[Evergreen-governance-l] Membership Dues - a bad idea?

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Sep 1, 2010, at 5:11 PM, Amy Terlaga wrote:
> Actually, Steve's right, I wasn’t thinking about the programmers.  My opinion is that if you're a programmer, the dues fee should be waived.

Ditto for the individual documenter, the individual tester, etc.  The same point about paying for the privilege of writing code applies to documentation and other forms of contribution, particularly at the individual level.

Possibly one solution is to say that individual members will not be levied dues without a vote of the membership, but that dues for institutional members could be levied upon supermajority vote of the board.
 
> Here's the thing - Bibliomation (and I assume all other agencies) have in our budget to pay for dues to an organization like the Evergreen Foundation. We pay that to COSUGI right now (and COSUGI is separate from SirsiDynix - they're a 501c3, too).

I would agree that many agencies (although not all, particularly individual libraries) would be in a position to pay some sort of institutional dues.  Evergreen support vendors could as well, although we would want to be very careful about not setting up a dues structure that would disadvantage a small consultancy.  What I wouldn't want to see is the mere act of paying dues to count as a contribution for the purpose of membership eligibility.

> My big fear is that if we don't put it in now, to try to introduce it later will be even harder.
>  
> I do not want to cripple the Foundation right from the start.

I think retaining a section about the Foundation reserving the right to levy dues in the future is needed.

Can we establish a dues structure right away?  I'm less sure about that, but if we want to hold a meeting to try, I'm game.  Soliciting an initial round of seed money is more likely, I suspect, but we'd have to figure what we'd be paying for.  What would be the expenses?   I could envision things like filing fees to establish the foundation, but those would likely be nominal.  The conference is an obvious expense, but funding for that wouldn't *have* to come from dues - registration fees and sponsorship could continue to fund the conference.

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
VP, Data Services
Equinox Software, Inc. / Your Library's Guide to Open Source
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
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