The agenda spreadsheet has some blurbs, as do the notes documents in the agenda spreadsheet, but that appears to be insufficient, so I will talk a bit about the agenda topics below.

Article of Incorporation/ByLaws

I moved this on the agenda because I realized that a lot of the decisions we have to make the rest of the day are going to stem from what we decide here.

For those unaware, Articles of Incorporation are the document you file when you want to become an organization in the US. Typically, non-profit organizations in the US are corporations, not LLCs. The IRS has a bunch of rules about non-profits that takes away a lot of the advantages of being a LLC. It also depends on the state. Some states you can’t convert from LLC to non-profit so we would have to dissolve and come back.

That said, maybe being a LLC for a while to get our feet under ourselves so we can get a bank account and pay for things makes sense. We can potentially deal with the headaches on IRS filing in the future.

We do have a bit of a chicken and the egg situation here. For example, if one of our big goals is to provide in-person live shows, we probably do need a corporation to shield Ryno from liability if a band’s pyrotechnics starts a fire or something.

If, on the other hand, we see ourselves as primarily an online group, being a LLC might make more sense. Still, there is the threat of being sued of someone samples the wrong song, but the risk seems less to me.

In any case, for actual operation, the By-Laws are probably more important, so that is probably where we should focus our time, even though I messed up when I made the Etherpad of the ByLaws document and called it Articles of Incorporation. Hopefully, the document itself doesn’t need a lot of editing.

I suspect ARTICLE III is the most important section to folks, so I will reproduce the current draft here:

ARTICLE III – PURPOSES

The purposes for which this corporation has been organized are as follows:

(1) To endeavor to improve the quality of currently existing publicly available Creative Commons works;

(2) To foster, promote and increase access to public interest content available to the general public and promote the general right to use, change or distribute cultural works;

(3) To solicit, collect and otherwise raise money and to expend such funds in furtherance of the goals and activities of the Corporation;

(4) To promote the use, development, and improvement of Creative Commons works; and

(5) To solicit, receive and maintain, invest and reinvest funds of real and personal property and to contribute its income and so much of the principal, in and as deemed advisable, for the purposes provided in (a) through (d) of Article III of these ByLaws.

I’m not super enthusiastic about the “public interest content” section because what the hell does that even mean, but saying stuff like that will help us get recognized by the IRS. The point is we aren’t doing this because we want to hear the music we want to hear and we aren’t doing this because we want to sell our music. We are doing this because music is inherently a public good.

And if this seems to US-centric, this is precisely why I wanted to have global representatives, but in the 10 months we’ve been trying to get this organization off the ground, no one has stepped up to say they were willing to run Friends of CC Music France, Friends of CC Music Russia, etc. The people that have been showing up to the meetings have been almost exclusively from the US. If you want that to change, I suggest you come to our next meeting on Jan 11.

Community Building

Probably our biggest problem is lack of time. We all have families. We can all donate a little time and some of us can donate some money, but we need to grow the number of folks that want to build a CC Music organization if we are actually going to be able to do anything.

One question that has come up a number of times is specific: should we promote on TikTok.

A related question: where are the kids?

I personally had a lot of success with in-person organizations from 2000 through 2011 and I suspect I could do something similar now if I wanted to. And I do think we need local CC Music organizations, but we also need to build something global. How do we do that? Where do we do that? Maybe we just need to “build it, and they will come”. Let’s figure it out.

Branded Electronic Shows

I very much think an interview show that brings in Netlabel curators and other innovators in the CC Music space would be a great addition to the world. Tom Ray is doing some of that with the Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. But unless folks know Tom’s band, how do they even find that?

There are a lot of ways to solve this problem:

1. Maybe we mirror Tom’s feed.
2. Maybe we play those shows on a stream.
3. Maybe we have our own similar show (and we could still do 1 and 2).

For those that don’t know, Craig Maloney of the Open Metalcast passed away from cancer. With it, the premier CC metal show went away. For now, the website still exists sans cert. I started a show called “Obsidian” to fill the void, but I don’t have time to write blog posts like this and do Obsidian. We’ve got to make some tough choices about what we actually want as a community and what we think we can actually achieve.

Stakeholder orgs

One of the complications we have as an organization is that different folks need different things. Specifically, there are Musicians, Netlabels, Other Curationists (such as clongclongmoo.org), Fans, Podcasters, and probably some others I haven’t thought of. Luckily, there’s a lot of overlap. The idea here is that the, say, the musicians always have a seat at the table. The latest meeting we had was Sam, William, and I (with late participation from Herr). Not a lot of input from Musicians. So, the idea is that we have a musician that comes to these meetings so we don’t do stuff that is contrary to the goals of musicians or is simply useless. This could be related to the directors, or it could be separate.

Steering Committee

In the ByLaws document, there is discussion of “Directors”. These could be the same folks, or they could be different. Part of the problem here is we have to work with the reality we have while trying not to cause problems for the future organization we’d like to be.

Long-term, I’d love to see us operate similarly to the UN, but we don’t need to stretch that analogy too far. We aren’t anywhere close to that vision, so discussing if there were longer term members for stability and shorter term members that rotate yearly probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. I’m not sure permanent members makes any sense but just to get the idea out, I would suggest USA, Germany, Russia, Indonesia as permanent members of our would-be security council as that gives us diversity in language and geography, while presenting prominent countries in the CC World. Past that, it’s unclear. Canada and the UK would be the next one’s on my list, but we’re doubling down on the Anglo world there, so idk. No South American or African country jumps out except South Africa, but we have a bit of the same problem there.

IRS Filing

We’ll probably end up talking about state filing status some too, but the main thing we need to figure out is if we want to file as a non-profit with the IRS. There are different statuses, but 501(c)(3) would seem to be the obvious choice.

Website & Logo

We need to talk about website design and we need a logo for socials.

Live Shows

There is a long history of live shows in the CC scene. Netlabel Day started off with live shows. There was Cologne Commons. We need to figure out if we want to be involved in this or if we want to let Ryno do his own thing separately. The other thing to figure out is if we want to handle this at a regional level. Right now, I took “Regional Orgs” off the agenda because it didn’t seem to be a topic people wanted to talk about, but we could let this be a Friends of CC Music USA thing, or handled by regional orgs in general if other places want to do it.

Fundraising

This website is not free, but if we want to do big projects we are going to need big money. Ideally, we would hire an Executive Director and that wouldn’t be a volunteer position. I’m not sure how far we are on that. I guess we won’t really know until we do a big fundraising push. I’ve had good success with local fundraising drives, but this is something we’ll either need someone else to handle or we’ll just have to learn by trial and error.

CC CMA

I think I covered this sufficiently back in September.

CC Hall of Fame

This was originally conceived as a way to catalog important folks in the history of CC Music, while the CC CMA was more of a pulse on what was happening now. It doesn’t make sense to do this unless we have by-in from the community. This needs to be something people recognize as an honor, or it just simply isn’t worth doing. I could do an interview show instead, for example. Everything is about tradeoffs.

Elections

At the very least, we will need to elect board members. At this point, we might want to elect some sort of leader as well. Idk. When this has come up before, people have been less enthusiastic about elections than I have but elections have an important function in showing folks what voters really want. Of course, if I run unopposed it is pointless, but if someone runs against me and they get 30% of the vote, then that’s a significant population that wants to go a different direction. On the same token, if someone runs a serious campaign, but then only gets 5% of the vote, then that tells me the direction we are headed is good. But I guess the first step is someone stepping up to present an alternative vision.

Let me tell you a short story. Back when I was in grad school at UNC-Chapel Hill, I ran for Graduate and Professional School Federation President. I did that because no one stepped up to run. I thought sure, I’ll do it. Well, it turned out there was a stipulation that the incumbent could get their name on the ballot a day late or something if no one else was on the ballot. So, I ended up running my write-in campaign against the incumbent, who was on the ballot. I had gone to undergrad at the school, so I knew a bit about how things work.

I presented a strong pro-Open Source, pro-environment platform. My platform was less about Graduate and Professional students and more about the school and campus as a whole. Not excluding graduate students of course, but largely not excluding undergraduates either. It was a platform a student body president could never run on because it was too niche, but the lesser power of the GPSF president meant I could provide a bold vision for the future.

I got 37% of the vote. That ONLY happened because I got the endorsement of the school newspaper. That is, by some measures, being crushed. But remember, I was a write-in against the incumbent on the ballot. Everyone – EVERYONE – knew my campaign had been a success and I turned that success into the Carolina Open Source Initiative.

Here, I’m in the place of the incumbent for all intents and purposes. We tried this once before – a decade ago – and although some of the things have changed (like a focus on music rather than content more generally), the base of the vision remains the same.

So, someone, please present a bold vision. Run against me. You’ll probably lose, but maybe not. Who knows. Regardless, your vision might resonate with folks and we might end up incorporating that into future plans.

Frankly, I don’t want to do this, but I’m going to because someone needs to…just like when I ran for GPSF president.