[Debian-uk] Forming the Debian UK Society

[Steve McIntyre]

--8tIZwPmdq+hd82jQ
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

[ Apologies for the delay in posting this, it's been a _very_ busy
  weekend. ]

One of the things I've been promising to sort out for a while is a
proper bank account for Debian-UK. I've been holding a growing amount
of funds for Debian (donations, CD sales, Expo profits) over the last
few years, and so far it's been piling up in a spare savings account.
While so far there have not been any problems caused by this setup,
it's clearly not an ideal situation. To make things more open and
accountable (and less susceptible to failure should I dive under a
bus), a proper Debian UK bank account is necessary. We discussed this
on the list here quite a while ago:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/pipermail/debian-uk/2004-June/002245.html

and people were clearly in favour. Then the subject got dropped as I
was too busy and distracted doing other things, sorry. I have since
gone and found out the details of what was required by the bank.

The fun part is that to set up a bank account, we need to set up a
company, charity or society first. The easiest one of those in terms
of paperwork is a society, so we have decided to set one up. At the
Cambridge pubmeet yesterday, the 7 DDs present thrashed out the
details of a constitution, a committee and a mandate for the Treasurer
to go and open a bank account. These are the minimum requirements that
the bank want.

Details of the meeting and initial constitution are online (in a
temporary home for now) at

http://wiki.earth.li/DebianUKSociety

We plan to move that to a more permanent home/domain soon. A quick
summary:

 * Initial constitution written

 * Initial committee elected (Phil Hands as Chairperson, Vince Sanders
   as Secretary, Steve McIntyre as Treasurer). Each of the committee
   members will hold a society cheque book and be a signatory.

 * Membership of the society consists of the set of registered Debian
   developers resident in the UK, bar those who have deliberately
   opted out.

 * We propose to have the first AGM at the usual Debian summer BBQ at
   my place (Saturday 20th August this year).

Before anybody screams that they were not consulted before we did this
or that we've done something wrong or we're trying to discriminate
against people (or whatever), the point of the society and founding
documents are _just_ to meet the requirements for getting a bank
account. We're _not_ trying to form a cabal (we expect the society to
have no effect on day-to-day Debian activities), we're _not_ looking
to embezzle Debian funds (if I was going to do that, spending the
money sat in my savings account would be much easier!) and we're not
trying to exclude people.

Any comments / hate mail / etc.???

--=20
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.=
com
"Further comment on how I feel about IBM will appear once I've worked out
 whether they're being malicious or incompetent. Capital letters are foreca=
st."
 Matthew Garrett, http://www.livejournal.com/users/mjg59/30675.html

--8tIZwPmdq+hd82jQ
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc"
Content-Description: Digital signature
Content-Disposition: inline

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFCPcS5fDt5cIjHwfcRAuYKAJ4qstH1Oz7TeEhn3S4Mi7Ysg1B5ZACgmuFo
Ny2XlBscAFZBbe4LnuKNyHY=
=m8sY
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--8tIZwPmdq+hd82jQ--