Hello,
since voting on each and every single expense during the BoD calls is a
bit tedious, but required by the statutes, I would like to propose an
alternative solution to make the daily operations a bit easier.
In a nutshell, I would like to have the board appoint responsibilities
to not only, but mainly, BoD members. As an example:
- Thorsten and Florian for administrative issues
- Alex (from the admin team) and Florian for infrastructure topics
- Michael and Caolan for development resources
- Italo for marketing projects
and so on. Every area gets a fixed budget, either per month, quarter or
year, and if the goals fit into the statutes, the tax law and the
foundation's objectives, upon approval of one of the responsible
parties, the money can be spent without the need to have a formal BoD vote.
Excluded should be long-term contracts and anything that is not part of
the daily operations, like entering 10 year contracts fors
infrastructure, signing exclusive advertising deals and so on - you get
the point. ;-)
Real life examples: Signing the contract with a new domain registrar,
buying a bunch of new domain names, ordering the SMS gateway, or buying
one additional machine is something the board could leave at my
discretion for infrastructure. Making expenses for the tax advisor is
something the board could leave at Thorsten's discretion, and buying one
development machine or buying required software is something Michael and
Caolan could decide.
Things like capital investments, trademark registrations, establishing a
certification program and other non-daily operations would still require
the approval of the full board.
While the above is no readily written proposal to formally vote upon and
issue warrants, what do you generally think about it? I think if we
limit the amount to a senseful value, and have the budget on the radar,
this is something that would ease our daily operations and give people a
bit more flexibility, so we can focus on work rather than administration.
The German FrODeV e.V. has a similar rule in their rules of procedure
("Geschäftsordnung"), but they forsee a "veto time" of four working
days, which I'd like to either shorten for TDF or even avoid at all.
By the way, this is something that should not go into our community
bylaws or the rules of procedure, since changing it then has some
hurdles, so an individual decision of the BoD that can be changed or
revoked anytime makes sense.
Florian
--
Florian Effenberger, Chairman of the Board
Tel: +49 8341 99660880 | Mobile: +49 151 14424108
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