On Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 09:03:22AM +0200, Stephane Ducasse wrote:
> 
> But for now an association would work perfectly, I guess that an 
> association in germany acts as a
> group of people that do not have the intention to make money but can 
> manage it.
> So right now this would be perfect.
> I prefer to see an association that a non exisiting foundation.
> 

Hi all,

Sorry for not answering earlier... but we had to discuss this on the
squeak-ev list first.

So... maybe I start with

What we did
------------

We're in the process of setting up a non-profit association in Germany.
This association will be a legal entity (like a Person or a Company) after
it gets registered (than we are a "e.V" which es a "registered association").
This will take some time because both the Tax Authorities and the local
Court are involved in the process.

The bylaws of the association were discussed on the squeak-ev list
for some time, and then some of us (exactly 7, required by law)  met
at LinuxTag and signed them. There is a nice photo at
http://swiki.squeakfoundation.org/squeak-ev/34

The bylaws are pretty standard for this kind of german association (Verein)
(We copied them from ADA Germany e.V. and then modified them for our
purpose). The bylaws are very much like a constitution for the association:
They contain first a set of goals (What do we want to do?) and then the
bylaws define the structure (simple: board of three (First, Second,
Treasurer), and how these get elected and how to remove them if they do
strange things.
The elected board is: 1. Marcus Denker, 2. Markus Gaelli, Treasurer: Hans
Beck.

Members are required to pay a membership-fee. (Euro 0 (younger than 18y, 10
(Students), 30 (normal) and 200 (corporations) per year)

Have a look at the Babelfish translation:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/urltrurl?url=http%3A%2F%2Fswiki.squeakfoundation.
+org%2Fsqueak-ev%2F20&lp=de_en&tt=url&urltext=&doit=done)
pretty funny translation, but better than nothing.

So the whole thing is as simple as possible and *very* flexible. We can
simply do what we want and build further structures on the way.
("Do the simplest thing that could possibly work").

Ok. Now

What we *are*
-------------
We consider the german association to be local thing. We discussed this on
the squeak-ev list, and we think that "morphing" squeak-ev into that what
squeakfoundation is planed to be would not be good. Being local instead of
global has some implications...
Our idea for squeak-ev was to do something small, but *do* it.

We agreed on the following:

1) We are not yet registered. Nothing will happen until we are.
2) We consider ourself to be a local organisation.
3) We would like to help building structures to support Squeak, both
   global and european.
4) Because there is no squeakfoundation yet, we are willing to take
   donations as soon as we are registered. We garantee that this money
   will be used according to our statutes.


So... back to you suggestion: It seems to be a good idea to put together
a CD for companies and universities to buy (and thus contributing to 
the further development of squeak). 

Other things to consider would be

T-shirts:  http://www.jinxhackwear.com
Affero:    http://www.affero.com/   (this seems to be a realy interesting idea)

     Marcus

-- 
Marcus Denker marcus at ira.uka.de  -- Squeak! http://squeakland.org