General Company Governance Meeting Minutes

All Partners of the organization are authorized to spend company funds or dispose of company inventory (e.g. books) using their reasonable judgment, in support of the Organization's purpose, within the following constraints:

For expenses of $20+:
• You must post to Slack before or simultaneous with the spending, sharing the amount they are spending and the purpose (very rough/brief is fine). This must be on a Slack channel that all partners are subscribed to, or have been notified may include spending announcements for the general category/purpose of the expense in question.

For expenses of $100+, or for any recurring expenses (including any pattern of one-off expenses for the same purpose):
• You must post to Slack (under the same channel rules as above) in advance of spending, and explicitly state your "intent to spend" (including amount and purpose, and with the whole channel tagged). You must then answer any clarifying questions and read any reactions about the spending (you don't need to respond to reactions). The spending is then automatically authorized 48 hours after you answer the last clarifying question (or after your original intent is stated, if there are no questions), unless any partner posts a request to escalate the decision to whatever other spending authorization processes exist (e.g. Lead Link authorization or a defined budget).

For expenses of $500+ $1000+ (including recurring expenses that would add up to $500+ $1000+ over three months), in addition to the above:
• You must get at least one other partner who challenges the decision in Slack, by suggesting reasons not to spend the funds, or to spend them on an alternate approach instead (playing "devil's advocate" to help you think through it counts).
• After the challenge, required delay, you must re-state your intent to spend the funds (either as originally stated or with amendments), and then get at least two other partners to attest that they would also make that spending decision were they in the relevant role. Attesting to this must be done by adding an obvious money-related icon to the partner's Slack post via a Slack "reaction", and no one may add such a reaction to an intent-to-spend post unless they are making this attestation. This step can be bypassed for an expense of roughly the same general amount for the same purpose as any prior spending authorization within the past three months.

For any recurring expenses:
• You must document the recurring expense via a role note in GlassFrog, and add a trigger to your individual organizational system to review the need for the expense after some period you believe is appropriate, and at that point re-assess the expense and seek re-authorization if desired for another period.

In addition, for any spending under this policy:

• The spending must clearly support the purpose or accountabilities of a role you fill, without any reasonable inference that boundaries have been blurred in making the spending decision, either between different roles or between personal and role interests. For example, a reasonable inference might exist if funding a project you're really personally inspired to work on, but where the link to the explicit purpose/accountabilities of one of your roles would look more like a forced fit or a "nice story" vs. a natural way to express the role (to an objective third party). However, you may still spend even with a reasonable inference of blurred boundaries, if you have called out the potential boundary question in your Slack post, thoughtfully considered it, and genuinely believe it is not a case of blurred boundaries.

• You must submit a bill to @Bookkeeper promptly after authorizing the purchase, or pay the bill personally and submit for reimbursement via an expense report within the expense reimbursement process and rules published by @Finance.

The authorization given in this policy is just one possible way to get spending authorization; other methods with different rules may separately exist, and partners may use other methods instead of the above when otherwise authorized and applicable.