[Board] Update on Directors & Officers Liability Insurance renewal

[Daniel Morissette]

Board,

As some of you know, it's this time of year where we need to renew our 
Directors & Officers Liability Insurance. I have been going back and 
forth in the last few weeks with our broker filling forms and answering 
various questions, and they got back to me yesterday with a quote with a 
premium 5 times higher than in previous years. We used to pay 1,000$ 
(+300$ broker fee) and the new quote is for 5,571$ (+300$ broker fee) 
which the insurer says is due to additional information regarding the 
organization's volunteers.

That's quite an increase in price, and seem quite high for what we need 
and for the budget of our organization.

Indeed, one of the questions that they asked was: "The Underwriter needs 
to know the number of volunteers you are using and needs it documented 
on the renewal application for rating purposes."

I haven't checked with them yet but my guess is that my answer to this 
question (copied below) was a bit too inclusive and they are trying to 
include a few hundred volunteers in the coverage, which is not what we need.

After discussion off-list with some of you, I will try to talk to our 
broker today about restricting coverage to directors and officers, which 
is 9 directors on the board of directors, 8 committee chairs, and 20 
software project chairs. (The committee and project chairs are officers, 
when acting in an official capacity they are acting on behalf of OSGeo.)

Hopefully that will help bring the premium back to a more reasonable 
amount. I'll keep you posted.

Daniel Morissette
OSGeo Treasurer


FYI, my response to their question about the number of volunteers:
> """
> How do we define a volunteer? Where do we draw the line between volunteer and regular community member? Do we count only those who are elected or appointed by the foundation to provide a service requested by the Foundation, or does this include anyone contributing to the cause, committees and projects of the foundation from time to time?
>
> To give you an idea, our structure includes:
>
> - Board: 9 seats (currently 8 until next election)
>
> - Charter members: 125 elected charter members. Their main role is to elect the board and elect future charter members (charter membership is increased by 10% each year). A large part of those individuals also tend to also be involved in various committees or software projects of the foundation.
>
> - Committees: we have 8 committees (e.g. marketing, incubator, conference, etc.)... each with a chair appointed by the board and between 5 and 20 elected members who work as part of the committee
>
> - Software projects: we have 20 software projects, each with their own "steering committee" with 5 to 10 members, and the steering committee chair appointed to respond to the board on behalf of their project. Each software project has between 5 and 30 developers contributing their time in the form of source code, documentation, etc from time to time.
>
> - Local Chapters: Local communities in various cities or countries of the world can create local chapters. I do not have the exact count right now, but it is probably in the range of about 30 local chapters. The chair of each local chapter is appointed by the board to respond to the board on behalf of their chapter.
>
> Note that several people such as myself are involved at several levels (e.g. members of multiple committees and software projects)
>
> So where should we draw the line on who is a volunteer and who is not?
> """