Re: Should PostgreSQL Europe organisation settle down in France ?

From: Oleg Bartunov <oleg(at)sai(dot)msu(dot)su>
To: Markus Schiltknecht <markus(at)bluegap(dot)ch>
Cc: damien(at)dalibo(dot)info, pgeu-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Should PostgreSQL Europe organisation settle down in France ?
Date: 2007-09-15 08:54:12
Message-ID: Pine.LNX.4.64.0709151245180.2767@sn.sai.msu.ru
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Hello,

I'm for upgrading PostgreSQL-FR to PostgreSQL-EU, since this is
a real european organization. I know Jean-Paul well and trust him.

The real goal of PostgreSQL-EU is a common PostgreSQL certification
program, not a donation, t-shirts and other bla-bla-thingies.

Italian guys were very well doing PgDay-2007 in Prato and I'm also
vote to continue PgDay in the same place. It's not expensive and friendly
place.

Oleg
On Sat, 15 Sep 2007, Markus Schiltknecht wrote:

> 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
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
>

Regards,
Oleg
_____________________________________________________________
Oleg Bartunov, Research Scientist, Head of AstroNet (www.astronet.ru),
Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, Russia
Internet: oleg(at)sai(dot)msu(dot)su, http://www.sai.msu.su/~megera/
phone: +007(495)939-16-83, +007(495)939-23-83

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