IIUC, there are 2 "streams" on how the things should be done:

1. Turn Maemo (community) into a corporation, with GA on top and BoD(or whatever it is called in german) as executive body. In this scenario I don't see (or didn't get it) what exactly role has the community council. If GA is "the community" that tells BoD what to do, there is really no need for another entity doing the same. And how's that going to work legally. So maybe completely removing CC in this scenario is the sanest thing to do.

2. Keep the current structure(see the note bellow), with roles and responsibilities as were agreed back in the times, just replace HiFo with MCeV and make some fictive GA to please the german law. Or even better - make sure that MCeV's BoD has legal duty to execute CC's orders (unless these orders are illegal).

I don't understand how taking route 1 benefits the community. How turning a FOSS community into a corporation with requirements that GA members have to disclose their name address etc and(maybe) pay to become such members, esp now that more and more people stop contributions is going to help?

What is wrong with the MCeV being a cashier only? After all, BoD members are (supposed to be) community members, so if a legal action should be taken (like removing Nokia (C) or similar from maemo.org) they can always tell the council, which in turn can either do it (by telling the sysops) or tell BoD if a legal action is to be taken. Sure, some may argue that in such a scenario CC has too much power, but there is the BoD that cares for the legal stuff and sysops, who I bet will refuse to do something stupid with the infra.

BTW is it possible to turn the council to MCeV's GA? With limited membership (for the duration of the council term)? IIUC this will make both parties happy - we will have a corporation with the community on top

note: The (OPERATIONAL)structure that was agreed on when HiFo was established is: community tells the council what to do and the council(if needed) tells BoD what to do and BoD executes it, unless illegal.

I think we should ignore any "this is how it is now with HiFo and MCeV", and focus on "how do we want it to be". This seems to be lost in some of the posts here.
Once we have found such a 'perfect' scenario, we can start looking into how to achieve this, e.g. by a referendum changing the by-laws or whatever.

Subsequently, I will be stating some things in a 'would be nice to have' way, even if those are already in place.

As far as I understand it, the current problems are the intersection between GA (General Assembly, the membership of the eV) and the Maemo community as a whole (garage account, etc), as well as the future of the Council.

There was also talk of membership fees, but that is NOT a requirement for an eV and IMHO the fact that this was talked about should not be used as an argument here. Membership fees can NOT be introduced by the board simply at their will. So let's ignore this piece of the argument for now.

In practice, all of this shouldn't be such a massive problem.

First of all, there shouldn't be any fear of rogue board members. The bylaws should be defined in such a clear, concise and close-fitting way that there are very few opportunities for the board not to act in the best interest of Maemo and its community. As pointed out before, the board is accountable to the GA!

There would be two bodies in the eV, the General Assembly, and the board, elected from and by the GA.

Now, the board should open up and delegate as many of it's duties to the Maemo community (not just the GA). That is, the board appoints techstaff, moderators (all chosen from the community), and does whatever else is necessary to run Maemo community's daily business.
Basically, it acts as a supervising and steering entity.

Whenever there is something to decide that is outside the normal course of business and/or that affects the community, the board holds a referendum amongst the entire community (i.e. garage account holders, which ideally includes all of the eV membership).
There is no legal requirement that the board can only listen to the GA. It can seek 'external' advice at will, which just happens to be the community. Such a referendum would, of course, only offer options that are in line with the eV's bylaws, hence adhering to the outcome shouldn't be a problem for the board.

Such important issues can, of course, be brought to the board's attention from anyone - member of the eV, member of the community, or even an outsider.

Now, to be a member of the community, to use TMO, garage, etc, and to vote on important matters, there is no need to be a member of the eV, and no need to reveal one's identity.

However, if one wants to support the eV further, one can become a member of the eV and vote for a board, or even run for board oneself, if desired.
Membership should not be limited to a 'select few', as that will for sure cause resentment, one way or the other. As was mentioned before, it is also possible for non-EU citizens to become mebers of the eV, and even run for board as well (the latter with limitations).

There is no need for a council in this scenario. There may, of course, be 'working groups' or 'steering groups' as appointed by the board from volunteers from the community. Or the community can create such groups by itself.



This is my 10 cents on this. I may have forgotten something or stated the obvious, as mentioned above. Please don't flame me for this. There have been enough flame wars and attacks here already.

Bingo! I was just about to post something along those lines but you expressed it much better.

HiFo/MCeV, Council, GA... that's at least THREE bodies representing the community. Four if you consider the BoD a separate entity. If you ask me, two (or three) of them are redundant.

If I get Jörg's arguments right, it is the Counxcil that has (should have) the most power and therefore it is the one that should stay. Unfortunately this is not possible for legal reasons. So there is only one option: keep the eV. That means doing away with the rest.

I am not saying do it overnight. Exactly in accordance with foobar's excellent opening line, I suggest that this is the optimal terminal state where we want to be. Now we need to work out how to get there. I imagine not simply dismissing the Council, more like merging the responsibilities. But, in the end, having a simple structure with just ONE body standing between me and the dark world of banks, lawyers etc.

Exactly, except that with the eV you will always have two legal bodies, the board and the GA, for legal reasons, even if board = GA. But that shouldn't be a problem and shouldn't hinder us in any way.

No, three: board, GA, council. See the signed and approved-by-court MCeV bylaws and HiFo bylaws. Tell me how "dismissing the Council" is going to work with this. "shouldn't hinder us in any way" and the ones you voted into positions supposed to act illegal? Don't forget Nokia will frown at this, they rely on the bylaws of any entity inheriting the stuff are warranting that no rogue stuff is done with the maemo trademark etc. HiFo/MCeV now acting like there's no rules at all will convince Nokia that such entity isn't trustworthy.

On a sidenote referring to some former criticism:
""At a bare minimum, the skin, the logos, and the linkages with other systems that are custom to this site (including Karma) are still under LPGL""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_(media) (nobody but OP said content = software)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_(computing)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theme_(computer)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
http://maemo.org/legal/terms_of_use/trademarks/logos/ !! ""Maemo.org logos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.""
The OP's reference to "LGPL" is completely inapproriate here since 1) doesn't apply to content and 2) the LGPLed linked software doesn't establish any licence whatsoever for the linking software. (but maybe that's what he tried to say? No idea. And also irrelevant since the linking software been a maybe 400 lines of [publicly available via SVN?] php code that he claims he edited 3 of them (and did _not_ fix karma by that), but ignores that I said techstaff edited and replaced way more than that, during the 99% of time he's not been around and thus not witnessing what been done.) OP also seems to insinuate that I doubted if Nokia was allowed to hand over maemo to HiFo. That's obviously nonsense, of course Nokia was allowed to do so. What I said is community was and is allowed to use all that stuff without Nokia's consent. So Nokia has nothing to 'sell' to HiFo, except of the hw, trademark and the domain. Nevertheless it's of course nice when Nokia explicitly grants HiFo permission to use all of maemo.org server data (executable and content), no matter if such permission is legally needed or not.

Wrong. Turn Maemo into a real non-profit organization, which need to have Board, and maintain legal responsibility. We may like it or not, but this is how law works, and it seems to work well for other organizations like this, of similar or different scale (see Debian)

2. Keep the current structure(see the note bellow), with roles and responsibilities as were agreed back in the times, just replace HiFo with MCeV and make some fictive GA to please the german law. Or even better - make sure that MCeV's BoD has legal duty to execute CC's orders (unless these orders are illegal).[/quote]

And where we will find masochists that want to take legal responsibility (board in your scheme), but still get ordered what to do by guys without legal responsibility (Council)? Maybe you should candidate for being Board member in such scheme?

The BoD having "legal duty" to execute CC orders is so ridiculous against the (any even remotely sane, including the german's one) law, that it's not even funny anymore. Well, technically, you can have some kamikaze people executing such orders unofficially, but it won't help them if law gets on their asses for breaking the law - Board is responsible, no matter what idiocy we write in our internal rules.

Againt, not corporation, but REAL non-profit, unlike the joke we had before. Then, maybe, just *maybe* we will be able to legally provide basic functionalities, that our Community should serve - like, for example, easy availability of setting development environment for new interested developers, which is, practically, non-existant now.

Sure, guys like you, who set up they dev machines ages ago don't care much - maybe it's the reason you haven't noticed, that the "Organization" (a joke of an organization) that resulted from joergs sabotage doesn't server such basic things for more than a year, already. and it's just one example of basic things that are not working, and can't be working, if we listen to shouters that have no idea about law.

And no, thet fact that we have "working" irc channel and TMO, +semi-working autobuilder DOESN'T mean that we're properly functioning organization. It is less than emergency life-keepinjg, actually.

No one will tell anything to the Council, as the Council is no-one by the law. Following your logic, anyone wanting to take any legal action on Maemo, could take any random average joe from the street, and start demanding it from him.

The only responsible part is Board, as they're legally responsible for functioning of organization. every party outside Maemo will talk with Board only, and only Board will be held liable for anything. No sane person will want to have such responsibility, with random unofficial dudes (Council) telling them what to do.

...and we end up with current limbo. joerg from Council always want board to do something stupid with infra - like, paying him for his doubtful hosting, and then, complaining that "rules" were broken, when board decide to do with other, free, and responsible (without someone constantly threatening to wipe out infra) hosting service.

Of course, this is just an example - with your proposition, we would be living in constant conflict. What is "stupid" for one party, may be clever for another, and vice versa.

We can integrate Council members into Board. they will still be Board for anyone outside, and calling them Council would be internal thing to Maemo, without anyone else carrying about it. Practically, it would still mean we're disbanding Council and replacing it with Board - we would just use fancy name for our Board, to satisfy some egos.

This is a lie, repeated by joerg over and over, and i see you have swallowed it whole. Council have no rights to tell BoD what to do, and never had. Many people have quoted bylaws zillion of times in this thread (even got some "bravo, someone finally read bylaws with understanding" comments, afterwards), so I will leave exercise of finding it to you.
---

Anyway - what Board tries to do, is to make Maemo a legally functioning organization, with Board responsible to members (and it would be done long time ago, if joerg wouldn't be - until recently - threatened like spoiled egg, with too much care and tries on negotiating).

Council may or may not function as volunteer bunch of people that act as Community relations contact for Board (I think we don't need such weirdo, but of course it's point for discussion). Or Council can be just Board members, with fancy "Council" name used by Maemo, for no reason.

There is no middle-ground - you *can't* have legally responsibleness people ordering around legally responsible people what to do, period. and you *must* have some legally responsible people to have officially working organization, no matter where you set it up.

Sorry, I'm unable to write it simpler than the last paragraph, so if you still haven't grasped it, move along - this is not the post you're looking for.

/Estel

Thanks for this EXCELLENT demonstration of your troll nature and lack of any clue. Techstaff *did* provide the stuff you ask for, alas we had to revoke it due to Nokia asking HiFo about LEGAL issues with such providing. And of course council and techstaff immediately fixed the issue to not expose HiFo to any legal threat. You hoping for this to change with MCeV already discredits the MceV, you're doing damage to the whole community with such nonsense, which I bet you don't care a cent about, as long as you can insult and bicker and spread lies. This been a case where legal issues took effect in which case BoD - as owner - is highest authority. This doesn't mean BoD usually is supposed to decide anything on their own, unless asked for by anybody like council or Nokia or $patent-troll (the usual chain of command situation where BoD is lowest in chain and community has all the power, council acts as proxy). Well, when not even chainsawbike gets the concept of difference between legal authority and democratic decision and delegation which are frequently exactly reciprocal to each other, then how could we expect you to grok it.
And: Which sabotage?? Blatant sneaky Liar!!

I am short on time so I cut in to the worse part of this conversation.

I see that people do not understand that there is no way to have a fictive General Assembly (GA), GA is another term for "all regular members" and is nothing you may bend to your needs, it is a fact and a requirement to have for a German registered association (e.V.).

Why you guys are discussing what is not there I do not get at the slightest approach from my side - there is no membership fee and as long as the GA does note vote to have one, there won't be one.

Member's Personal Data, German law applies, we are not allowed to disclose anything public if we do not have permission to do so.

With the MCe.V. there won't be any change for the community, it has its garage and has its council. If you do not want to have the council as part of the e.V. you can have that voted by GA but I'd prefer a referendum about that - ask the community what it wants.

And just for the record, both HiFo and MCe.V. are currently NOT registered NPOs. But that is actually something already set in the bylaws so turning them into NPOs (in case of HiFo "turn it back into a NPO") is just a matter of paperwork but is not sane in our current financial situation. Both are not registered corporations and must not act as such.
(As you guys are always about facts, you beat me to it.)

For fmg and joerg, I cannot track what you guys are actually on about anymore. Find another form of entity that suits you and is actually able to act as legal representation of the maemo community... all I hear is "not your way MOFO" and "FU". Instead of nagging about every detail (true or false) you might just use your energy in a productive way and ADD to this community instead of trying to demoralize what is left.

For all the chain of command things, Anonymous will take credit but never liability.

Typical Chemist post, lots of bashing while blaming others for exactly that. Not to the point since too much in hurry to even read stuff. Going "Leeeeeroy Jenkins", turning around and hoping others will finally get the point that been soooo obvious if not everybody except of you was a complete idiot. Right?
For "I see that people do not understand that there is no way to have a fictive General Assembly (GA),": nobody asked for a "fictive" GA. So I don't see where you see that. Re-read the posts! I'm tired of repeating sht for you a 5th time.
For "And as I was Council and Techstaff *) at that time and also member of the BoD I highly doubt that there was anything "official" about these actions?!" you best ask Woody who been the HiFo member who approached me and asked me if we provide tablets-dev.nokia.com. I explained him that we technicall cannot provide *.nokia.com sites, but that we fixed the broken (like so many other services, after migration2) stage.maemo.org (DNS IP assigned to us by Nokia!) that feeds the akamai serverfarm owned and operated by nokia, and he asked me to stop that since Nokia thought somebody was pirating their *.nokia.com website, which I forwarded to our sysops who took the required actions - was that incorrect? This tells something about Nokia, but that's not relevant here. What's relevant is that the above is the absolute truth and I never stated anything different and am willing to disclose the relevant non-public communication to you when you can't get it inside HiFo. I also don't see any problem in all this, except your leeeroy jenkins idiotic attack against me, and quite obviously Nokia got a problem caused by them not expecting techstaff to fix broken services in maemo.org A pity people never change and never seem to learn.
BR
jOERG
*) Yeah, I recall that: You been council but missed about three quarters of council meetings, when you showed up you bitched about the time of day and day of week, we changed it but you still didn't show up. On maemo admin channel where all techstaff is supposed to be available 24/7 for organizational conversation and keeping track of what gets done, you simply didn't show up either, allegedly you didn't know about that channel's policy. Seems your communication inside HiFo been similarly tight and verbose.

ehrm read again... smart *** (the first time you asked for it, this time it was fmg)

You know there are logs and stuff?

Don't recall you being some role-model lately, are you?

I knew about the channel policy and did some alterations to my client after you refused to fix the channel settings (don't call me idiot when you are unable to set channel flags right! And yes you could have done that the first time after I asked to fix it...)
But as this channel seems to be used by you to talk privately with techstaff about your frustration about what is going on at the moment but actually not being techstaff (I remember you stepping down right? or was it being discharged by HiFo?) and comparing supporting MCeV as some Nazi Germany move from 1933 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933

original quote:
15:07 < chem|st> I wont discuss anything with you in private channels
15:08 < DocScrutinizer05> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ermäch...M.C3.A4rz_1933
15:10 < DocScrutinizer05> (discuss) yeah, why should you. You already accomplished that mission
He also believes I want to become CEO of MCe.V. in the future, charge members fees to save me a nice job with proper income...

How about me pushing some theories now?

Just below, way below me... good night!