4 Mar
2026
4 Mar
'26
9:19 p.m.
Am 04.03.26 um 03:54 schrieb Peter Saint-Andre:
(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!
I would like to volunteer and help here. But I have some concerns.
The proposals and research is really great. But with an org being in the
Netherlands there will be still the language barrier and NL legal stuff
most of us are not aware of.
Doing bookkeeping and filing taxes is even challenging in your own
country and native language. So my concern would be that we heavily will
rely here on our NL members or pay for services.
The same concerns would apply to any other EU country or the UK. The EU
still hasn't standardized any of this.
(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.)
this is a very
interesting question and idea. Would be great when there
is a way to run the org without all the red tape and bureaucracy a legal
org entity put on us.
Alex