Welcome to this wiki ! You can put here any comment about the future statutes of the European Association

Article 5 : Any individual or legal entity can be an active member of the association, provided they pay an annual membership fee. The amount of the annual membership fee will be fixed by the Board of Directors.

dave page says : Why in that case, are we saying that people who wish to contribute and be part of the European Group will have to *pay* for the privilege of doing so? That is the most anti-Open Source way of running part of the project I can possibly imagine, and seems like an exceptionally efficient way to minimise the number of people that decide to help out.

Andreas Scherbaum : Ok, a membership fee for people is maybe not a very good idea.

Andreas Sherbaum : For the fee: my student organization has a similar rule in the statues. Every year the annual meeting redefines the membership fee for each student to 0,00 Euro. No problem.

Joshua Drake : You shouldn't have to pay to be a member of a PostgreSQL community organization. You should have a nominal expectation of participation though.

Damien Clochard : Let's say that instead of setting a standard membership free, we propose a “free membership fee”. I mean : any member is free to pay what he wants or what you can give.

Magnus Hagander : Can't we just have people register for PG-EU and on the registration they specify “already member of pgsql-it” for example. If we're not charging money, it's not so critical.

Dave Page : I can see us rapidly getting into a situation where some people try to join PG-EU, some their local group, and some both. Many users that are less passionate than us probably won't bother to join 2 users groups, so we end up with a situation where the local and EU groups are effectively in competition with each other for the membership.

Gabriele Bartolini : Those users that belong to a local group and accept the local group policy, might be informed that they could become members of the EU PUG if they want

In the case we don't reach a quorum by mail/irc/whatever, we have another meeting between 6-30 days which goes without quorum.

Koen Martens says : It is mentioned “For the General Assembly to be validly constituted a quorum of 30% of the total number of members must be present or represented.”. Is there no danger of the association ending up in dead water if you require such a big amount of members to be present? In my experience, only the 'die hards' ever come to these GA's anyway. I think most GA's i've been to attract maybe one percent of the members, if not less (counting represented members also).

Magnus Hagander : How about lowering the quorum, but *also* require approval by the board? Meaning that the GA and the board have to both agree to dissolve?

Koen Martens : Now, a simple solution would be to drop the quorum. This is not uncommon. An objection to dropping the quorum could be democratic validity, but as said I think in practice you will always end up with a non-quorumed GA within 30 days anyway, so democractic calidity is not an argument.

Koen Martens : You might want to think about a safeguard against 'takeovers' too: a rush of new members right before a GA because some malicious party wants to take-over the voting.

Damien Clochard : Actally only the half of the Board of Directors is renewed every year and members of the Board of Directors are elected for 2 years. So a complete takeover would take 2 years

Koen Martens : There could be any other criterium that a member as to satisfy, not necesarilly monetary. Some organisation merely require you to register, others decide membership on a 'approved by the board' basis, or whatever. The crux being that you should have satisfied the chosen criterium for at least x months already to be able to vote.

Joshua D. Drake : I strongly suggest *not* having companies be members. If you want companies to be *sponsors* that is good but the moment you allow companies to be members, they will *expect* something for that money.

Gabriele Bartolini : I personally am a bit uncertain about allowing private companies to join the association as members

Jean-Paul Argudo : be a member is a stronger act compared to just giving money.

• Companies are “benefactor members”
• Benefactor members don't vote

Koen Martens says : You might want to add 'financial controllers' to the statutes, who are to check the financial records and report to the GA on their validity.

Joshua Drake : SPI uses the Condorcet method of voting. Which at first I thought was dumb but using it for a while it seems reasonably fair.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method

Magnus Hagander : I think a clean way to do that in pgeu is to vote two members for 2 years and one member for 1 year (since we're only getting 3 members in the board for now - the org is small!). That way it solves itself. Doesn't need to be in the statues, but we need to put it in the election info. Easiest way - the two people who have the most votes get two years, the one that gets in third place gets one year ;)

Damien Clochard : Certified translations costs money If we have enough money to do that, why not…

yes checkout Article 7

• IT PUG : http://www.itpug.org/pdf/statuto.en.pdf
• PostgreSQLFr : http://wiki.postgresqlfr.org/doku.php/statutes
• SPI : http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/by-laws
• Mozilla Europe : http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/about/statutes/

— damien clochard 2007/11/04 13:20