Financial decisions in FSFE (was: Re: FSFE ignoring OOXML?)

[Georg C. F. Greve]

 || On Wed, 25 Apr 2007 15:13:02 +0200
 || Davide Dozza <davide at flossconsulting.it> wrote: 

 dd> The cost for the subscription fee was not so much. Just 2.000
 dd> Euros. A lot for a 20-people association, but not a lot for an
 dd> organization which receives 240.000 euros of Incomes and spends
 dd> 31.000 Euros for travels.

For your information: Of those 31k EUR, the largest part was related
to the international conference on GPLv3, which FSFE organised last
year and for which it received specific and dedicated funding from
Stichting NLnet in the Netherlands.

Usually FSFE insists on invitations to cover travel expenses, or
covers them through European Union projects or other external sources
of funding, whenever possible.

At the end of the day most of our funds are spent on personell, which
translates to work done for Free Software. And as you can see from the
numbers, our overhead is quite low in comparison with other
organisations.

And yes, we still consider 2k EUR a significant sum, as also explained
in my other email.


 dd> As I think the OpenXML fasttrack is *very very* important for the
 dd> future of free software I really wonder to know how Felloship
 dd> fees are spent.  More in general, *who* decides how felloships
 dd> fee are spent? As I just received an answer from Greve, how are
 dd> the decisions taken about?

Decisions about significant sums (and 2k would already be in that
category) are generally taken by online consultation of the members of
the general assembly.

Decisions about smaller budgets and expenses within defined budgets on
projects are authorised by the responsible project coordinators, or
(as fallback) the Extended Executive Committe of FSFE.

Every decision that was not made by the general assembly directly
remains a personal liability of the person taking the decision until
the general assembly exonerates that decision.

But as the president of FSFE it is usually my duty to convey bad news,
although this is certainly something I could do without.

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
What everyone should know about DRM                   (http://DRM.info)
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