[TriLUG] TriLUG non-profit status?

[Alan Porter via TriLUG]

All of our documentation is in the "TriLUG Steering Committee Google 
Drive", which is where I archived a bunch of stuff last summer:

* the old steering wiki called "the Book of Secrets"
* the steering committee's git repo (which was just too hard for some 
people to access - hence the Google Drive)
* the old publicly available (and thus trashed) TriWiki
* a starting point doc called "How to Run the LUG"


I see that some of these files have been updated recently, so it looks 
like the current steering committee has access to all of this stuff.


In short, we started off as a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation back in 
1999.  That was so we could accept donations of money and equipment from 
companies who wanted to write them off on their taxes.  The thought was 
that we would use that gear to bootstrap smaller LUGs in the area.

Over time, we morphed into a "pizza and talks" club, and we did an 
exceedingly good job of that.

But we developed weaknesses around steering committee turnover and 
knowledge transfer.  So we suffered from administrative rot.  By 2014, 
our non-profit status with the IRS had been canceled, and no one was 
really clear what we needed to do to maintain our status with the state.

ALL OF THIS IS OK -- The LUG's goals changed, the leadership turned 
over, the new simpler organization worked better.  See Joe Mack's 
description of how an informal club is run.  That is, no one has to file 
taxes for the LUG, and the pizza money is stored in a lunch box.

I am curious what prompted Maryam's question.  I would caution the 
current and future steering committees to take an honest look at how 
much (or little) administrative energy they have before committing to 
any new annual paperwork.  It seems easy.  But remember, sysadmin is 
easy for geeks like us, and yet our main web/mail server has not been 
upgraded in 14 years (Ubuntu 12.04 LTS).


Alan Porter
TriLUG member since 2003
steering committee member 2008-2013