Legally establishing the F# Software Foundation

[Reed Copsey, Jr.]

A few years ago, two very dedicated members of the community started the F# Software Foundation (FSSF), which manages the fsharp.org site. Even as an informal organization, the FSSF and fsharp.org has been very successful, and has grown to become a central point for the F# community.

But with growth has come new challenges.  The FSSF is now responsible for critical assets such as fsharp.org and the F# logo, and in order to grow while managing resources and assets appropriately, and to accept donations easily, the time has come to transition the F# Software Foundation to an organization with a recognized legal status.

This has always been part of the original mission statement of FSSF.  The mission statement states: “The intention is to eventually move towards an established organizational structure (e.g. charity or legally established foundation).”

Working with the original founders, select community members have recently established the F# Software Foundation as a legal non-profit organization within the United States.  The FSSF is now a legal entity, but now needs the resources to operate properly moving forward.  Note that the Mission Statement of the F# Software Foundation remains unchanged.

A funding page with details has been launched.  We are asking for financial assistance from the community in order to finalize the legal establishment of the organization, as well as setup and manage operational requirements that occur as we become a legal entity.

We are opening this thread on the forums in order to provide a dialogue for answering questions and getting feedback from the existing Founding Members, as well as the F# community at large. Please feel free to ask questions regarding the process, structure, details, or any other topic related to establishing the F# Software Foundation in this thread.

You are also welcome to contact me directly if you would like to discuss your concerns privately, or if you wish to become deeply involved in the process and participate.

Thank you,

Reed Copsey - on behalf of the interim Board of Trustees of the FSSF

[Loïc Denuzière]

This is great news, although it is a bit disappointing that the community at large didn't get to know that the process of creating an official organization was going on before it was already done. It would have been nice to know that the official establishment of the FSSF was under way.

[Adam Granicz]

As a discussion opener, I would like to start by saying that I always supported the idea of creating an organization whose purpose is to seek a wider audience for F#, especially amongst professional developers and enterprises.

When the FSSF was formed, however, I was, as many others, quite disappointed in the secretive circumstances - and now that I see the same mistakes done again, I can't help but to voice my opinion on the subject.

On a recent thread on fsprojects, I argued that:

"... (FSSF endorsing projects) is annoying because it assumes that you need endorsement, and this gives false indications about projects [...].  I just don't think anyone or any one set of people have what it takes to "endorse" projects in a community outside of their expertise, yet the current hierarchy dictates that a closed group of people decide about this."

I also expressed that IMHO FSSF should concentrate on the language, the compiler, and infrastructure (IDE integration, etc.) and leave EVERYTHING ELSE to the community, arguing "for more diversity and a lot less control, and to simply remove the implicit "endorsement" system from fsharp.org and its various code repository arms."  This got pretty far, and with the support of other members, I will be filing the request to remove FSharp.Charting (and a couple other projects) from the fsharp GitHub organization, as Don recommended.

Discoverability of community projects should also be decentralized and the above is an aim to fix that in FSSF.  Instead of FSSF umbrella repositories and listing on guideline web pages, these should be left to the individual projects to establish, prove, and win over.

But now, when I browse the FSSF funding page, I read things like:

"... let us raise funds and support interesting projects and also get more members involved in decisions and running the foundation." (Tomas Petricek)

While I agree on the second part, I absolutely disagree on the FSSF needing to raise funds to support interesting projects.  On a fundamental level, simply because the no one at FSSF nor the entire organization can decide what is an "interesting" project, and this can ONLY lead to spending funds on someone's self interest.  Furthermore, the FSSF supporting any project is against the no-endorsement and decentralized discoverability principle above.

You may think this is no big deal, but if you pay close enough attention to the details, the signs of self interest are plaguing the FSSF organization already.  Contrary to all the above, if you browse the FSharp.Data/FSharp.Charting project pages, they prominently feature the fsharp.org link on the top, indicating a kind of "endorsement" of FSSF and listing several other projects for people to check out.  All those implicitly endorsed projects share a common small set of contributors, and an uninitiated observer would quickly conclude what warned against as "limiting visibility, dividing the community, and giving newcomers the wrong idea about various projects."

So where is self interest besides tieing any one's personal projects to FSSF?  Take a look at the the bottom of the Funscript page:

http://i.imgur.com/NjOlNC3.png

It says "Funscript is .... | The F# Software Foundation"

Essentially, it makes it look like that FSSF is endorsing Funscript directly.  As one of the contributors of WebSharper, this is not only annoying but seems very unethical to me.  Then look further on that page: it lists five different IDEs where Funscript can be used, but it doesn't mention CloudSharper, an IDE that we developed.

Before you conclude that I feel "left out", you should think again. My self-interests aside, there are already many other community members and companies who could and probably do feel left out.

Also, while I appreciate the link to our company as a consulting firm for F#, I feel that those listed should be done in a less opinionated, and more neutral way.  At the moment, the ordering is not alphabetic - and thus it seems to set an "order of importance": with the "top" consulting firm being one with close ties to one of the core founders, again.  Incidentally, the link itself doesn't work - and this reflects poorly for some of those looking into F# and that very page.

To sum up, I propose that:

To avoid favoritism, and to provide a healthy ecosystem and a collaborative community,

 1) the FSSF should have NO "funds to spend on interesting projects," and

 2) the FSSF should have no business in developing and endorsing, directly or indirectly, any project other than the core language/compiler/infrastructure ones, and

 3) the FSSF should seek to it that no non-core project claims to be associated with FSSF in any way.

To root out self-interest and run the organization with a full appreciation to the community,

 4) the incorporated FSSF should start with fresh officials (different than those in the original unincorporated FSSF), and

 5) any new and future FSSF officials/members should receive NO compensation for any of their contributions, time, and efforts, and

 6) the FSSF should rotate members with decision-making powers at least once a year.

And to maximize the reach of F#,

 7) the FSSF should strive for being a conduit between organizations who use F# and those who don't yet, and

 8) thus the FSSF should put a priority on advancing F# into enterprises, and

 9) the FSSF site should list any possible consultants alphabetically.

Some of these are in sharp contrast to what we can read on the funding page, and that's worrisome.  Given that no one asked the community about the formation, I feel that discussing and fixing these is in order.  I also would prefer the funding page to link to this discussion, as stated in its text.

Thanks for reading through, and please do share your comments if you have any.

Regards,

Adam.

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Adam Granicz, IntelliFactory
www.intellifactory.com

[Wallace Kelly]

I'm still basically an outsider to the F# community, though I code in F# most of every day. Two points from my perspective...

1. I agree that there is an implicit endorsement effect. Until this recent discussion, I assumed there were "official" projects.

2. Adam's email makes a lot of sense to me. The Foundation should invest money in "the language, the compiler, and infrastructure." (I might add to that list... activities that further F# adoption and conferences.) I would expect companies that build libraries to be more likely to contribute to a Foundation working in those areas.

Wally

[Isaac Abraham]

Adam

I think you make some good ideas, and others I personally agree less with.

On the one hand, I can understand the somewhat secretive manner in which the transition has occurred perhaps upsetting some people. On the other hand, the foundation cannot turn everything over to a public vote - it wouldn't be practical.

The issue of endorsement has already been discussed at some length and many of the points you raise here are just regurgitating them again (not that they don't have merit, but repeating them isn't really necessary IMHO).

Personally I think discoverability is an important part of adoption and am confused as to why you would not want to make it as easy as possible for people to find software that can help work with F#. The pages on Fsharp.org for software are public and anyone can submit pull requests to amend them. Again, I'm wondering why you feel that these are a bad thing. If someone develops an interesting project, what is wrong with quickly getting it made available on a site where lots of people can find it?

Already you've made the decision on what you consider acceptable for FSSF to spend money on. What if I decide to wrote an IDE tomorrow and see VS as a competitor. Does that then mean that spending money on VS integration is "unfair" as well then? The issue of funding is IMHO particularly important in areas where there currently isn't a good story for F# and some funding might enable people to invest time into that.

I think that the people involved in FSSF have only got the best interests of the language, platform and community at heart. I'm sure that there are some things that will change - the endorsement issue is one that has already been discussed - but surely FSSF having the ability to make more of a difference in general can only be a positive thing.

---

From: Adam Granicz
Sent: ‎07/‎11/‎2014 21:35
To: fsharp-o...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Legally establishing the F# Software Foundation

[Adam Granicz]

You claim that:

1) ... Being secretive about FSSF's formation is "understandable".  I definitely disagree.  If I create an organization with a name that indicates capacities that are largely beyond mine and the other founders', e.g. I ride on the community to accomplish my objectives, it is NOT right, nor ethical, nor OK to claim ownership of that organization, nor to be secretive about plans that affect its uses.  It is so because this is an organization that explicitly and unquestionably needs the entire community for it to work.  Therefore, you can not be secretive about it.  If you are, you just turned me away and I am sure many others as well.

2) ... Submitting pull request to a documentation and waiting for "core" admins to approve, or that we can sum up the world of F# into a single site without prejudice is possible and is a good thing.  I certainly disagree.  Even the visualization/charting libraries you feel we regurgitated so much when we discussed discoverability won't fit in a single place without appearing to be "too much to consume."  And where is that compared to the whole F# universe?

3) ... Funding areas that are not yet best fit for F# is "particularly important". So you will tell what's important?  When we talk about core projects such as "integration", I mean projects that provide tool-neutral capabilities, such as the F# Compiler Services and friends.  They are NOT or should NOT be specific to a given IDE or tool.  (In fact, we use FCS in CloudSharper.)

With these in a different light now, do you not agree with the nine points I raised?

[Tomas Petricek (Info)]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for the feedback – you’re making some good points.

 

I agree that my wording on “supporting projects” was unfortunate. I think the foundation should not (at least initially, under the initial non-elected board) should give money to open-source projects.

 

If there are any decisions about spending money (on things beyond costs of running the foundation), I definitely think that should follow from a discussion in the open. I’d personally really like to see the FSSF spend money on helping first-time speakers (those who are not doing lots of talks already), helping to support diversity (grants for attending conferences for minorities) etc. I’d also like the idea of supporting student projects (as Google Summer of Code does). This is too long to put in a short fundraiser quote, so that’s why my quote was imprecise.

 

As for “endorsing” projects, I didn’t originally like the idea of “fsprojects” on github that much, but it seems to be working quite well. Also, I do not think this is “endorsing” – it is mainly providing a space (and I think we can put an explicit note somewhere saying that FSSF does not endorse the projects there – just gives them space). Many other projects link to fsharp.org, but I believe the others just use “fsharp.org” so that should be okay.

As for FunScript, I think I put it there (even though Zach is maintaining the project) but my goal was more in the other direction – provide people who come to FunScript with a link to a place where they can learn about F#. I’d fully support changing the text of the link from “The F# Software Foundation” to “Learn more about F#”. (I cannot change this, but send a PR to Zach and perhaps link to this thread?)

 

Alphabetic listing of companies makes sense – please send a PR there too.

 

Thanks,

Tomas

[Adam Granicz]

I am more than convinced that the FSSF should NOT fund projects even after the initial interim board, and I would rather have this fixed in stone now than later.  It doesn't feel right, it can only be abused, and the general concept of "granting money for development" is wrong.  This is why I am also proposing to limit FSSF's source exposure to the compiler/language + neutral infrastructure - with that work funded by the FSSF's own resources (via donations, etc.)

I like the idea of helping first-time speakers, but I would insist that they have solid skills and relevant content to talk about.  Helping minorities I agree with, but the budget should be fixed up front for this kind of expense.  Student grants are a great idea, I would also create a mailing list for this separately for brainstorming for topics.

Thanks,

Adam.

[panesofglass]

On Sunday, November 9, 2014 12:55:45 PM UTC-6, Adam Granicz wrote:

I am more than convinced that the FSSF should NOT fund projects even after the initial interim board, and I would rather have this fixed in stone now than later.  It doesn't feel right, it can only be abused, and the general concept of "granting money for development" is wrong.  This is why I am also proposing to limit FSSF's source exposure to the compiler/language + neutral infrastructure - with that work funded by the FSSF's own resources (via donations, etc.)

Please allow me to turn the tables on your argument against FSSF.

Developer tools should be free. Anyone who thinks otherwise is foolish and wasting time.

I don't believe that statement, but it rings with the same sentiment you express regarding the FSSF.

No one has defined exactly what the FSSF will do. It's possible you won't like the outcome, as many community members only write OSS tools and libraries and would probably love to get some trivial amount of support for their efforts, even if it's just enough to fix a few bugs or write some documentation. Should the FSSF support this? I don't know. I agree with you that any such support could quickly get into areas of fairness we'd all like to avoid.

You have made some good points. I don't think anyone disagrees that the issues you raised are valid, just that your proposed solution is not necessarily the one that best serves the community. I am certain we will all remember and address the issues in some form or another as we try to figure everything out.

However, you are electing yourself out of the process and appear to be making it clear you won't even consider working with the FSSF unless they agree to your terms. I really wish you would instead engage and continue to stay involved rather than considering us all your enemies. Your work with F# is valuable, and we will be worse off without your constructive engagement in defining the FSSF. 

 

[Adam Granicz]

Ryan, you are saying you need my constructive engagement, I gave 9+1 general guidelines for that.  I get it that you don't support the one on the FSSF not funding any non-core projects.  I will continue to try to convince you otherwise on that point.  This was Tomas's comment, in case you didn't see it:

"I think the foundation should not (at least initially, under the initial non-elected board) should give money to open-source projects."

So it seems to me that he is at least partially in agreement with me.  I was simply re-iterating that even after the interim board this should remain fixed and set in stone.

What else other than the above do you not agree with?

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[round crisis]

Hi

There are some super valid points in Adam's arguments, also in Tom's arguments, also some that I don't agree with.
The question I want to ask is Do we agree that a foundation with legal capabilities is a great idea?

I helped getting the foundation started, and so far the only real thing we dealt with is the practicalities of getting it of the ground as a legal entity. Pretty much everything else about it, including how we will deal with funds, and projects, is still to be discussed.

I do think we did make a mistake in keeping it secret, and I m sorry. I thought the reason for that was that we could get it off the ground and deal with the boring parts and then involve the community when the fun stuff start ,ie when we need to make decisions about F# and it's ecosystem .

I suggest we have a chat online, perhaps even with voice, so that we can be a little more personal. Perhaps on Saturday? at sometime where the timezones make sense? PErhaps this way we can explain in more detail what has been done and clarify? We did a mini version of this during Progressive F# in London and that seemed to have worked. Would you be up for that?

I am really inspired by all of you (us?), when I talk to people from other communities about F# I always end up mentioning the fact that we are so nice to each other and try to bring people in and help and be kind to each other. I think the foundation might take our community  to the next level, give it room to grow, it might be hard but I think we need to decide on a direction together we can make it so

[Andrew Cherry]

I wasn't involved with the getting started bit of the FSSF, but I also think doing it in secret was probably a mistake. However, I think the point about the community so far being generally a very friendly and kind one is important here - in my experience it really is.

I hope at this point we can probably all accept that while some things weren't perfect so far they were all done with good intentions. We're a young community in many ways and there are going to be missteps, but I hope this is a tiny one we can put behind us and get on with shaping things as we think they should be. I'm hoping that everyone in this thread gets involved and adds their voice. There are differing opinions - and that's great, at least we all care!

A chat online where we can all hear each other sounds like a great idea - definitely worth doing.

A.

[Reed Copsey, Jr.]

First off - I'd like to apologize for taking so long to respond to this thread. I've had some personal issues that have prevented me from being online, but I'd like to address some of the issues brought up by Adam, as well as by everybody else.

I really want to step back a second, and try to focus the discussion here a bit.

I think it's important to try to put what we're doing in a little perspective. Then I can try to address some specific points. This is, of course, just my view of what's occurring, and I will provide some of my views and perspective on what we should, and most importantly, shouldn't be focused on at this point in time, as well as why.

Tomas and Phil started FSSF informally, with the best of intentions. Don has been involved, as well, and the three of them have been operating it, with support from the community. There has always been, as part of the mission itself, a mention that legal establishment was a goal.

Over the last couple of years, FSSF and fsharp.org has had quite a bit of success. It has also made some mistakes - and I suspect few people would disagree with either point there. However, I personally think it's successes have outweighed its problems, and it has value which is worth preserving and growing in the future. The question is how do we do that, and what's important for that process.

Given the success, the FSSF and fsharp.org is now incredibly valuable to the community. There are some assets involved, such as the domain name, social media accounts, the logo, and similar. The value of these, while seemingly small, is actually quite large at this point, especially as searches for "F#" or "fsharp" always pull up the F# Software Foundation as the top search item organically. This brings a lot of exposure, and provides us with a huge opportunity. There is also a huge amount of value for everybody in the ecosystem in having a foundation which supports some of the core functionality (compiler, etc). However, there are some fundamental problems with the current lack of structure. The assets are owned by various people, with no real means of protecting them if something were to happen. There is also a lack of formal structure, and that, in my opinion, is a large part of what's caused most of the valid complaints brought up in these threads. There is a mechanism we can use to try to improve things, both by centralizing the assets and protecting them for the community, as well as providing the structure needed to put in place guidelines which should help mitigate and avoid some of the problems in the past.

Right now, we are just taking that single step - and nothing else. The mandate that those of us are working under right now is to provide legal establishment and the best structure possible for FSSF moving forward. Questions about how we should handle other issues are incredibly important, but can and should come later.

At this point, there are a few issues being raised, a couple of complaints, and some ideas for how to move forward. I'd like to address some of these, and provide some information about my thinking of how we can avoid much of this in the future.

First, I'd like to address the idea of "secrecy" in the process. I completely understand this - but I also would like to point out that, as I mentioned before, the desire to become legally established has always been public, from the first when the mission statement was placed on the website. There is nothing "new" happening here that hasn't been mentioned before on the website. This is just taking that step. I know that nobody involved was intentionally trying to be secretive - we're just trying to do our best and to make sure that the process happens, and that it happens correctly.

Part of the problem here is that there is no real channel for discussion specially about FSSF, as it really hasn't existed in a formal, structured manner. This forum is the best option, which is why everybody is being included here, but it's really not necessarily appropriate for discussions of things like legal details, etc. When a discussion takes place now, where here or on private channels, there is no mechanism to make sure that discussion is implemented correctly or that the correct people are included. This has been a problem, and as time goes by, I've started realizing it's a significant problem with FSSF today. I've been copied on various discussions that have already occurred multiple times over the last year - and many of the ideas brought up haven't gone anywhere because there's no record, nor a good mechanism to make the change that's often needed. This is a huge part of what I hope to address - a formal organization puts rules in place which provides communication channels for people to address issues directly, puts rules in place for how things happens, and creates records of what occurred and decisions that are made.

Those of us involved haven't been trying to be secretive - there are actually a large number of people involved in this effort, and that wouldn't be possible with secrecy as a goal. We are actually trying to be open - and keep a dialogue going, hence this thread, and the complete willingness by myself and others to discuss this publicly, privately, or however people choose in order to address concerns and issues that arise. I do apologize to anybody who feels left out, or that this came out of nowhere. As I've said, I'm very happy to discuss this personally with anybody, and if you want to be involved, please let us know and we can discuss that as well.

Next, I'd like to address Adam's 9 points, but also to bring another perspective to the discussion in terms of what we should focus on at this point in time.

First off- Sorry that the funding page wasn't linked here. I've corrected that - it was accidentally "reverted" in an edit, but the intention was always to have it link here. It now does.

Adam's first two points are all related to spending and day to day operations. The third relates to guidelines and rules about associated projects. All of these are, in essence, operational issues. I will address these last.

Your point #4 I do disagree with. I think that including people and support from the informal organization provides continuity - we're not trying to start a new foundation, we're trying to legally establish and formalize the one that already exists, and set it up in a manner to prevent many of the issues that have arisen in the past. However, this doesn't mean the people who started the informal organization will end up permanently part of the Board due to your issue #5.

For #5 - The current plan is to have a clause in the bylaws which explicitly states that Board members will receive no compensation for their involvement. This is a fairly standard clause in a non-profit in the United States, and something that we will keep as we want to make sure we can have the proper tax status, etc. That doesn't mean that nobody will ever be able to receive compensation - appointed positions and staff members typically do receive compensation in a non-profit, and that's typically required to get the "best people" in place. At a certain size, most larger organizations, for example, pay their Treasurer a (relatively small) salary as they want a professional accountant, not a community member. This won't be an issue for the foreseeable future, as we have no plans to have any paid staff, but we don't want to limit ourselves or our growth as we become more successful. Again, this will all be drafted in a way that's in line with the legal requirements for a proper non-profit charitable organization, which hopefully will address your main concern, as that specifically puts many guidelines and rules in place to discourage favoritism and manage conflict of interest.

#6 - The current plan is to have annual elections for the Board of Trustees. This would allow the entire governing body to be rotated out on an annual cadence should the community decide that is the correct approach. 

Points 7 and 8 relate to the goals - and I believe both of these fall under the current mission statement and mandate of FSSF. I would love to discuss ideas of how to be more effective moving forward in both of these topics, but agree 100% that they need to be priorities.

#9 - Agreed. Any "company" type listing should be done in a way that avoids favoritism. I personally prefer random shuffling, as alphabetical always lists certain people first (which provides a bias), but agree with the intent here. This is, again, and operational issue that I'd like to address at some point, but is really a separate issue to the legal formation. We started this process with the revamp of fsharp.org, btw - sponsors and testimonials are now randomized on the main page. There is still more work to be done here, though.

Back to your operational issues - and I'm addressing this last because I feel this is an important thing. Whether I agree or not with your points here, Adam, I do feel very strongly that now is not the right time to address these. The important thing to have "set in stone" legally is the overarching goals of the Foundation. The mechanism by which those goals are achieved can and should be flexible. Our industry changes far too quickly to try to predict how any of us will feel about this in ten or twenty years time - and I am trying to work to setup the FSSF in a way that it will be sustainable for the long term. As such, operational issues, other than those related to governance of the organization itself, shouldn't be mandated in the Foundation's legal formation. They're much better off done via resolutions after the fact which can be changed when the industry changes around us.

My thinking here is that we need to get better safety, structure, and transparency. A legal basis helps with all of these issues. It moves the assets out of individuals' hands and into the foundation itself. It provides rules and guidelines by which change happens and is documented. It also provides the mechanisms for moving forward and being sustainable in that it provides structure in how the governance works in the long run.

Right now, that has been our focus. All of the other discussions being brought up, such as how and where to spend money (aside from requirements that arise from legal establishment), operational issues, and other issues are incredibly important, but I feel that it's actually a mistake to try to address them now. This somewhat ties back to that "secrecy" problem, and is something that's been on my mind since the beginning. I'd like to point out that, in all communications, we've always referred to ourselves as the "interim Board of Trustees" - this is because we want to potentially be replaced. Right now, our focus has been on getting the right people in place to put everything on the right path, and hold elections for the Board of Trustees moving forward. After that first election, the Board would be comprised of people voted in by the community, which represent their views.

In my mind, the role of the interim Board is purely to get the legal basis established, and to get the proper foundations in place for communication, membership, voting, and the like. Any issues we want to address are going to need to be done with far more care and deliberation, and, if significant, most likely include the members in more formal manners (ie: potentially doing some voting and not just discussion, etc). I want to prioritize establishment, however, as getting the structure in place allows everybody who wishes to be involved to have a voice, and to be part of the governance of FSSF directly. The Sustaining Members, at that point, would be able to elect a new Board of Trustees, which may include some of the original Board, but could also be a completely new set of people.

The second Board would be the people who really should be implementing change. If we try to put this change in place without having the proper foundation, I feel that we're just perpetuating some the problems that have existed in the past, and which you're alluding to in your post. My hope is that this can be done relatively quickly - the interim Board wants to get things setup, and we need some time to make sure that happens. We don't want to dump a load of work with no history, background, or research on the legal requirements on an entirely new Board, which would happen if we switch over too quickly. That being said, I personally want this to happen as soon as practically possible.

Again, this is purely my perspective on how we should approach things. I know some members of the interim board have an interest in trying to address your 2nd and 3rd points right away, but I think that should be a different discussion. Right now, I think we need to focus on questions related specifically to the legal establishment, and focus on operational issues once the establishment has happened, and the proper channels are in place to correctly include the vested community and provide formal mechanisms for implementing any change.

Thank you,

Reed

[Don Syme]

Hi all,

 

This is a fabulous write-up of where we are at. I think it makes things extremely clear and the right steps are being taken to get things on a very positive basis going forward.

 

Thank you Reed!

 

Kind regards

Don

 

 

From: fsharp-o...@googlegroups.com [mailto:fsharp-o...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Reed Copsey, Jr.
Sent: 12 November 2014 17:18
To: fsharp-o...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Legally establishing the F# Software Foundation

 

First off - I'd like to apologize for taking so long to respond to this thread. I've had some personal issues that have prevented me from being online, but I'd like to address some of the issues brought up by Adam, as well as by everybody else.

--

[Loïc Denuzière]

All right, so we should now set things up to bring this conversation live.

Andrea proposed Saturday, and I agree that's probably when most people will be available, especially since we need to cater to various timezones. How about 7pm GMT (11am PST / 2pm EST / 8pm CET)?

-- 

Loïc Denuzière

IntelliFactory Kft.

On Tuesday, November 4, 2014 2:16:09 AM UTC+1, Reed Copsey, Jr. wrote:

[Andrew Cherry]

Is tomorrow likely to be a good time, or do people really need a bit more calendar notice? Just following up as my better half has just suggested going out tomorrow night... :)

A.

[Loïc Denuzière]

So... Is this happening? Next week maybe?

[Roundcrisis]

I would be up for it if it helps, at the same time, a good few of us where recording the first F# podcast with a bunch of questions, would it make sense to wait for it and do the call then? 

Also, it would give some calendaring room. What do you think?

Andrea
www.roundcrisis.com

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[Loïc Denuzière]

Sounds reasonable to me, let's not duplicate the effort, instead we'll use the podcast in addition to this thread as a basis for discussion.

[fbmnds]

I think that the current membership fee structure as in the GoFund initiative does not seem reasonable to me. For a regular payment, the fee should be less than with a one time contribution.

[Reed Copsey, Jr.]

I realized my last post made no sense - I apologize.  I misunderstood what you were asking.

The structure listed in the GoFundMe is not a membership fee structure.  

The prices listed are purely suggested contribution levels (people are welcome to give any amount they choose) to help us get the formation accomplished, and everything setup properly.  We decided to include the first years dues in contributions of $100 or more, as we wanted to acknowledge those contributors, and are trying to do the "right thing", as the Sustaining Member level, as planned, with have $100 annual dues.  Many people, myself included, have contributed more than the $100 minimum, and the excess is going directly towards helping get the FSSF started properly.

As hinted in my last post (and I apologize for the confusion), we are planning to have a mechanism for repeated, smaller payments, should people prefer that.

-Reed