**IMPORTANT** MUST READ: Pharo Association and Consortium

Dear Pharoers and Smalltalkers

This mail is really important so read it carefully. Especially the last part of the mail is important for the
immediate future: we need your support and input. Read section ***Support*** at the end of this mail.

Context
=======
After taking into account feedback from companies and pharo users in different occasions and
discussing with the INRIA lawyers and the team in charge of the administrative aspect of the consoritum
here is the setup we finally want for the consortium. We will have two separated entities:
        - one french law 1901 association for individuals and
        - one consortium for institutions (companies, research groups, laboratories, universities...) managed by INRIA

We hope that in the long run the consortium will be fully managed by the association
but in the current bootstrap phase INRIA is a good solution.

==============
The Pharo Association
==============
The goal of the association is to promote Pharo. It will have its own web site.

        Individual Memberships (managed by the Pharo Association)
        ----------------------
        There are two individual memberships
                - Individual Pharo Association Member: Yearly fee 40 Euros
                - Golden Individual Pharo Association Member: Yearly fee 99 Euros

        You will get
                a nice goody,
                reduction access to conferences,
                reduction for training and access to teaching material,
                be part of the pharo groups on social networks,
                be part of the pharoAssociation-individual-members mailing-list,
                get access and registered to the pharo association web site.

        Others (managed by the Pharo Association)
        ----------------------
        The association will be able to issues bills so you will be able to buy a Pharo distribution
        when your organization cannot be a member, a sponsor or doing a donation to the Pharo consortium.

End of Pharo Association Description



===========================
The Pharo Consortium (managed by INRIA)
===========================
The goal of the consortium is to structure and build an umbrella to foster business around Pharo and to promote Pharo.

A company, user group, research group, team or institution can be a consortium member, not individual member.

There are three levels of fees and corresponding benefits. You decide your degree of support.
The annual fees are
        - Bronze 1000 Euros
        - Silver 2000 Euros
        - Gold 4000 Euros

        Consortium members main advantages are
        ----------------------------------------
        Non individual members of the consortium get the following advantages:
               
                - privileged access to the core development team via a specific mailing-list
                        [hidden email]

                - influence priorities of the next development. The member will be able to propose
                agenda points and items for the executive team. They will be requested one month in
                advance before the committee meeting.

                - get access to privileged core engineer time (to address pharo core problems)

                        - Bronze member gets
                                        one day of engineering time
                                        + is automatically a diamond sponsor.
                                       
                        - Silver
                                        + two days of engineering time
                                        + one job description for job dashboard
                                        + is automatically a diamond sponsor..
                                       
                        - Gold four
                                        + 4 days of engineering time
                                        + multiple job description for job dashboard
                                        + is automatically a diamond sponsor.

                - Training special prices and possibility to become pharo trainer
                - Pharo consortium member can also ask and pay for extra support days at INRIA engineer prices (around 600 Euros) per day.
                - Member can offer to their client access to the possibility to pay for extra support days at INRIA engineer prices (around 600 Euros) per day.
                - The core team can provide contact with experts for certain areas of development.

        Pharo Consortium Gouvernance: steering committee
        ----------------------------------------
        The consortium will be managed as follows: There will be a steering committee and an Executive Team.

                * A steering committee is composed of one representative of each member (except individuals).

                * The chairman of this committee will be Inria

                * Steering Committee Role :
                        - The Steering Committee follows the execution of the PHARO R&D Team
                        - It validates and gives input about the task list of the Executive Team.
                        - It can propose members of the executive team.
                        - It prepares, organizes conferences, seminars or other animations to promote PHARO and have new members
                        - It revises the annual fee
                * Decisions taking: after consultation and collect of representative member points of views, Inria takes the final decision.

                * The steering committee will communicate via a private mailing-list. It may meet physical once a year.

                * An agenda to reach conclusion will be established by Inria on proposals of the members (the members will be queried a month in advance).
       
        Technical Executive Committee (akaR&D task)
        ----------------------------------------
                * The Executive Team is composed of members proposed by the steering board and RMOD Team
                * Its roles is to
                        * Study, analyze and validate external contributions for PHARO
                        * Report to the steering committee
                        * Present a task list to the steering committee.
                        * Propose, schedule and implement tasks in conformance with the tasks list.
                        * Coordinate the release Pharo and its VMs

        Pharo consortium Sponsoring  
        ---------------------------
                Orthogonally to memberships, an entity can be a sponsor of the consortium without being a pharo consortium member.
                Pharo consortium are de factor platinium sponsor. Sponsors will get their logos name exposed to the consortium web site.
                There are two kinds of sponsors:
                        - normal 500 Euros
                        - diamond 1000 Euros
                       
        Job board
        ---------
                Non consortium member companies will be able to pay a fee (1000 Euros) to post job offers to the job board.

End of Pharo Consortium Description


=====================
*** Support and Answer needed***
=====================

To be able to pay an engineer by the consortium, INRIA needs to make projection, build budget, pay attention to visa
and other important administrative tasks. To deal with the risk that the consortium may not collect enough to pay a full salary
we are considering to ask INRIA to help us financially. To do so we have to give some concrete figures to
INRIA and motivate our request. In addition, our team (RMOD) on its own budget will try to compensate by allocating extra resources
However, this will be only a one shot. In addition, some of our team members have been approached by google to work on chrome and dart
Virtual Machines. So if we really get a future we should build it now.

Many of you told us that they want to support the consortium, now we need to know what would be amount of membership, sponsoring
you could give. So please read carefully this mail and send us a mail at [hidden email] with the same subject than this one.
We will collect the information and build a case to present to INRIA.
Thanks in advance for Pharo and for the future that we are building together.

The RMOD team and the Pharo board