OSGeo Bylaws

Original document moved to official site:

http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/incorporation/bylaws.html

The bylaws no longer cover everything the foundation is doing (process for board re-elections, local chapters, sponsorship relations, status of charter and regular members) and ideally they should.

Our bylaws are also default corporate boilerplate and User:JoWalsh Jo thinks it would be great to have a human-readable version that actually reflects what we are doing, we can be later translated into attorney-speak, rather than something legally perfect but not actually mapping to what we are doing.

Names of people interested in helping to update the bylaws

 * Jo Cook
 * Frank Warmerdam

References:

 * http://www.apache.org/foundation/bylaws.html - more corporate boilerplate, quite minimal. Not a model approach for us.


 * http://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/Eclipse%20BYLAWS%202003_11_10%20Final.pdf - Eclipse worked out a lot from others' experiences. This also covers a lot of the woolier membership issues. Verbose, but perhaps nesc. to be complere.


 * http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/documents/mf-bylaws.pdf Mozilla foundation bylaws - somewhere in between.


 * http://www.okfn.org/governance/ - the Open Knowledge Foundation is also renewing its governance process and has a much lighter weight approach but still taking into account the necessities of legal responsibility of officers/directors etc