On 2/24/26 6:50 AM, Guus der Kinderen wrote:
Please review these examples, ask questions, and share feedback - maybe
even add alternative proposals of your own. Your input will help ensure
that any future decision is well-informed, practical, and aligned with
the needs of the XSF community.
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_Eclipse_Foundation_employees
