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Provide fuller paragraph for clarity on UnincorporatedAssociationCharity #13

Open thadguidry opened 4 years ago

thadguidry commented 4 years ago
  1. Just having the (UK) in parentheses doesn't provide enough info.
  2. Also, the inclusion of "Charity" in the Type naming also makes this confusing, I think.

In the UK, "unincorporated association" as mentioned at https://www.gov.uk/unincorporated-associations is already known to be of a Charitable type. "unincorporated charitable association" is not a legal term, it's an expanded phrase used on several documents throughout the UK. In fact, there is no legal name of "unincorporated association" , it was never legally defined:

"There is no statutory definition of an unincorporated association[1], but there are judicial definitions. Lord Justice Lawton in Conservative and Unionist Central Office v Burrell defined an unincorporated association as follows..." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unincorporated_association

Extra info here: https://www.gov.uk/setting-up-charity/structures

I think a fuller paragraph would be better to explain that we probably mean to use this type for only the 1 subtype of a Charity structure (of the 4 types: CIO, charitable company, unincorporated association, trust ) in the UK known simply as "unincorporated association" and also provide a link perhaps (or not) to where they are currently mentioned at https://www.gov.uk/guidance/charity-types-how-to-choose-a-structure

philbarker commented 4 years ago

I've had a chat with a lawyer about this. Her comments:

  1. UK is slightly problematic because Scotland has different laws on charities to England and Wales.

  2. "unincorporated association" as mentioned at https://www.gov.uk/unincorporated-associations is already known to be of a Charitable type"

    apparently that's not quite right. An unincorporated association is not for profit but is not necessarily a charity. (e.g. a sports club may not aim to create a profit and may not aim to do any chraritable work, it just aims to cover its costs while it exists).

In the context of "some not-for-profits in the UK are unincorporated associations" the definition didn't seem wrong to her, but if you want a full explanation you might need a lawyer of your own.

thadguidry commented 4 years ago

@philbarker Yes I know Phil, which is why I mentioned about the removal of "Charity". It completely depends on our stance and if we are narrowing in our definition or trying to be all encompassing. I don't know our stance. And would like the definition to help reflect that. Right now our current definition is confusing publishers and we need to make it more clear.

Point 1

I don't know the provenance. But to me it seems someone did have a look at the www.gov.uk info and concluded that those same 4 types are needed to cover Wales and England only , so with what they saw:

There are four main types of charity structure:

charitable incorporated organisation (CIO) charitable company (limited by guarantee) unincorporated association trust

We then in turn created to match? :

CharitableIncorporatedOrganization LimitedByGuaranteeCharity UnincorporatedAssociationCharity UKTrust

Northern Ireland is different and defined here: https://www.oscr.org.uk/ Scotland is different and defined here: https://www.charitycommissionni.org.uk/

All of them are just enumeration members anyway. And it seems we decided to only create those particular common members in the USA and Wales and England and called it a day. I'm fine with that. But that is not how its defined... we said (UK) in the description when I think someone was intending to actually narrow to (Wales and England).

The definitions should be cleaned up a bit.

Point 2

The other MUCH more important issue (one that lawyers and judicial systems look to immediately) is that of any Organization being classified as:

And we don't have those as enumeration types with a property to hang off of like a generic "businessType" that could be filled with Text such as "S-Corporation" or one of those 2 enumeration members like "Corporation" or "Unincorporated".

ldexterldesign commented 4 years ago

👋 https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/2577

ldexterldesign commented 4 years ago

An unincorporated association is not for profit but is not necessarily a charity. (e.g. a sports club may not aim to create a profit and may not aim to do any chraritable work, it just aims to cover its costs while it exists).

👍

RichardWallis commented 4 years ago

See issue #7 for the context of the move from the main Schema.org issue tracker to this repository.