TLUG Inc? Membership Dues?

Sat Oct 9 05:04:15 UTC 2004

On Fri, 08 Oct 2004 21:01:41, the world broke into rejoicing as
James McIntosh <jemcinto-cpI+UMyWUv+w5LPnMra/2Q at public.gmane.org>  said:
> At 09:11 AM 2004/09/30 -0400, you wrote:
> >On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 12:02:51AM -0400, Paul Mora wrote:
> >> At the last NewTLUG meeting, one of the regulars was handing out TLUG
> >> membership applications, and charging a $20/year for membership.
> >> 
> >> I don't recall seeing any announcement here about this, nor do I
> >> recall seeing something on the website.  The membership form mentions
> >> a "Constitution", which is not available anywhere where I've looked.
> >> 
> >> So what are the funds going to be used for?  What is TLUG trying to do
> >> here?  Who is spear-heading this movement?  How does one become
> >> involved?
> >> 
> >> Just curious,
> >
> >I have certainly never heard of it either, so I am quite sure no such
> >thing has been announced on the list.  Sounds fishy to me.
> >
> >Lennart Sorensen
> >--
> 
> I arrived late at the presentation of enhancements to BASH, but I may have
> the answer.
> 
> I was told a long time ago that T.L.U.G. is actually two different
> organizations: one, as a club, and the other, as a legally-incorporated
> nonprofit corporation, with Mr. Clive Apps as the President.
> 
> Legally, the Board of Directors is required to announce a vote to all
> members of the corporation, whenever an executive, or Board member is no
> longer able to perform his/her duties.
> 
> Mr. Clive Apps is of limited ability to carry out his Presidential duties,
> so legally the Board of Directors is required to meet, to have a vote for
> the new President of the corporation.
> 
> Actually, this vote is long overdue.

Actually, I don't think anything was ever set up as a corporation, at
least not until quite recently.

> Any member of the club "T.L.U.G." is permitted to attend meetings, but
> only members of the nonprofit corporation "T.L.U.G." are permitted to
> vote for the new President.

Close.  Anyone is permitted to attend meetings, but only paid-up members
of the NFP corporation "GTA Linux Users Group Org, Inc" can vote for the
officers of that organization.

> The T.L.U.G. corporation must inform all members of the circumstances
> of the vote, but does not need to inform people who are only club
> members, because they would be unable to vote anyway.

Well, what's vital is that "GTALUG Org Inc" establish a set of paid-up
members so that it can hold a meaningful general meeting for the purpose
of voting for officers/board members.

> To get more information, contact anyone who is on the Board of
> Directors of the corporation.

> To identify people on the Board of Directors, it would probably be a
> good idea to start by asking the various people who run the club. I
> expect that they have dealt with someone on the Executive, or on the
> Board, or someone delegated to either, or reporting to either.

> I imagine the following as possibilities:
> 
> |   Herb Richter <hgr-FjoMob2a1F7QT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org>
> |   Richter Equipment, Markham, Ontario
> |   http://PartsAndService.com
> |   http://PartsAndService.ca
> 
> |   Drew Sullivan drew-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
> |   http://tlug.ss.org
> 
> Note that all this may be wrong. I can be totally off base.

No, you're not off base here, not in the "grand brush strokes," at any
rate.

There has been an effort to get "TLUG" incorporated; it started probably
about 2 years ago.  It didn't get into place until the last couple of
months.

The organization could not be incorporated as "TLUG" because a name
search on NUANS (required by the "legal beagles") found that there were
other instances of that name, conspicuously:

 - TLUG, the Tokyo Linux Users Group  <http://www.tlug.jp/>

 - TLUG, the Trondheim Linux Users group <http://www.tlug.no/>

The list actually goes on...

 <http://www.tlug.dk/>
 <http://tlug.up.ac.za/about.html>

Therefore, you'll find that the legal name is actually _GTA Linux Users
Group Org, Inc."  The name is different from "TLUG" not out of some
desire to change it, but rather because no one would be permitted to use
that name.

I'm not sure offhand who all of the officers are, at present; I'm
reasonably certain that Drew Sullivan is presently "President" and that
Bill Thamer holds one of the other offices.  I think there are four
initial officers, but someone with the actual paperwork needs to weigh
in with an "official" comment.

What has taken place is, while initially somewhat "private," a typical
way of "booting up" such a not-for-profit organization.  When organizing
a corporation for this sort of thing, the number of initial participants
are generally tiny, in much the same way that one may boot a Linux
system using a boot loader that has to fit into 512 bytes of memory.

There's now a corporation, and an initial board of directors, and there
is a formal definition of what "members" are, which is needful for legal
purposes.  (When I was involved with incorporating NTLUG, the North
Texas Linux Users Group, it took well over a year to get from the stage
of being "incorporated," with the set of members being the board of
directors, to the point in time at which membership became formally
defined so that they could start soliciting members 'at large' and
thereby have a "representative" democratic governance.)

The natural next step is to, as it were, "load in the kernel," start it,
and get the _real_ system going.  That is, put together some reasonable
set of members to transform the initial structure, which was necessarily
NOT representative, into what amounts to a form of "representative
democracy."

There are numerous directions in which this could go:

 1.  People that have sufficient faith in the merits of the existing set
     of officers may stand behind them, and build things up in that
     direction.

 2.  If people think differently, they might stand "behind" them in a
     different fashion, perhaps involving the officers being perched
     somewhere rather precarious, and then, well, "push."

     That is, people might see about joining, and then voting in a slate
     of candidates somewhat different from what they began with.

 3.  The really rather unfortunate possibility would be to ignore it, 
     and to try to do roughly the same thing by starting over.

     Some money has been spent on legal counsel, and on the
     incorporation arrangements, as well as some effort that any
     would-be alternative would have to replicate.

     It would make a whole lot more sense (and be cheaper!) to push for
     option #2 rather than #3.

Something that is quite unfortunate about the situation (and that should
appear troubling) is that such notable participants in this thing as
Drew and Bill aren't present on this mailing list to make comment.  It
seems to me that reading this list would reasonably fit into the
"expected responsibilities" of those that wish to be officers.

The fact that someone imagined that maybe this "LUG membership thing"
could be "fishy" makes it pretty clear that things were not stated
clearly enough.

It definitely fits into the now-officers' responsibilities to inform
people of this in a much clearer fashion than has been done thus far.

Seeing as how the incorporation process took a couple of years to take
place, it shouldn't come as a total shock that it would take at least a
little while before comprehensive information about this would percolate
to the mailing list (particularly when some don't bother with it) or to
the web site.

It's worth noting that:

 a) <http://tlug.ss.org/> is controlled through the domain ss.org, 
    which belongs to Drew Sullivan.

 b) That, the "TLUG" web site, has long been hosted personally by Drew.

    You were wondering what funds might be used for?  Well, perhaps to
    allow TLUG to have its web presence without the need of Drew's
    personal 'charity' in the matter.  At present, TLUG gets whatever it
    is that Drew decides to give.  That's not necessarily what's best
    for everyone else.

    If Drew got "hit by a bus" (in the Python tradition), or moved, or
    otherwise acquired new interests, this would cause considerable
    disruption.

 c) "Making meetings happen" at U(T) has long involved organizational
    matters involving, well, Drew.

 d) Drew may not read the TLUG mailing list, but he does host it.  See
    b).

 e) [not really related to the others]  According to whois,
    tlug.org is held by an "Adrian Buss" of Kemptville.  
    I'm not at all sure how that weighs in.

Holding some sort of "vote of nonconfidence" would doubtless have
adverse consequences regarding all of those things (perhaps save e).

Which is not the same as saying that no one should ever consider that,
but rather that if there is, um, "opposition," it needs to rapidly
organize vital things like meeting locations, publicity, and needful
Internet services.

I am certainly aware that there are a number of people that don't
particularly get along with Drew.  That merely establishes that there
could be some "opposition," but not that there's any real would-be
alternative organization lurking in the wings.
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