[Board] Next meeting: 15th August, 3 UTC

[Daniel Morissette]

Hi Darrell,

FYI we discussed appointing a board rep for the PDX LOC in yesterday's 
board meeting, and it was decided to wait until after the election when 
the new board is in place at the beginning of September, to pick a rep 
from the new board.

I envision that one of first the tasks of this rep could be to work with 
you to define the best fiscal scenario, and at the same time better 
document the process and contractual relationship between OSGeo and the 
FOSS4G LOC (and/or PCO). There is a good amount of experience from past 
years to work from (see emails from Paul and Peter for instance), so it 
should be mostly a matter of documenting an existing process, and then 
perhaps come up with a template contract that would be used for this 
year and future years.

In the meantime, you may want to start updating your budget to reflect 
the latest information that was not available at bid time, and submit a 
final budget to the board for review and approval. That is one of the 
steps that the LOC needs to go through before OSGeo provides any seed 
funds or financial backing.

Daniel



On 13-08-14 12:52 PM, Darrell Fuhriman wrote:
>> In the meantime, if someone wants to document a couple of scenarios I can run them by our attorney to get his input/comments, but I am not going to come up with those scenarios myself.
>
> I think Steve Swazee outlined the scenarios in his e-mail pretty well, though it may be worth perusing the rest of the thread for clarity.
>
> To my mind the vastly preferred option is to keep everything under the umbrella of OSGeo. The real deciding factor would be how quickly a non-profit entity could be setup, whether a new c3, or OSGeo becoming a c6. If the timeline for that is on the order of a couple of months, then I would think that keeping it all under OSGeo is exactly the right thing.
>
> So that would be my #1 question to the attorney: how long 'til non-profit status is attained. I would think he/she could answer that one easily.
>
> If it looks like it could be a while[1], then I would suggest partnering with another organization to handle the Fiscal Sponsorship. I don't know what that would require from a legal perspective, so that's question #2 to ask the attorney.  Once the arrangement is made, then the seed money would be transferred to that organization and they would handle the contracts, pay the PCO, etc.
>
> Once the conference is done and tax-exempt status is achieved by OSGeo, then the profits would be transferred back to OSGeo from the partnering organization. I think the partnering organization would deserve some amount of donation from OSGeo for their work, presumably pre-determined as part of the sponsorship arrangement.
>
>> My understanding of the process is that the LOC comes up with a budget for board approval, and then OSGeo would provide seed money to the LOC to help kick start things based on this budget (in the order of up to 20-40k$). Then a rep of the board is assinged on the LOC and keeps an eye on things and reports to the board for the rest of the conference planning. With respect to signatures, I would think that using a PCO or separate org to manage the money should take care of that, once OSGeo has signed a contract with that PCO or other entity.
>
> Sounds good. We did draw up a fairly detailed budget as part of the bid process. I presume that will be sufficient?
>
> Darrell
>
> [1] Where "a while" is defined as "after sponsorship money starts coming in, potentially triggering tax liability".
>


-- 
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/
Provider of Professional MapServer Support since 2000