[Foundation-l] board manual and where information about the WMF should really be

Mon Dec 5 10:57:22 UTC 2005

Hello everyone,

There has been a bit of discussion recently about Non Profit Foundations 
and their organisation. Michael Davis has been discussing a lot in the 
past few days with a lawyer we are working with, and amongst various 
conclusions, it was recommanded that we try to anticipate the best we 
could our growth curve and to get a strong legal framework in place 
asap. Which seems to involve good functioning structure... and sticking 
a bit more to traditional board governance procedures, with some 
evolution in the way we handle agendas, minutes, bylaws, resolution, 
board manual, insurance and so on.

We are currently working on all this very much. Each according to its 
own ability.
Some of this can only be done by board members proper, other tasks can 
also be supported by officers, and some can involve anyone who is 
serious and supportive.

Amongst the tasks I will try to take care of in the next few weeks (or 
months...) is documentation, such as typically board manual. Michael has 
provided us with some documentation (such as 
http://www.boardsource.org/FullAnswer.asp?ID=98) and I gathered some 
more as well. Most of what is typically required on a board manual, we 
already have, but it is dispersed on at least 3 different wikis and 
poorly organised. This is unfortunate.

Board governance is not something new and there is no reason for us to 
reinvent the wheel. When I looked at some of these pages, I recognised 
areas where we have indeed tried to reinvent the wheel... other areas we 
have never explored at all, areas where we found our own balance and 
areas which are still a mess :-)

I invite you to join and help the way you can if you have such a desire. 
Either help to organise the structure of the future document (and more 
generally Foundation website), help to gather what already exist, help 
write what does *not* exist, help fix poor english, help translate (much 
later) some of the pages.

If you are interested, please, let's talk about this on meta or by irc. 
I presume this will be very boring for most editors here, so it will 
probably rarely be mentionned on the list, but if you wish to help, 
please jump in any time.

thanks

Ant