I'm at work and don't have time to respond in full right now, but there's one thing I've been thinking on, and I wanted to get toss it out into this discussion as early as possible.
I believe that, when it comes to advocacy, there should be legal entity separate from GNHLUG. Note that I am *NOT* saying GNHLUG should not be an incorporated legal entity. I think there should be a legally-enabled "GNHLUG". I'm just saying that advocacy should be done under the name of a separate entity. By "advocacy", I mean going to law-making sessions, or to school board meetings, or business seminars, or whatever, and telling people they should use FOSS. The reason why I think this is simple: If we're going to go before anyone and say we represent GNHLUG, we have to make sure we actually *DO* represent GNHLUG. That means everyone has to agree with everything we're pushing (more or less). I think that will be unnecessarily complicated and cumbersome -- we can discuss this aspect more if people don't agree. On the other hand, if we create a separate group for purposes of advocacy, we can put some explicit goals in the charter from the get-go. Anyone who doesn't agree with those goals is free not to sign-up. Thus bypassing the whole consensus problem. This may have additional legal benefits as well. From what Ed has said, 501(c)(3) groups are "better" in terms of receiving donations, but have more restrictions on what they can do in terms of political activism. Sounds good for the non-advocacy group. The 501(c)(6) type of group is less restricted -- good for the advocacy group -- but contributions aren't tax-deductible. Gotta run... _______________________________________________ gnhlug-org mailing list gnhlug-org@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-org
