[DECISION] Authorize Florian to sign legal engagement letter

Hello,

the following decision, which has been taken in private on 2025-04-03, is now made public in accordance with our statutes.

For context: The legal engagement letter is for a pro bono (=free of charge) consultancy on a new topic. Details will be made public as soon as the matter requires no confidentiality anymore.

Florian

as discussed before, I call for the following VOTE:

Authorize Florian to sign the attached legal engagement letter on behalf of TDF

The vote runs 72h from now.

The Board of Directors at the time of voting consists of 7 seat holders (not including deputies). In order to be quorate, the vote needs to have 1/2 or more of the Board of Directors members, which gives 4.

A total of 4 Board of Directors members have participated in the vote.

The vote is quorate.

A quorum could be reached with a simple majority of 3 votes.

Result of vote:
4 approvals: Eliane, Sophie, Paolo, Italo; deputy Mike approves the motion as well
0 abstain
0 disapprovals

Decision: The proposal has been accepted.

The related topic has now been published: Administrative bits: UK Online Safety Act

so … this is UK regulation
we have UK board member
and UK board member not even voted for a pro bono work?!

wow …

The UK board member was not aware of the “vote” as it was not on the agenda of any meeting (I attend all of them unless it’s impossible) and I was not alerted to it on Signal as I have requested repeatedly so I can log in to Roundcube and check. Obviously in this case I would have supported retaining Neil and would anyway have recommended him had Paolo not done so, and was aware of the topic given I raised it and participated in discussions.

This use of ad-hoc e-mail voting has become routine - there have been no agenda motions for a long time, and the board majority does not need my vote for quorum and usually rejects my input even when I get the chance to express it. It is a serious problem that business is not being brought to meetings (where proper notice would be required of each topic and where discussion would be minuted and where a motion would only be proposed once consensus was reached), but the board majority finds it very comfortable even though it is most likely harming the interests of the Foundation.

2 Likes

a person “alert” you on signal for this message too ?
you reply in 1 hour but you do not vote in 72 hours votes ?

you want to vote only one time a month in a meeting ?
this make tdf sloooooow.