[Evergreen-governance-l] Phone Call re: Fiscal Sponsorship Agreement

[Dan Scott]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 03:58:43PM -0500, Watson, Sylvia wrote:
<snip> 
> *       People/entities can agree to do Evergreen related projects without the money or agreements going through the Conservancy.  However, the final product/result is subject to being accepted and approved by the Evergreen Oversight Board.  Such projects are not considered part of the Evergreen Project until they are accepted by the Oversight Board.

I'd like to provide some clarification on this final point. To be sure,
Sylvia asked about collaborative development funding, and about whether
all of those efforts needed to flow through the Conservancy's coffers,
and Bradley replied no, it's normal for projects to have all kinds of
development arrangements for site-specific features, customizations, etc
that can be negotiated outside of the Conservancy (as long as the
Conservancy doesn't have to be involved). Then, perhaps to reassure
Sylvia / Elizabeth that the project's code would remain under the
control of the project, he said that it wouldn't be part of the
Evergreen Project unless it was accepted by the Evergreen Oversight
Board. 

Rather than "Evergreen Oversight Board", I suspected that Bradley meant
to say "Evergreen Project", meaning following our development norms
contributions as documented at
http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=contributing.

Alternately, perhaps Bradley meant "Evergreen Oversight Board" insofar
as development decisions are delegated to the project committers.
Arguably, once the Evergreen project signs the Fiscal Sponsorship
Agreement with the Conservancy, the Oversight Board represents the
project and could have the ability to make arbitrary decisions such as
choosing a different code repository, naming a new set of committers,
setting up a process by which contributions must be approved by the
Oversight Board, etc - but in my opinion that would be a rather ruinous
path for the project to follow. I opted not to interject with a question
for clarification because the question had been about funding, not about
our development methodology, but I suppose I should have spoken up in
this case.

Bradley, if you have a chance to clarify what you meant, on the chance
that I read your intent incorrectly, it would be appreciated.