[scribus-dev] Scribus e.V.

[Gregory Pittman]

Christoph Schäfer wrote:
> Exactly. For instance, the statutes and articles don't describe the voting procedure for the general meeting, so this can be decided during the meeting. Also, the scale of fees is an external document, not a part of the charter. In its current form the charter contains the absolute minimum to satisfy the requirements of German civil law and to get the association working -- thanks to the many useful hints from court employees.
>   
Having been involved with the formation of a nonprofit in the US, it 
seems from everything Christoph has done that the process and structure 
of nonprofits in Germany is much the same.

You definitely want your initial documents to remain simple, simply 
justifying the nonprofit status and a basic management structure. 
Afterward, then you develop various other articles describing operation 
and which may allow for other peripheral kinds of membership. An 
important operational issue is not to let a controlling group (ie, 
voting members) become too large, since decision-making can become 
difficult. Especially when you begin to bring in "outsiders", it's good 
to develop a sense of their true commitment. If nothing else, you can 
have the time-wasting exercise related to them taking part in meetings 
only infrequently, and expect to be updated on a lot of past events 
during a meeting, or rehashing past dead discussions (much like some 
mailing list threads that won't seem to die).

Even for those of us that we "know", we will probably need to set up 
some rules about some percentage of attendance at online meetings being 
necessary to maintain voting rights. One thing we can experiment with, 
particularly considering time zone issues, is whether we can have some 
element of flexibility. It may be necessary to have some things happen 
in a simultaneous IRC-like way, but others (such as opinions that may 
require some thought) can use something else like emails.

Greg