On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:07:25 -0400, Jimmy Kaplowitz <jimmy@debian.org> wrote: > Hi all, > > On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 12:00:40PM +0100, Philip Hands wrote: > > On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 01:57:54 -0400, Richard Darst <rkd@zgib.net> wrote: > > ... > > > Some of us would just like to make a donation, additional sponsorship, > > > or donate some of our travel sponsorship in order to fund Clint's > > > travel. > > > > While, as you know, I'm all for this situation being sorted out, I > > have doubts that it's OK to earmark money for an individual's benefit, > > and still put it through the not-for-profit -- at least I'm pretty > > certain that doing that would cause problems for a UK Charity. > > I don't want to comment too much in this thread, because Clint and I are > currently both candidates for SPI board (please read about all 4 candidates and > vote!), and anything I say here about his case specifically could be > interpreted as trying to influence that election, which is of course not my > intention. I shouldn't personally coordinate the solution in Clint's case for > the same reason. I wasn't aware that there was a SPI election going on, nor did I know that Clint was running, or you running again. Thanks for the mention, I'll have a look at the candidates and be sure to vote! I can understand how you might think that some people who are listening may be negatively influenced by things you might say about another candidate, and excusing yourself for the purposes of avoiding this conflict of interest might seem like the honorable thing to do. However, with that said, I would appreciate if anything you would say in this matter were said without holding back out of fear of being viewed as an attempt to sabotage a political campaign. Personally, I prefer the actual information from a candidate rather than a clear message that a candidate is politiking by not saying things that would otherwise be said outside of a campaign. It is especially problematic to claim conflict of interest when the precisely the issue at hand seems to be about conflict of interest. > 2) As Phil suspects, it would cause problems for SPI to be the conduit of those > payments. No US 501(c)(3) charity can accept donations specifically earmarked > by the donor for the private benefit of a specific individual. I have no ill > will toward Clint and am only pointing this out because as an SPI board member > I'm required to try to keep SPI out of tax trouble. I'm sure someone can figure > out an alternate way to track or aggregate the donations. If nothing else it > could simply be gathering cash, US checks, or future money transfer pledges at > DebConf and working with Richard to make sure the money is tracked and gets to > Clint. Is it not true that it would be considered, at minimum, a conflict of interest if board members of a 501c3 organization were found funneling money to themselves? I would think that it would raise significant questions with an auditor who might be looking at an organization's taxes. If that is true, then it seems to me a clear conflict of interest that board members who requested funding not only got perfect scores, but also rated themselves with perfect scores. Wouldn't it appear, from the outside, like board members are essentially giving themselves money when they ranked themselves perfectly? Or when a husband ranked a wife with a perfect score or vice versa? I believe any of those would be considered either as either vested interest, nepotism, malfeasance, or at minimum a strong reason for excusing oneself for conflict of interest out of concern over causing tax problems for the organization. If we want to keep debconf and debian out of tax trouble, a committee designed to execute a process that allocates money between themselves isn't how its done. Calling this a simple mistake is ignoring a very serious concern. micah
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