Legal Structure

I must admit I'm kind of sad that Diaspora* went from "Diaspora Inc + some community devs" to "Community devs + Diaspora Inc community manager" pretty much overnight :P

Would like to of seen Maxwell and Dan still stay active in the project but I guess they have other things to do which is understandable. And it's awesome how much they have given to the world already.

@robinstent-outreach before planning to work full time with 5 interns on Diaspora it might be worth actually drafting a plan on how this would happen. Would it be worth the money if the interns know nothing about the project and spend all the time just learning what the code consists of? You cannot just take a programmer and ask for pull requests. It takes time even if you pay the dude.

But yes in general having some paid people working on the code would be awesome. I'm sure it will happen (again).

Someone say somewhere here in Loomio that he knows legal stuff and can help set up the foundation. @robinstent-outreach if you find the post, ping him here and we will see what we can do ;)

@jasonrobinson yes of course the details of how they would be managed would need to be discussed, I was about to come on to that in the thread about Interns when I was stopped in my tracks by the news that Diaspora has no legal structure. I only really said 5 to emphasise my point.

@flaburgan I'm not quite sure what you're referring to, if there is a previous discussion on this subject that you know about please share the link.

@Jason: While Maxwell isn't actively coding for D* right now, he still helps with the upkeep of joindiaspora, and has been of considerable help with getting everything moved over to the community's side.

@robinstent-outreach I apologize for not getting back to you sooner. Moving over to a non-profit structure takes time and money, and while Maxwell and I are dedicated to making this happen, realize that simply just going up and starting a non-profit is not the most straightforward process.

One thing that Max and I have been taking a look at that might speed this process up considerably would be the Software Freedom Conservancy.

It's an aggregated non-profit infrastructure, in the sense that the SFC itself deals with the non-profit/legal side, while projects focus on just coding.

The project receives funding and can take donations, and most importantly, the organization itself has no bearing on the decisions made by the project. So, the SFC couldn't threaten to pull funding because it didn't like a particular feature, for example.

Like I said, it's just an option we're taking a look at, but it might be just the thing we need to get the project to take off and sponsor developers in some way, shape, or form. :)

For a better overview of what the Conservancy does, take a look here: http://sfconservancy.org/members/services/

@seantilley-communitymanager from a quick look sounds awesome! Will have to read more.

Didn't mean to sound like I was unhappy with Maxwell and you - you've both done awesome work and especially from Maxwell's point of view taking Diaspora* in to community governance was a bold move and surely most likely not taken easily. Always will have the utmost respect and hoping all the new guys joining the project also remember who actually made Diaspora* happen in the first place ;)

I think that something as complex and with as potentially far-reaching consequences as setting up a legal structure/foundation deserves to be done slowly and carefully. It may mean that certain activities are delayed at this time, but it would be much worse to rush the establishment of a foundation and take a wrong step. That could be disastrous in the future.

@Sean thanks for updating us on where you'd got to with this. Yes I understand that setting these things up takes an amount of time and energy. The focus of my messages on this subject was to get information, not to demand action from you, I hope that was clear.

Diaspora is a community now and its important that everyone knows what's going on, both for transparency and so we can help each other out. In that spirit if you need any help getting this side of things sorted out, let me know and I'll do what I can.

A few people said I shouldn't worry about this side of things and focus on development. I will worry about this stuff because I consider myself part of the community now and I think this side of things is really important, besides which once this is sorted out it could lead to much more development.

The SFC sounds like a great way to go, would there be much work involved in setting things up with them?

So until we get a proper structure in place what's happening to the money? eg where does the money from the Heroku donate page go?

Diaspora Inc I suppose.