Hello all,
Am Sun, Apr 27, 2025 at 10:26:00PM +0100 schrieb Steve George:
> > SAC membership has limited governance prerogatives of Guix as a legal entity
> > and necessitates identity towards French regulations.
> Yeah, I did just read the translated section on the Solidarity Advisory
> Council and it made my head spin!
> But, what I got was that they are a representation of all the members, and
> two of them sit on a Board with the President and Treasurer to make all the
> executive decisions on behalf of the members.
hm, as I read it, I think it is wrong. The idea of the statutes is as
follows:
- The SAC is the organ that "is invested with the highest powers within
the limits of the goal of the Association and the resolutions adopted
by the General Assembly". So the SAC takes the decisions in day-to-day
life (while the General Assembly can take all decisions it wants to,
it is less actionable for everyday business). For instance, we have
run every membership request and every expense through the SAC.
- The Board (Presidency and Treasury) are the outward representatives of
Guix Europe; their roles are constructed as, if I may be so impolite,
figureheads required for the administrative work (and this is a lot of
important work, like doing the accounting, opening a bank account
(which has been *decided* by the SAC, but requires actual paper
signing or app fingerprinting or what not), writing minutes of
meetings and so on). Of course it is also expected that the Board is
active in promoting the association, so it does have an important role
in practice. But it *represents*, while the SAC *decides*.
(As to "two of them sit on a Board with the President and Treasurer",
I am not sure to understand correctly; if I do, it is a
misunderstanding on your part :) The "Board" *are* the two persons
"Presidency" and "Treasury", who are members of the SAC together with
other people not on the Board.)
The essential idea was that of Guix Europe as a self-governed entity
where decisions are taken collectively, and that more or less all regular
members join the SAC (in practice, this often means a waiting period of
one year until the next GA).
Some associations do this by not having a board, and only something like
the SAC ("collégiale"); however, this has the drawback that all members
of the SAC would have to be declared to the French administration (with
name, address, job and, I think, date of birth). The separation of Board
and SAC makes the *outward* appearance more look like a classical
association, and only the Board needs to be declared; while the *inward*
functioning is collective. And members need to disclose their identity
only to the members of the SAC, who vote on their acceptance (the
membership form has a box to tick if members are willing to share their
identity with the public; the current members of the SAC do, this is why
their names appear on the website; but it is not mandatory to take part
in the SAC). Concretely, before closing our account, the Banque Populaire
asked for a list of our members, which we refused to provide.
Now the statutes have been written by laypersons, and as always, things
cannot be claimed with full confidence until tested in court. But at
least this is the spirit of the statutes, and also the way things have
been handled up to now. (I remember a somewhat sophist argument that in
practice, not each and every decision is taken by the SAC; for instance
as Treasury, I have taken the liberty to create a web page and am still
updating it from time to time as a regular member. However I would claim
that all important decisions, including membership and anything related
to finances, organising Guix Days and so on have been taken by the SAC.)
As to the relationship to Teams, I see none :)
Teams are a way of organising the Guix project itself, while
Guix Foundation (renamed so some time ago) is a non-profit supporting
work on Guix. Guix Foundation has a legal existence, while the Guix
project is a social fiction :) In any case, these are separate
entities.
Andreas
