Europe-meeting-2024-07-18

Agenda

Ideas:

Legal structure in Europe;
National entities - different structures
What do we need - actually - flexible, as a community
See also: https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Europe and https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Europe_archive

What we need to investigate for (some) countries, when it comes to a legal entity:

The actual form of the legal entity;
Bank account;
Taxes;
Liabilities;
Costs of opening and running the entity;
- 500€ to set up (including notary)
- 1000€/year for administration
Membership of companies/Legal entities and people (persons)
Setting up, running day-to-day, closing down

Why to try

ACTION: Codrina to send a list with what aspects should we know about creating and running a legal entity for the OSGeo Europe Local Chapter before we decide.

Possibility to donate to projects directly - Legal structure to provide the money flow
“FLOSS steward” as per CRA. The global OSGeo Foundation is a bad option since it has a specific US foundation status not able to move funds (potentially we want to leverage CRA stewardship into maintainer sponsorships)

What should the connection between OSgeo Europe LC and FOSS4G Europe be?
No history on FOSS4G regional conferences to contribute to the budget of OSGeo
FOSS4G is not registered as a trademark but has a long tradition of being used in the context of Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial. The domain was originally registered by Venkatesh Raghavan (Venka) who later graciously donated it to OSGeo - under the condition that using the name should stay open to anybody who does something reasonably related to Free and Open Source Geospatial. If you are not sure, simply ask on the main mailing list (starting from here). https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G