While your council and HiFo board believe an e.V. (or another similar association in the EU) is a good idea, we also want to hear communitys' thoughts. I have added a public poll and ask you to please check your opinion.
If you vote 2)-4) - please raise your concerns; if you vote 5) - please tell what we should elaborate on; if you vote 6) - you are suspicious, check your attitude ; if you vote 7) - congratulations, you're a brave soul and thanks, your assistance is highly appreciated.

Voted 1 - afaik the GTA04/Neo900-involved company is placed in Germany and maybe that could help the cooperation and this project's development. Of course that's not the only reason, but just wanted to point that out. I lol'ed after reading option 2 :P

Option 2 would usually be pretty funny. But in this particular vote it's the only way to go. We can't have one man party. Admin. Board member, moderator, Country.... It's against what I think is best. We need to split the power. Nothing personal.

History shows it works quite well unless America™ shows up :P But seriously, what power? There's not much to split really... Besides, from my point of view, I use mainly repositories and tmo, if they're both hosted in Germany then I don't see a point in locating the authorities in any other country (especially on the other continent with different law system). That also happens to be the case with most maemo.org services (afaik) and even the upcoming Neo900 hardware project - so let's concentrate (LOL xD) full power in Germany and keep the stuff rolling.

[Not fully serious]Besides, when we don't like the actions of future Germany-based leader, we will both be able to go there and give him a slap in his face, while America-based one would require some of us to get a visa (which may be hard or impossible).[/Not fully serious]

No it won't. Please note that GolDeliCo and Neo900 project is not sponsored by, or in any other way linked to HiFo. Neo900 the hardware also is not a community project, though the Neo900-crew acts almost as if it were. In the end there will be little that maemo community can do via HiFo or council as proxy, to help cooperation and development of Neo900 project. At least I don't see anything right now. Maybe that changes for whatever reason, e.g. HiFo finding funds that allow them to buy GolDeliCo, or any cooperation contracts regarding brandnames or whatever. For now though... not a good argument why we need an e.V in Germany.

Besides HiFo (or any such e.V., at least aiui) is meant to be the treasurer of maemo community. A treasurer has no power, it's you (the community) who has all the power - and it's council and HiFo to execute what community wants. In this regard HiFo has less power of any kind than any of you and even than council, and I'd hope that stays unchanged and the same for any e.V.

my 2 Euro-cent ;-)
jOERG

Please all (who have doubts) read that above again. Unless it's clear that HiFo is only an "administrative matter" to give us (community) some sort of legal character, there's no point in discussing anything.

The community (we all) stays the same (no need to change nationality and the council continues ot have no restrictions of nationality of any kind.

This whole issue can be summarised as "are you OK with moving the bank account to Germany? (yes/no)".

Hi there,

Just to add to this discussion from my experience. I am UK citizen, resident in Czech Republic, I am Board member in Czech Company and I am on a board of Directors for a German Company in Dusseldorf.

The board of directors position is more of corporate responsibility than of actual executive work. So generally the Board of directors is only advised of key facts and asked to approve significant decisions.

Generally this will not change the way the foundation runs or operates day to day. I would expect below BoD is an Executive team who are 'running' the foundation professionally.

As for the language issue. In my case all documents and processes are done in English with notarized translations of German documents where needed. My level of German is enough to order me a beer or insult someone, but that is it. Generally German laws are part of harmonized EU laws. So any European resident would be pretty comfortable on the BoD of a German entity.

So I am happy to support the move of the foundation to German. And willing to hold a position on the BoD if needed, subject to approval of the articles and some due diligence on my side.

The time has arrived to do the transition. HiFo needs your help with this and we'd be honoured if you'd be part of the team to give us the foundation on which we can continue. To achieve this, we are seeking german speaking contributors, esp. those who are familiar with an e.V. Unfortunately, all this has to be done in german language, so I've started a new thread for this purpose:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...33#post1409333
We will provide an english translation of the articles of incorporation and other relevant papers when they're ready to being finalized so that community can review it.

Why in german?

The answer to this question is probably the same as to "why paperwork needs to be done in english in the USA?" or "why paperwork needs to be done in french in France?" or "why paperwork needs to be done in italian in Italy?".