Informal overview of operations

From CSTART Wiki

At the present time, CSTART operates in an informal manner by rough consensus amongst our small user base on the forums.

In the near future, we hope to turn CSTART into a legal entity. Eventually we want CSTART to be a non-stock corporation with 501(c)(3) tax exemption status. CSTART may go through various phases of being "less" than this while we raise the money and human resources required for this final goal.

Once CSTART is a legal entity, its behaviour shall be strictly governed by bylaws. The bylaws will be designed to give the board and officers of the organization the minimum power required to do their job. The emphasis will strongly be on community-driven, "bottom up" development, rather than authoritarian "top down" decisions.

Our draft bylaws are in a very preliminary state, but here is a rough overview of how we expect things will look:

• CSTART will raise money via donations, sponsorships and sales of merchandise
• There will be a list of official CSTART projects, with various rules dictating how many projects may be active at any one time, how long projects may run for, etc.
• CSTART will only be able to use its money for:
  • Day to day running of the organization (paying bills)
  • Doing things which are in direct aid of one of the current official projects.
• The sorts of things CSTART may be allowed to do in direct aid of projects are:
  • Award grants
  • Award contracts
  • Run prizes (similar to XPrize)
  • Organize launch events
• Everything will happen in accordance with the CSTART Social Contract, i.e. where we do grants, contracts, prizes, launches, etc. the fine print for those things will ensure that the work we organize and finance remains open and peaceful. For instance, if we run a prize like the XPrize, it will be a rule that all entrants, not just the winners, eventually give the IP involved to CSTART, who will be required to release it to the public under a Creative Commons license.