Re: Should PostgreSQL Europe organisation settle down in France ?

[Markus Schiltknecht <markus ( at ) bluegap ( dot ) ch>]

Hello Damien,

thank you very much for figuring this all out. It sounds like a plan!

damien clochard wrote:
> The response is unanimous : they are not comfortable with the idea that the 
> french association would "disappear". It represents for them 3 years of 
> work : Lots of time and energy to build this user group from scratch. 
> Changing the name and goal of the association would somewhat mess things up. 
> Besides  the association aims to provides help to **french speaking** users, 
> which includes Canada, West Africa, etc. etc. 
> Obviously this is out of the scope of an European user group. 

Very understandable.

> By the way we still consider that the PostgreSQL Europe is a great project, 
> but we think it would be better to have two separate entities.
>
> Furthermore some of the member of the french "crew" are OK to provide help to 
> create an European non-profit association under the french law. As i said 
> previously it's a very common thing in France and i think this could be done 
> within a few months.

As you or Dimitri and Jean-Paul certainly already have experience with 
the law and all the legal issues around non-profits in france, that make 
sense.

Or does any other team have experience in its European country?

> 1/ We need to make some kind of poll to see if creating PostgreSQL Europe 
> under the french law is OK for every one, or if there are others 
> possibilities.

After all of the name-game on -advocacy, I'm not very excited about yet 
another poll. Let's first check other options (if any) and maybe we can 
simply reach consensus by discussion.

AFAICT an additional association under the French law is the most 
reasonable option so far.

> 2/ If the "french association" proposition is accepted then we'll have to 
> write together the legal statutes in English ( i have samples of generic 
> statutes we can adapt to our need ). Once the statutes are written, we can 
> translate them in every languages and propose them for acceptance. A wiki 
> could be a good tool for all that stuff, imho.

I'm offering help in translating to German. Although IANAL.

> 3/ Once the statutes are accepted, we'll have to decide what will be the 
> address of the association. I think the best idea is to locate the 
> association in Paris . We'll also have to name 3 persons that will constitute  
> the "temporary Administration Board" of the association and make the official 
> declaration to french authorities. This declaration will take a least one 
> month to be "fully official" as french administration is not a very fast 
> machine.

<rant>Administration is slow per definition</rant> ;-)

I'm fine with whatever location, but Paris sounds international. I guess 
these three persons for the temporary Administration Board need to be 
French?

> 4/ Once the the declaration is fully done, we can open membership.
>
> 5/ In February 2008, we meet at FOSDEM to make the first"General Assembly" and 
> replace the temporary Administration Board with a brand-new democratically 
> elected one. 

Cool, seems somewhat tight, but if you think that's doable... Certainly 
FOSDEM is a good meeting point, no matter how far we got with legal stuff.

> 6/ After that the administration board meetings can be made via teleconference 
> or IRC...  However i think that meeting each other "in real life" once in a 
> year is mandatory.

Agreed.

> These 6 steps are based on my experience, on PostgreSQLFr members advices and 
> on my interview with Tristan Nitot. Surely there are other ways to do this 
> and some of them might be better than the one i exposed. What i like with 
> this one is that it gets us on track and focused on a deadline : FOSDEM in 
> February. That leaves us 5 months to build this thing up :-)

I'd say: let's work on it to make it happen!

Regards

Markus