Parrot Foundation: Current Work

I've only been a member of the Parrot Foundation board for a few days now, and I already feel exhausted by it. I've read through dozens of pages in IRS Publication 557, I've been pouring over several incomplete drafts of Form 1023. I'm not certain that either of these two documents are written completely in English.

Luckily for me, because of the time I spent in the Wikimedia Chapters Committee, and because of some of the work I did with Wikimedia NYC and the now-defunct Wikimedia Pennsylvania, I'm not unfamiliar with this documentation or the process of gaining tax exempt status for a US non-profit corporation. It has been at least a year or two since I've really looked at this kind of paperwork, however, so I'm taking the crash-course to get back up to speed with it all. Some of it does seem more daunting than I remember!

I've also been digging through invoices and financial records, and lots of other paperwork as well. Some of the information and documentation that I need is readily available. Some of it might not be (or, I may be looking in all the wrong places). Either way, I'm setting a break-neck pace trying to get through it all and form a comprehensive view of the current state of the Parrot Foundation.

My goal is to put together a report about the current legal and financial state of the Foundation, and present that report to the other directors at the end of the month so we can start coming up with a plan of action for the coming year. Shortly thereafter I would love to send a status update to the general foundation membership, so we can make sure everybody is well informed about the state of the foundation and also so we can solicit some input about the future direction of it.

I will definitely post updates, either here or to the members mailing list as I get more information. However, don't expect too much until I am ready with my full report, probably around the end of September. As a member of the board I have a lot of plans for the year, but I don't want to start anything until I make sure the foundation is on a solid footing with all the right documents properly filled out and filed with all the right organizations. It might be a big job, but it's one that I hope to complete by the end of 2010.

Parrot Foundation Board

Today at the weekly Parrotsketch meeting there was also a meeting of members of the Parrot Foundation, with the aim of electing board members for the coming year. All but one of the current board members chose not to run for re-election, so it was a pretty open field.

Four candidates were nominated, and today all of them were elected by simple majority: Jerry Gay (particle), Jim Keenan (kid51), Jonathan Leto (dukeleto), and myself.


Here's a brief discussion of what I want to do this year as a Parrot Foundation board member:

1. Re-read and re-reread the foundation bylaws. I've read through them a while ago back when the foundation was first forming, but don't think I've looked at them since. Plus, I've read through so many sets of bylaws for so many young organizations in my time, the details all run together in my mind.
2. Money. The foundation doesn't have a whole ton of money, of course I can't think of too many non-profits of this size which do. There are lots of things that can be done with money: grants and bounties being two that immediately come to mind, but there are plenty of other things. Finding ways to raise money and increase the PaFo coffers should probably be a pretty big priority for us.
3. Create a proper membership committee. Parroteer "smash" has been running the elections and doing a fantastic job, but some problems have been exposed in the membership process. Many people do not know whether they are members or not, and many people are confused by how a person becomes a member. Clearing up confusion in this area will help everybody.
4. Recruit new people. People are the fuel that runs an open-source project, and you can never have too many people. Parrot is by no means a small open source project, but it is far from being a big one. More developers create more/better software, which attracts more end users, which increases the prestige of the project, which attracts more developers, which.... It's a feedback loop that we should be trying much harder to feed.

These are just four things that I would like to focus on this term, however this is not a definitive list. I am hoping to get, within the next few days, some information from the current board members about what kinds of tasks they have left unfinished, or what kinds of things they would try to accomplish if given another term.  Since there is so much new blood on the committee, we need to make sure to thoroughly pick the brains of the current board so that we can get this coming year off to a running start.