustworthy non-formal-members the priveleges to do a lot of those things.  If someone with a good forum posting history proving they are intelligent and well-intentioned says they are willing to do miscellaneous Wiki clean up and cross linking work, we want to be able to let them do it without them having to formally join the NPO first.  It would be the formal Wiki officer's job to supervise these informal Wiki workers.
• Legal officer – probably worthwhile to have in case anybody sues us or we want to sue anybody.  For general legal advice on various things I think crowdsourcing may work relatively well once we have more members.
• Finance officer – how would this differ from the board position of Treasurer?
• Liaison officer(s) – I suppose this is worth having to make sure we present a consistent and professional face to other groups, like Copenhagen Suborbitals.

This is good work to be doing.  My main concern is that I want the formal NPO structure to be as small, lightweight and non-authoritarian as possible, consistent with us still being able to actually get stuff done.

Perhaps important passwords and other information can be stored in a sealed envelope left with an attorney or at a bank and can only be opened in the presence of two or more officers? Perhaps that's overkill. It should probably be as easy as having the President and Vice President keep hard copies of the usernames and passwords somewhere.

I think the second suggestion is best.  The Web systems officer shall be obligated by by-law to periodically update the President and perhaps one other board member with all the pertinent details.  Perhaps the by-laws will specify that passwords must be rotated every n months/years and must be of at least some minimum length, bla, bla, bla.  The President and anybody else who receives these details from the WSO shall by obligated by by-law not to disclose them except to certain people under certain clearly defined conditions.

Rocket-To-The-Moon said:

I think I sort of started to diverge in my earlier post. The CSTART NPO itself should indeed be very small, two to three members to cover the bare minimums. I think I was sort of referring more to "staff positions".

To be clear: two to three board members, right? I think having as many non-board general members as we can get would be a good move, since (i) we could get a small dues from each of them to help raise money and (ii) they would provide a large voting body who could approve the creation of new projects, etc.

Couldn't agree more with you, brmj.

My vision is basically:

• Technical decisions are made by interested people on the forums / wiki.  Some of these people may be non-board members of the formal CSTART org, some of them may not be, doesn't matter.
• There is a process whereby people can say to the board "we'd like to make this design official and get money to contract its construction".  The actual process would need some fleshing out.
• The board calls a meeting whereat anybody who is a member of the formal CSTART org can vote to approve or deny this request.
• If the request is approved only then is the treasurer allowed to pay contractors, etc.

This means the board keeps out of day to day design work and only actually blesses something as official and financable if the majority of our non-board members agree with it.