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

[Karen Collier]

I like Galen's suggestion of making individual contributor memberships free, while possibly leveraging dues on institutional memberships, in the spirit of encouraging contributions.  I've got to admit, I was squirming at the idea of having to pay to continue leading DIG.

Karen

----- "Galen Charlton" <gmc at esilibrary.com> wrote:

> 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
> direct: +1 352-215-7548
> skype:  gmcharlt
> web:    http://www.esilibrary.com/
> 
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-- 
Karen Collier
Public Services Librarian
Kent County Public Library
408 High Street
Chestertown, MD 21620
410-778-3636
www.kentcountylibrary.org