I talked with Joshua Drake about membership in Software in the Public Interest (SPI). They are a nonprofit umbrella for several large open-source projects including Debian, Open Office, and PostgreSQL. (http://www.spi-inc.org/projects) They can also host groups like SeaPIG. They handle all the paperwork, and our administrative burden would be insignificant.
We'd have to tell them our governance structure and liaison contact. We don't need a full corporate structure with Secretary and Treasurer and elections, but we need something concrete. The liaison contact is a single person who would have the sole ability to tell SPI how to disperse the funds in our account. Typically, donors would contribute online or by sending a check, and claimants would get reimburesment for things they've purchased. Or we could occasionally tell SPI to pay an invoice directly, or to purchase something via their credit card to be shipped to us. I think we should look at setting this up in the next few months. It's not urgent because we don't have any anticipated expenses until the next Python Day after this, so we can discuss it at the February or March meeting. But it would give us more options in the future if we decide to take on additional expenses and solicit contributions more heavily. Potential uses include more Python Day-like events, a conference, a regular meeting space that charges rent (we may not have the luxury of free spaces forever), equipment, reference material (SeaPIG library?), scholarships for PyCon or other event travel, paying programmers to work on open-source Python projects (the way somebody was paying David Goldsmith to document NumPy or something), etc. Re governance, Brian Dorsey and I have informally led the group for several years. We could formalize this structure, or do something else. We could have elections, or simply say there will be two leaders, and if one resigns or is asked by the group to leave, the group will choose somebody to take his place. -- Mike Orr <[email protected]>
