[OSGeo Oceania] Funding for organisation development

[John Bryant]

Hi all,

I'm eager to kick off a discussion about OSGeo Oceania membership, our AGM,
and the election of directors, so that we're ready to execute these things
by the time FOSS4G SotM Oceania takes place. But in contemplating how this
may play out, I'm seeing a lot of moving parts. It seems possible we'll
need to make amendments to our constitution, and obviously we need to make
sure we're fully compliant with relevant legislation.

So, before we begin the membership etc discussion, I'd like us to consider
engaging some professional help to make sure we do this right, and to offer
timely guidance along the way. There are organisations that specialise in
assisting not-for-profit organisations through processes like this, and I'd
lean towards engaging one of these.

I feel like once we begin the discussion, there will be a lot of questions
we need to answer about what we can do, and having professional advice at
the ready may keep us from getting bogged down.

OSGeo (international) has part of their budget allocated to helping local
chapters get off the ground, and this feels like it would fit the bill [1].
I'd like to ask them for USD $2k.

Also, Linux Australia recently launched a grant program [2], this might
also be a good fit. I'd like to ask them for AUD $2500.

With these two amounts, we'd have ample funds to seek professional advice
in the short term to help fulfill our mandate in the OSGeo Oceania Terms of
Reference [3], as well as have additional funds for specific accounting
advice that we'll likely need as we bed down our accounting system.

If one or both of these funding requests are unsuccessful, I would still
see us engaging professional advice, but we may need to be more
conservative with it. I believe we already have agreement that we should
spend money on professional advice where needed, but this funding would
give us latitude to get more help, move faster, get a better result, and
avoid burning out our volunteer base.

So, the motion: *We direct John Bryant to apply for funding from OSGeo and
Linux Australia for funds to engage professional advice on developing our
membership, AGM, and director election processes, and for additional
accounting advice.*

Thoughts? What say you? If I get the go ahead with this, I'll put in
applications for funds right away.

John

[1] https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Budget_2019#OSGeo_Initiatives
[2] https://linux.org.au/grants/
[3] https://drive.google.com/file/d/13aZ6L08ke1-l32I7c00MahyEKgxeZkq8/view
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