I am currently investigating/clarifying these different points:
Joining HSA directly, but then I am not sure I can easily help organizing something like BeGeister remotely, or easily find donators/sponsors for a German based organization
or
Creating a France-declared HSA “sister” organization which would :
officially organise/participate to France based/francophone events (also having official budget/equipment for these events, etc).
greatly facilitate French donators/sponsors to declare their donations (and get tax rebates)
other tasks (i.e. federating/developing a french-speaking community)
French non-profits can become a non-physical member of another non-profits. I need to check if it would be possible for a HSA-fr to be a member of HSA.e.V (and vice-versa?), which may help in organizing/participating to European-scale events. That’s more a bonus than a necessity though.
Because both in HSA and in France there are afaik so few people willing to join a club and organize an event, I think it would be better if you join HSA. I would be happy if I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.
What confuses me is that people think HSA is somehow limited to Germany in some magical way. Why should it be? It can clearly operate internationally, and within the EU virtually all kinds of things are invisible-borders. Money and products can flow freely, people can move around, … there is no problem with an e.V. running an event in Spain. Why should there be?
This is specifically important to remember given how this thread started. By:
And this is what we have. So, just getting it back on track is all what is needed.
Also, if you want to have like some local regular user meetings in e.g. Vienna, what is the problem? Just find a pub and be social. The tiny bit of legal infrastructure that might be handy (but not needed) can be provided by an e.V. in Germany, no problem. And if your local user group grows, is active, and requires more local resources or identity, THEN it makes sense to consider what the next steps might be.
I think everything else will just fragment the few users and doers until nothing much is happening at all.
I want to note, While Haiku, Inc. exists within the US, Haiku infrastructure exists internationally.
We did this with the current “global political instability” in mind.
Our main k8s cluster is in the Netherlands
Our object storage is in Finland.
I regularly backup our full CDN to a cold flash drive in the US.
Our concourse worker is in the US
Our package builders are in Germany
We also have a handful of international mirror partners.
I publish signed “am I still alive” notices on my personal website. I can’t speak for the board as a whole, but if a well trusted, international Haiku org sprang up, I’d personally support working in parallel with it to help dilute risk.
The main one is being able to do tax-deductible donations to a nonprofit. The rules for that are different in each EU country, and don’t always apply to foreign nonprofits.
In that situation, having a French non-profit may allow French people to donate to it and get a tax deduction (of 60% of the value of the donation, so that’s kind of important for larger donations).
I don’t know if something supporting Haiku would get tax deductible status however.
For everything else (events, meetups, …) there is no need for a formal entity at all at least initially. I have run coding sprints on my own without any official support already. You can just book a room in a conference center, or find a sponsor company willing to let you use their office during the weekend (my current employer could do that for example).
For a coding sprint? I just announce a date here on the forum and tell everyone they are welcome to join.
The main problem is knowing in advance if there will be just 2-3 people (in which case I can even host it at home) or 4, or 8 or 10. If you have 10 or more people it becomes interesting to get a conference room in a youth hostel (as we used to do in Düsseldorf together with BeGeistert) or find a company that is happy to give access to (part of) their office to a bunch of opensource hackers on a weekend.
I’ve done a lot of sprints with the XMPP community as well, in all shapes and forms: in my living room with just 3 people, in an AirBNB in Sweden which we all reached by train or roadtrips, in a conference center near my home that provides sleeping rooms, conference rooms and food for everyone (this costs a bit more to organize, but then you have no logistics to worry about during the sprint and everyone can code for 12 hours a day), in a company office, one was hosted by Wikimedia Germany in their new (and in fact still being painted) office.
During the pandemic we even experimented with “online” sprints with several devs each working from their own home.
How did the experiment with online sprints go?
If it works fine,that’s a good idea actually.
We don’t need a room,save hotel costs,save travel costs and everyone from the whole world can join.
I’d still like to have a meeting in person if we can find enough interested people and organize everything,but online is a good alternative that can be done more often with way less organization work.
Online is no dnfferent from what I do every weekend, so personally I don’t really see the point. And timezones make it work not so well.
Maybe other people enjoy it more, but I don’t find it particularly useful. It will be a lot mure interesting to work together on a project (whatever it is) while sitting at the same table.
But it alo depends on if there are people near you who would be interested. A few years ago, the Australian community was running an online conference (Haiku Down Under), because… well Australia is very large, and they were all over the country. In comparison, for us europeans, travelling to some large german city should be fine?
Well, it all depends what you’re looking for or what purposes the organization should fulfill.
Benefitting from the status of being gemeinnützig could not be achieved in Germany, because promoting an open source os doesn’t fit into the legal framework.
Of course, you could still found a company or an association, depending on your aims.
Well, of course you can act internationally as an eV. And the point is, that we already have one. That’s why we’re talking about Germany. What you can’t do, is to found an association in Spain under German law. But you can be a Spanish member of a German association. Or vice versa.
The main point is, whether we need something like non-profit Haiku Inc in Europe. But, at least in Germany, there is no such thing as a non profit status, only being gemeinnützig. But supporting an OS doesn’t fit the legal definition. Thus, rules like taxation would apply to a German Haiku GmbH like to any other company.
@FaBe Again: I think our “human resources” are so scarse that I will pick any straw that already exists instead of splitting us further by founding two European organizations.
The German e.V. (HSA) is not perfect, but let’s see if we get more than 3 club members. I could imagine a BeGeistert and/or codesprint wandering annually from country to country. But that is already thought too much into a future which can’t be predicted.
Of course not. I wasn’t arguing in favor of that. It was the question whether we can have a non profit organization, that benefits from certain regulations. Neither is that possible for HSA eV nor for an imaginary HSA GmbH.
But of course, having an eV is useful because if you, as a member, organize something like begeistert, the Verein is legally responsible and not you as an individual. Joining HSA and reviving it, is the right way.
That’s not correct, the Vorstand is personally liable in parts.
In any case the distinction of Gemeinützig or not is mostly about taxes and as such more academic than anything in this context. Wether or not you can pay a little less tax is not relevant when we don’t have any working entity in the first place… so let’s get the hsa up and running first..
Well, the differences are in general minor, but the most important part is, that donations aren’t tax deductible. So that’s not an academic discussion.