On Sun, 2005-05-08 at 19:02 +0200, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> On Sunday 08 May 2005 17:36, Brad Cowan wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> >   I'd like to be considered in the voting for a trustee position.  A
> > particular interest would be in the form of funding and the possibility
> > of grants based on recommendations of a "steering committee" if that
> > model gets approved.
> 
> What do you mean by grants? Maybe I should add that the foundation by no means 
> is rich, and financially most if not allmost all money not spend on legal 
> fees should be saved for future legal fees and a reserve.
> 
> Paul
> 

  Yes, I understand the current budget situation, these are longer term
goals.  I'm interested in ways to increase our funding to go above and
beyond self sufficient. Spending all our funds on general expenses and
saving all the excess for legal expenses and a reserve for possibly more
legal defense leaves no room for things like research and development or
overall improvements.  I know these last two things depend on the having
more funding coming in than going out, which is what we should be
striving for in my honest opinion. Just because we're a non-profit
doesn't mean all our funds need to be for legal issues or our focus as
trustees needs to be towards legalities does it? 

  As for the grants, I'm not talking about huge sums of money here. For
example the trustees decide that they would like to start a $500 overall
improvement grant (could even be $10...the amount is trivial), they
would then ask the steering committee to decide which area needed the
most improvement and would write up a set of criteria or goals they
would like to see accomplished with this grant. The trustees would then
enact this grant based on the recommendations of the steering committee.
The steering committee would then judge which party should receive the
grant based on all criteria being met and the best model that represents
their goals. This separates the trustees from making the actual
developmental decisions or goals that the steering committee should be
making, but still allowing for contributions towards the overall well
being of the distro.  

  Anyway I'm just scribbling random thoughts, thanks for listening. 

-- 
Brad Cowan <bcowan@gentoo.org>
Developer,
Gentoo Linux    http://www.gentoo.org/~bcowan

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