update

[astolat]

I want to say generally that this project is going to be a marathon, not a sprint -- we want to keep moving forward so enthusiasm doesn't flag, but we also don't want to rush or lock ourselves into an early hasty decision.

What's happening right now:

• We have a layout thanks to _workinprogress! The mods are working on the userinfo and posting policy for this comm, and we have people working on collecting volunteers and suggestions and a general summary from the original giant discussion.
  
  
• General discussion is still continuing on that original thread. Once the summary is posted, I will close down that post (just freezing rather than making all comments vanish -- no worries!) so the continuing discussion can move over to here.
  
  
• I'm putting together a small working group of volunteers with professional experience in the legal/nonprofit/corporate setup world to help figure out the right kind of corporate structure to do this with. (If you have such experience and I haven't emailed you yet, please drop me a line! astolat at livejournal reaches me if you don't want to comment.
  
  
• I'm starting to hit people up to do some research for us on various things like software tools that have been mentioned in the discussion.

As a rule, we'll want discussions here to stay open for a while before any action is taken. Stuff on lj tends to fade from sight pretty quickly, so I would really like to encourage subscribing to email notifications for posts on this group, and thumbtacking any posts dealing with areas you are interested in.

Please do chime in even if you are coming to a discussion late -- ideally we'll make it a habit to recruit someone to collect up a summary after discussion has died down. Also -- please use the subject line in lj comments if you think of it, so that if discussion gets large, it's easy to see the main point of a particular collapsed thread while skimming.

Addressing a few specific concerns:

• On ownership/organization: I'm running with the ball and doing a bunch of stuff unilaterally right now to get this off the ground, but I want to make clear from the start that my goal is to set up an organization to run and own this project that is not under the control of/dependent on any one person, with both a strong decisionmaking process and accountability to the community.
  
  
• On the financial side: Fiscal responsibility is critical. We will not start out with idealistic guarantees that just ask the whatever high atop the thing to smite us. *g* However, we will absolutely be not-for-profit, and will do our level best to make the donation model work. The issue will clearly be the long-term. We will have to do some research and learn as we go both how much money we will need, and how much we can consistently raise under a donation model.
  
  
• On the legal side: we will absolutely be getting professional legal advice right from the start.

Also, we are going to have fun. :)

Comments

[astolat]

Hey -- if you can drop a note with this on the original discussion there so we make sure to have you on the volunteer list, that would be great. We are not quite ready to start looking at server issues yet, but having you on tap would be wonderful, thanks!