[Members] Re: XSF EU Legal Structure: Example Proposals

On 2/24/26 6:50 AM, Guus der Kinderen wrote: Broadly speaking, I am in favor of migrating the XSF from the US to the EU. I have expressed this preference in the past and I express it again now because I continue to be concerned about the significant dependence on me as almost the only person semi-active in the US (Sam Whited is another, perhaps there are a few more?) and certainly the only person authorized to take care of banking (I am the only person known to Wells Fargo), payments (some things get charged to my credit card and I pay myself back), reimbursements (e.g., for Summit and SCAM expenses I pay volunteers and vendors via Wise), donations (I send invoices to sponsors), compliance (I make sure our business registration is maintained), taxes (I pay our franchise tax with the State of Delaware), etc. This is not a good situation and it is not sustainable. Based on our conversation a few years ago with the executive director of the Eclipse Foundation [1] as well as input from other people and information sources over the years, I would say there are several other practical aspects that we need to talk about. These include: (1) estimated cost of the move, e.g., consulting fees paid to lawyers and accountants on both sides of the Atlantic, filing fees to establish the new organization, ongoing costs of EU domicile (do we need an office or physical address), etc. - note that the Eclipse Foundation spent 100k Euros on this (!), which is way more than we would probably spend because they had employees and so on, but even if we spend 20k Euros we've blown our entire funding reserve (2) how to raise money to pay for (1), e.g. through a special call for donations from sponsors and the community ... also, does this money go to the existing US org or the new EU org (both orgs will be spending money on various aspects of the move), etc. (3) how to handle intellectual property (XEPs, logo, etc.) held by the US organization so that all of our work over the last 25 years is safely transferred from the US org to the EU org (are there tax implications for this? more money to be spent on accountants and lawyers to figure this out...) (4) which roles within the EU org could be filled by volunteers (and who is volunteering??) and which roles need to be outsourced to professionals (e.g., bookkeeping service, accountants, lawyers, auditors); this topic is related to (1) above because right now we operate very inexpensively (no paid legal counsel, no accountants, no bookkeepers, no required yearly auditing of the financial accounts, etc.) and I don't know what the ongoing costs would be to operate in various EU countries (e.g., would we need a paid financial audit every year?) ... this stuff can add up fast! (5) a rough timeline so that we can estimate how long we'll need to have both organizations running simultaneously (Mike from Eclipse indicated that this will be necessary during the transition period) (6) long-term sustainability of the EU org: I'm not complaining at all but in many ways I have been singlehandedly holding together the US org for 25 years and if we're going to move the whole thing to the EU then we need to think about how to reduce the "bus factor" so that we don't end up being so dependent on one person for the next 25 years ... this might imply paying for more professional services but that gets expensive and we don't have a lot of money coming in via our wonderful sponsors or other donations because let's face it XMPP isn't exactly a hot new technology with all sorts of popular and corporate appeal, so how exactly is this going to work? (and here's a deeper question: do we need a formal organization at all or could we structure things in a more lightweight manner with crowdfunding of conferences, ad-hoc donations for particular initiatives, simple hosting of specifications in a repository instead of having them be owned by an organization, etc.) My focus is mostly elsewhere these days so I might be missing some things... Peter [1] https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Organization_Proposal#Informational_talk_with_Ecl…