News Roundup
It might seem that things are a bit quiet at the moment - but that belies the work going on behind the scenes. It has been a while since we have updated you on our progress and also I would also like to give you a flavour of what else is happening that you might not have noticed.
A New Site - Same As The Old Site
As I hope most of you are aware by now we are planning to create a new company that can assume responsibility for the this site's assets so that NCommander and Matt Angel can relinquish their current responsibilities. After 10 years they quite understandably wish to move on to other projects and activities. We are aiming to purchase the domain(s) that the site uses, the database and its accounts, and to keep the community intact. You should not see any immediate difference in the site - you will log in as you do today, all your comments will still be there and, with perhaps the exception of a few teething problems during the actual transfer from one set of servers to another, it will appear unchanged. However, there will be a new board structure made up of volunteers from the community, and you will all have a far greater say in how the site is managed and the topics that we will discuss in the future. Most of the staff have been involved in this process over the last 8 months or so.
I decided that one of my New Years resolutions was to get the new site back on track again. So I spent about a month sorting out the problems that we had identified with the structure that had been last discussed by the Governance Committee. The main problem was that it would require members of the Board and other posts to waive their anonymity and this was unpopular. There is no simple solution to maintaining anonymity of the Board members and something had to change. So I identified a different structure that would only require 3 people to have to give up their anonymity (Chairman, Secretary, and Treasurer). This subsequently required that the by-laws be rewritten to reflect the new structure. Various other members of staff were already busy with real-world issues so that really left it up to me. It is not a thing that I would recommend to anyone. These were presented to the community as Draft 8.
I finished that task but I was running out of steam (like another community member, I am facing possible non-trivial surgery). Fortunately, fliptop (who had been absent for a while in order to sit the electricians' examination) returned and he agreed to take on the next phase of the work, for which I am most grateful. Trying to create a business in the US while living in France is not an easy matter. Fliptop has created several businesses in the past and knows far more about it than I do. We also discovered that Delaware was not the best place to create a business of the type we wanted and we have opted to do so in West Virginia for several practical reasons. Perhaps not surprisingly, each US State has different requirements for creating a business and they use different terminology for certain aspects of the creation process. Combined with the requirements to change from my UK spelling (en-GB) to American spelling (en-US) this required yet more work on the by-laws. The subsequent work does not change the structure specified in Draft 8 or the rules that are declared in the by-laws, but they have required a continuing rolling process to get everything in compliance with the requirements of West Virginia. Thanks are due also to the volunteers for the initial Board and Community Representatives who have assisted in this task.
Fliptop has applied for IRS approval for the appropriate desired status and, when we have that reply, we can formally apply to create the new company. We are now waiting for the inevitable bureaucracy to do their stuff. How long this will take is unknown but we are optimistic that it will not be too long.
I have been able, as a result of fliptop's help, to assist with the daily preparation of stories to the front page and other tasks that I will come to in a moment.
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