Launching the Xfce Foundation

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Hi everyone,

there are a few issues with regards to my plans of launching the Xfce
Foundation e.V. at FOSDEM. We discussed this on IRC and here's the
summary:

I found out that we need the board of directors to sign the
official registration request in the presence of a notary. This is of
course not possible at FOSDEM. There is an exception for people from
outside Germany however: in a lot of countries (an EU thing
probably) they can go to a local notary, sign the letter in his
presence and get a so-called apostil from the court under which the
notary is registered. That way, people from outside Germany can
participate in the official paperwork.

We can't do that with a board size of five people. It'll take ages and
it'll cost a lot. So our idea was to make the board a lot smaller: 2
people, one president and vice president, one of them also being the
treasurer. That is the minimum size allowed and I think it'd be ok.

Board members don't have many privileges: they can represent the
Foundation to the outside world on their own and they can make
decisions about the member's fee and financial investments, I think.
For everything else, there's the general assembly which is the highest
organ in the decision making process anyway.
Other than that, board members are responsible for administrative tasks
like approving membership requests etc. 

So, the current idea is to:

  * Make the board a 2-people thing.
  * Launch the Foundation at FOSDEM, leaving out the signatures that
    need to be approved by the notary. We still need 7 people for this
    process as there have to be at least 7 members at the time of the
    registration.
  * One of the board members (perhaps from outside Germany) takes the
    papers home with him, goes to a notary, gets the apostil and sends
    the papers over to Germany the second board member does the same
    thing and hands in the registration request.

That should be doable within a few weeks. The downside is that we'd have
a small board (which is less cool and representative but should be
fine for a project at our scale) and to not over-complicate things even
more I would have to be elected to the board.

We could make it a 3-person thing, that should be ok too. But more
than that would probably take took long and make things overly
complicated.

Any opinions? Please hurry up with replies so I can finish the
paperwork before I get on the train tomorrow morning. ;)

  - Jannis