Structure of FSFE (was: FSFE ignoring OOXML?)

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi Davide,

On Wednesday 25 April 2007 15:13, Davide Dozza wrote:
> The cost for the subscription fee was not so much. Just 2.000 Euros. A
> lot for a 20-people association, but not a lot for an organization which
> receives 240.000 euros of Incomes and spends 31.000 Euros for travels.

some of the income actually is earmarked when it goes through our books.
Like: Here you have 10 K Euro to invite speakers to a conference about GPLv3.
A different view on the sum would be 10K spend on GPLv3.
Or it is reembursement for us to speak, when we say: You can only have us
speak if you pay the travel expenses. This is not budget we are free to spend.

> As I think the OpenXML fasttrack is *very very* important for the future
> of free software 

I personally tend to disagree a bit, see my post about this.
To me software-patents, the anti-trust case, FTF, drm and GPLv3 are more 
important.

FSFE has spend significant resources on open standards,
as Ciaran and I have pointed out. In the past it has been problematic
to just give funds to other organisations, because we must be absolutely
sure that this is spend within our constitutional goals and even very 
promissing individuals turned out to support "open source" in the end.
So we only do this only on rare exceptional cases.

> I really wonder to know how Felloship fees are spent. 
> More in general, *who* decides how felloships fee are spent? As I just
> received an answer from Greve, how are the decisions taken about?

Georg is the elected president, running the operations and executing the
decisions of the general assembly of the organisation.
There is an extended executive comittee which supports him doing so.
Furthermore some team leaders, like myself for Germany or Stefano for Italy
do have a budget they can authorise on their own.
For all those operational decisions we are liable to the general assembly
which has access to the documents throughout the year and can call 
extraordinary meetings if then need arises. They are a bit like an advisory 
board.

You read about details on
http://www.fsfeurope.org/about/about.en.html

Best,
Bernhard
-- 
FSFE -- Coordinator Germany                                   (fsfeurope.org)
Your donation makes our work possible:  www.fsfeurope.org/help/donate.en.html
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