Forming a formal NPO

Hi all,

This subject was becoming offtopic for the previous thread, so I'm 
opening a new one.

Here are a few tips for anyone wanting to form a formal NPO. These are 
the things I've learned from going through the process.

   1. Don't ask - do. It is my experience that any LUG is filled with
      people willing to give "good advice", but not actually do anything
      about it. Send an email to all of your LUGs mailing lists saying
      "We want to form an NPO. Our coordination meeting will be held on
      X at Y. Please come". This will land you about 10-15 people
      (unless your country is significantly less dense in population
      than Israel) in the first meeting.
   2. Keep your costs down. You are not much income the first few years,
      so you had better not commit to too much. Set the mailing address
      to one of the first board member's home address. Advertise on the
      LUGs that you are looking for a lawyer and an accountant to do a
      little vulenteering job. We originally planed on using one of the
      founding member's father as a lawyer, when we happened upon a
      lawyer who is also a true believer himself (ever had a lawyer work
      for you AND pay member's fees for the privilege?). An accountant
      took longer, but is fortunetly not a prerequisit. In the end we
      got someone to do us a favour (again, a relative of a LUG member).
   3. Steer clear of obvious pitfalls - Don't try to solve the Free
      Software/Open Source dichotomy right off the bat. We just put both
      promoting the use of open source software AND promoting the
      benefits behind Free Software on our agenda, and left it to
      individual activists.
   4. Don't take too much time formulating the agenda - The agenda is a
      general guideline, it is NOT strict rules to follow closely. It
      needs to be formulated a little broadly, and it's a stage you need
      to get over FAST. Hamakor is the third attempt at forming an NPO.
      Both previous attempts failed because an agenda couldn't be
      decided upon. This time around we just put forth a few general
      sentances about what we intend to do, and got it over with.
   5. Use someone knowledgable to formulate the bylaws. A good lawyer
      can save you some work later on. In Israel, for example, in order
      for the NPO to be tax deductable, the bylaws have to forbid
      sharing profits with NPO members, and have to state what happenes
      to the NPO's assets should the NPO shut down. Our lawyer knew
      that, fortunetly, and so the original bylaws already included
      that. Otherwise, this requires calling an assembly of the members
      and changing the bylaws.
   6. The founders should be someone your local LUG already knows.
      Israel has several bodies claiming to represent the "Linux" or
      "Open Source" community. They are, however, external bodies, not
      grass root (usually commercial), and their actions are usually not
      considered representative of the LUGs members views (at least -
      those who speak up on the mailing lists and forums). We are names
      already known to many LUG members today, and were thus better
      accepted. We are also more sensitive to what is, and what isn't,
      important to the real users. For example, Hamakor was formally
      registered on January 1st of this year. Actually starting to be
      active took three more months. In less than half a year I have
      already received two offers to buy our member's list from us for
      spam purposes. I politely refused. I think you get the drift. As a
      result, we already have over 80 members (I think it's not bad for
      a six months active NPO).
   7. Once up, try to get as much press and activity as possible. Try to
      issue press releases about things you do. If you are holding
      constant LUG meetings, send a press release out to newspapers.
      They probably won't publish it, but this will register, over time,
      that you exist.
   8. Use the LUGs. The NPO is not supposed to do things for the people
      of the LUGs, it is meant to organize them. The more open you be
      about what you do, and the more you let everyone participate, the
      more succesful you will be. Think of this as an open source
      project, and use the bazaar approach wherever possible. You may
      hear lots and lots of complaints. Bear in mind that these
      complaints mean you are on the right track. People only complain
      if they think it's successful, otherwise they don't bother. Don't
      be upset. Just try and turn this disgrantlment into cooperation.
      Sentances like "how can you help us be better" will, at the very
      least, try and real in the complaining parties.
      This also comes as power. A big newspaper in Israel published in
      an "answers to questions" section something along these lines. The
      question was "I am tired of windows. I want to install Linux.
      Where can I download Mandrake 9.1?". The answer was a funny,
      witty, and mostly factless explanation of why the reader should
      stay with Windows, as well a sentance that said "If you insist on
      trying Linux, here is a link", and a link to Mandrake 9.0. Very
      irritating.
      Learning from past experience, we put up a public announcment in
      the LUGs forums saying "please send a polite response saying that
      you feel the response was ill researched, and ask them to publish
      Hamakor's official reply". I believe they got over 100 emails. The
      following week the same section published a retraction, and two
      weeks later they published a similar question, and the answer was
      "Due to the fact that the last time we tried to answer such a
      question, we were flooded with replies, we turned to the local
      Linux gurus for an answer. Here is what they said:", and the rest
      of the answer was a word for word quote of an answer I provided.
      As a direct result of that, we are meeting with said reporter to
      demonstrate to him how Hebrew's support in Linux is.
   9. Have something interesting to show. In our case, the attraction
      point as far as government goes is the cooperation with some LUGs
      in the Arab world over adding BiDi support to FOSS. The Israeli
      foreign ministry is very happy to boast off such things. In your
      case, it can be localization efforts, statistics of local
      employment opertunities, or anything else you may come up with.
      You might be suprised to find friends in unexpected places, once
      your exposure is high enough.
  10. Make sure the terminology is right. Use consistant and persistant
      terminology. In Hebrew, "Free" as in beer is a different word than
      "Free" as in speech. It is most unfortunate that most reporters
      usually use the former word to describe FOSS. A perstant approach
      of "great article, but one small correction, if I may" can and
      does lead to change. The same works with commercial companies.
      Israeli representatives for Sun, for example, didn't understand at
      first the difference between Java and Linux (their both free, no?).

In addition to the above, we chose to take a defensive measure against 
hostile foreign takeover. In our case, we created two layers of 
membership. The full members, who can vote, be voted in, and change the 
bylaws, and the friends, who can't do the above, but are otherwise 
totally equal to the members (same fees, same discounts if any, etc.) 
The criteria for becoming a member was to have spent significant amount 
of time on something beneficial to FOSS. In addition, companies cannot 
be members.

To conclude this (rather long) email - forming an NPO is possible, and 
not so difficult. Use your local resources. Feel free to email 
[email protected] if you have questions, or want to cooperate (or 
just managed to form one, and want to create a network).

                Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Open Source integration consultant
Home page & resume - http://www.shemesh.biz/