Re: Should PostgreSQL Europe organisation settle down in France ?

Hei Damien, hei all,

On Sat, Sep 15, 2007 at 02:24:21AM +0200, damien clochard wrote:
>
> Over the last few days, I've met almost every "key members" of the
> PostgreSQLFr association and asked if they would be OK to transform the
> association into an European purpose one.

i would like to say thank you for all the work you have already done!

> 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.

Ok, so since we cannot work against you we should work with you ;-)
As you told us most of the .fr ppl would not give up your own
association but they have no problem with creating a new one, we should
discuss this idea.

In contrary, i will use this mail and state the situation in germany:
For founding an association in Germany you need 7 people (all to be of
age) and a bylaw. Simple said, thats all.
But this bylaw will be checked (and maybe refused) by a court. One of
the BSD groups in germany founded an association last/this year and they
fought a long time only for the right to have meetings on IRC and
invitations by mail. And there are other problems too. So german courts
doesn't seem better than french law ;-)

If one of the other EU countries has more relaxed laws, that would be of
course an opinion. Any suggestions here?

> Now to answer to Andreas question about the next steps, here's my point of
> view :
>
> 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.

For now this seems not a problem for me.

> 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 can translate it into german too, the only question is if we need a
officially translation and/or confirmation if the translation is
correct.

> 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.

Now i'm asking the french people: would it be a problem (for you) to use
the same address like the one for the .fr association? This would make
things easy, if we decide to use the association under french law, but
you have to decide this.

> 4/ Once the the declaration is fully done, we can open membership.

Where can i subscribe? ;-)

> Any suggestions, critics or addendum to this proposition are more than
> welcome !

Yea, one: you said 5 month maximal time. Imho we should have the legal
stuff (in whichever country we will install this association) done end
of this year. This makes 3 month and we need 1-2 for the court stuff.

Bye

--
Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum
German PostgreSQL User Group