Feedback from a funder: and feature request

[David Bovill]

I got some feedback from a local funding agency with regard to the OCO voluntary association constitution. His take on it was that it would not fall within the funders remit for a not-for-profit. I will try to get more precise feedback, but would like to get some answers here first so I can see if the better way is not to persuade them to accept the minimal constitution first before suggesting new features?

The comments were the following:

1. There are no officers - ie Treasurer, Chair, Secretary. My guess is that while there is strictly no need, they find this reassuring, particularly with regard to point 2 below. Additionally it often helps with the running of the group to designate roles and responsibilities - the names roles tend to encourage people to take individual responsibility for things like minutes ( Secretary), speaking for the group (Chair), and dealing with the bank account (Treasurer). So it's useful for both the funders reassurance and the running of the organisation. Adding these as a proposal does not add these to the constitution.
2. How the bank account is managed - signatories etc
3. Something else I've forgotten

The feature request is therefore to be able to have one or more "elected posts" - to define these and add them to the constitution, and then enable regular (ie annual) voting on these positions. This feature will probably also cover the need for 2 above (but not 3 :)

[Chris Mear]

On 14 Dec 2012, at 12:09, David Bovill <da...@vaudevillecourt.tv> wrote:

I got some feedback from a local funding agency with regard to the OCO voluntary association constitution.

Thank you for doing this!

His take on it was that it would not fall within the funders remit for a not-for-profit. I will try to get more precise feedback, but would like to get some answers here first so I can see if the better way is not to persuade them to accept the minimal constitution first before suggesting new features?

The comments were the following:

1. There are no officers - ie Treasurer, Chair, Secretary. My guess is that while there is strictly no need, they find this reassuring, particularly with regard to point 2 below. Additionally it often helps with the running of the group to designate roles and responsibilities - the names roles tend to encourage people to take individual responsibility for things like minutes ( Secretary), speaking for the group (Chair), and dealing with the bank account (Treasurer). So it's useful for both the funders reassurance and the running of the organisation. Adding these as a proposal does not add these to the constitution.

We have an informal features called 'roles', where a member can add a title such as 'Secretary' to their profile. While this doesn't address the question of formal officers and elections, it could be useful for the more social aspect of running an org that you mention.

2. How the bank account is managed - signatories etc

I didn't realise this sort of detail was usually specified in constitutions. It would be useful to see an example of the kind of information they're expecting to see.

3. Something else I've forgotten

The feature request is therefore to be able to have one or more "elected posts" - to define these and add them to the constitution, and then enable regular (ie annual) voting on these positions. This feature will probably also cover the need for 2 above (but not 3 :)

This is something we can look into, although we would have to make it optional since not every association is going to want this kind of formality. In fact we already have some new code to handle officers and elections from our work on the co-op platform (although it not quite the same model as we're discussing here).

In general, I think it is important that we keep the associations platform as simple and lightweight as possible. But if there is feedback that the omission of formalities like this is stopping orgs from getting bank accounts or from getting funding, then we need to look into addressing that.

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention, and sorry for the absurd delay in responding to this post!

Chris