Not viable, I think
Are you sure, Noemi? The members of an EEIG, the way I understand it, are not people, but organizations. How would you overcome that?
I don’t know in practice, but
I think it would be an alternative to disparate, more localized actions that end up serving the same Edgeryders purpose - if someone starts moving resources in Sweden, and someone in the UK, and so on. Instead of having several activities in several countries, at one point these can be joined together under one stronger entity, including some of Edgeryders partners if they want to and this new status wouldn’t prejudice their current.
Also, from what I understand from the page an EEIG “can also be formed by individuals carrying on an industrial, commercial, craft or agricultural activity or providing professional or other services in the EU.”
More information
I just noticed that there is some more info about the Belgian registered internatinal association on the Co-Ment document that was set up a while back
"AISBL – questionable
by Peter Troxler, created on 2012-08-05 13:42
make sure you also look at the running costs of such an AISBL. this is not a quick win solution (having gone through the exercise before) – the process took some 8 months… Also, financially not a lightweight vehicle: Costs at our end were : notary: 1500 euros attorney: 1625 euros (the invoice of the attorney includes the notary fee) accounting: 1149,50 euros we also had to organize a domicile in Brussels, done via FAIB, but again this is membership / year: 290 euros and the FAIB mailbox another: 31,50 euros per month"
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Thanks for checking this out
Hmm this seems odd, there ought to be some way of getting around those fees. Would love to check with some kind of entrepreneurship encouragment org 
I googled Peter Troxler
I’m guessing this is who posted that comment -
http://nl.linkedin.com/in/petertroxler
If it is, looks like hes got a fair bit of experience messing about with legal structures
ASBL, AISBL, Cooperative a finalite sociale, etc
Thanks Darren for pointing at this.
Hi Nadia.
Yes, actually, for a person with a domicile in Belgium,
and with volunteer support of a lawyer and accountant having experience in not for profits,
the main cost is the Notary, which is still relatively high for a small organization ( 1500 euros ).
The easiest may be to start with a ASBL ( not for profit ), which is fairly easy to set up and “only” costs 150 euros.
If a more business like, yet social approach, is being considered, a “Cooperative a finalite sociale” can be set up, for which there can be 12 000 euros of support from goverment money in its set up phase.
Both a Cooperative a Finalite Sociale or a Association Internationale Sans But Lucratif
can be created out of an initial ASBL ( Association Sans But Lucratif ).
It is possible to go together to some incubator. There is one I have had some exchanges with in St Gilles, called “Village Partenaire” :
Uk organisations
Regarding UK organisations, there are a couple of options we could go for.
The obvious, more traditional one is the “Company limited by guarantee”. This is a company with members but no share capital, and is the classic form used by charities but also by trade associations and other membership organisations. It is as easy for someone in a different country to be a member as for a UK-based person.
If the organisatoin was going to be more entrepreneurial, then you could use a simple company limited by shares but this would probably create a barrier if you want grant funding.
The Limited Liability partnership is also an option but I am not sure I would recommend it. I know Chris Cook is veryt keen on them and I believe he has identified very exciting uses for them but for mainly a membership organisation I am not convinced they are a good idea. And you would have the same issue with potential grant funders since the LLP is a “for-profit” form. Also it isnot geared up to be a membership organisation. Apart from anything else, if someone from outside the UK is a partner they’d be expected to file tax returns in the UK. Might not be a big deal but do you need it?
As for decision-making, this is a whole field of study. In brief, I would say this:
The limited company carries lots of historical baggage since it has been used for centuries for capital to dominate labour and the planet. Yet it is very flexible - you can use it for all sorts of purposes, and tweak the governance in all sorts of ways.
There are lots of ideas around “decision-making withour hierarchy”, as embodied by Linux, for example, or perhas Wikipedia, or W Gore (makers of Gore-tex). To summarise this vast area, the underlying theme seems to be a recognition that individuals are capable of responsible, autonomous behaviour, without external control. This points towards:
<span style="font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:
Arial" lang=“EN-US”> minimal, and flexible, hierarchy;
<span style="font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:
Arial" lang=“EN-US”>- no or few managers;
<span style="font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:
Arial" lang=“EN-US”>- leaders, and groups, appear and disappear as the need requires;
<span style="font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:
Arial" lang=“EN-US”>- information flowing freely; and
<span style="font-family:Arial;mso-fareast-font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:
Arial" lang=“EN-US”>- a “higher authority”, having legitimacy amongst the group, holding everything together through application of wisdom and moral authority, without ego and without controlling anything. This is about servant leadership, or trusteeship perhaps.
If you were to use the company limited by guarantee, you could certainly tweak the governance to encourage the development of this sort of culture of decison-making.
I trust that is of some help. As a member fo the community I support what you are trying to do. I am afraid I don’t have a lot of time to commit but am happy to chip in with advice from time to time.
Patrick
UK organisations
Thanks for your input here Andrew.
To further ellaborate on his suggested legal structure.
There are basically three options that would appear suitable for Edgeryders as a ‘company limited by garantee’. This is a very brief (and I hope reasonably honest / accurate summary)
- Charity - most work to register - most regulation when running
- Industial and provident society - next most difficult
- Community Interest Company (CIC) - Least difficult.
Of course this legal organisation/structure does not have to be the be-all-and-end-all for Edgeryders. We can change it, create other brother/sister organisation(s) etc. etc.
A very good, (reletively) easy to understand, up to date guide to UK legal structures is
http://www.uk.coop/simplylegal
download the .pdf chapter 5 page 18 deals with this stuff - but the whole document is worth a read if you are interested.
Any questions I’m more than happy to try to answer.
needs and missions,of various organizations,towards movements
Hi Darren, Andrew, Nadia, and all,
I wondered if it could help to ask : for what is there a need for a ( legally recognized ) organization ?
Then, based on needs, create various structures.
I could imagine it could be more then one structure,
and I could also imagine it does not need to be called “Edgeryders”, keeping the name Edgeryders for the movement, not the organizations,
while , why not, having organizations “in support of Edgeryders”… ?
Actually, perhaps even the movement does not need to be called “Edgeryders”…
What do we identify with ? And if new organizations are set up, for specific purpose ( which could be in support of networks beyond Edgeryders ), what would their mission be, and how would they be called ?
Finally, what partnerships between existing organisations may be created to facilitate some of the needs ?
organisation and movements
The idea, as I understand it, (as detailed in the original post here) is to create a registered organisation to “facilitate the collaborative projects of Edgeryders, helping us to working together effectively.”
It would most probably do this by organising networking events, facilitating communication (maintaining and developing the website), lending its weight/legitamacy in support of the projects of individual (or groups of) Edgeryders and … other stuff???
It would be looking for funding so that when necessary it can pay for these things to happen.
I would hope that this organisation would be governed democratically by the Edgeryders commmunity and would be highly flexible in its work and structure.
I could easily see a number of co-operating organisations/structures being set up as and when people saw the necessity.
As for the name - I guess it is what ties us all together? Also following the work that has already happened it carries some legitamacy. Do you think it should not be used?
What orgaisations do you think we could partner with to provide these things?
Organizations “in support of” Edgeryders
Thanks Darren.
As we discuss, I feel more and more strongly how it could be beneficial not to have an organization called Edgeryders, leaving the Edgeryders name to a movement,
though possibly to set up one or more functional legal frameworks In Support Of movements such as Edgeryders.
I believe that, to keep the movement empowered, the organizations who provide infrastructure and resources should be dissociated from representing the movement,
but rather be part of the movement.
Hence, any one individual can choose to support the movement, and organizations that support the movement can be used to enable both limited liability for specific events and activities, while facilitating resource allocation.
I believe that ideally, there would not be any one monopoly of one organization ( and its chosen governance ) over the resource allocation identified in relation to supporting the movement(s).
I wish to see it rather like a network who can be mutually supportive around shared intentions,
with certain organizations offering their services for basic frameworks / infrastructure, and other organizations connecting to the open participatory “api”.
All participating individuals and organizations would remain accountable, and build up reputation,enabling other individuals to legitimize or not their contributions, enabling each to choose to aggregate tozqrds, or route around, certain supporting organizations,
based on the reputation, governance, and approaches to support intention of each participating organization…
The platform is everything??
I tend to always favour decentralised/distributed solutions and I’m definately all up for using legal structures to facilitate our works rather than being bound or constrained by them.
One thing I’m having trouble with though is this web platform. Its what brings and largely what ties us all together. I appreciate we quickly make some independant links between each other… but this platform and, I guess the associated Twitter account are important.
I’m not entirely sure what the future holds for this platform. I’m guessing that its not going to be appropriate for the Council of Europe to host it forever - or maybe it is?
I’m also wondering who and how decisions on its future will ultimately be made (I appreciate that there is ongoing discussion about its development here that I really should find time to read and engage with).
I think the questions that we have to find an answers for are who is going to own the domain and how is the platform to be governed?? Is it appropriate to have / create a legal entity to take care of this? If not how will it be done?
Finding ways to multiply Edge-Aggregators
Hi Darren,
very good point !
lets find ways to reduce dependency on this site / platform.
What would you suggest ?
Multiply focal points regarding Edgeryders ?
It could be easy enough to invite people to become member of different proposed Twitter and Facebook adresses. What about non-proprietary platforms ?
The current facebook/twitter pages seem to be far from converging all Edgeryders members ?
I also wonder who controls this site, and if there are backups of all data and member contacts ?
How difficult would it be to enable profiles to become OpenID ? ( and could this contribute to a solution of keeping profiles connected while enabling greater resiliency through distributed hosting of profiles ? )
Or… perhaps we could invite the Edgeryders to some prototypes ( which aim at being distributed ) such this one, in development : http://netention.org ?
Any further ideas , anyone ?
Thanks Darren for bringing forward this topic.
3rd Parties and ‘jumping ship’
I’m not sure if there is any way of reducing dependancy on this platform without increasing dependancy on other places? Ultimately unless we all have our own servers ( freedom boxes? ) we are going to have to depend on 3rd parties to look after our data and provide the tools for us to communicate.
Isn’t it better to have collective governance over some of these resources rather than entrust them to others with completely different values. At least then we have ownership and control of a commons, rather than giving it all away!!
I don’t think that there are any p2p technologies that could really replace the platform at present. Which means we need a central platform - but we can play with other tools too and encourage adoption of any that make sense.
…you have me now looking through Michael Bauwens P2P Computing and P2P Tools bookmarks to see if he’s bookmarked anything that we could use.
One more option
It’s true what you say about the “necessary dependencies”, until P2P social networks are ready. But I guess there’s one more option to ease these dependencies right now: the option to fork. It needs the platform content being open data, and its software being open source.
Then it is just as in free software projects: if a (part of) the community agrees that the current governance scheme is not what they are happy with, they may download the open data dump and set up a fork of the platform. It’s mostly a theoretical option because, like in the free software world, forks would rarely happen and are detrimental to a community. But it strengthens the negotiation position of the community, rather than being just dependent as in the Facebook case.
Options??
So thinkng about the web platfrom and considering the conversation we’ve been having in this mission and considering whats been said here and here it appears the possible options are -
- Set up a legal entity to own the platform (domain name and rent server space) making data and software open means that it could be forked if there was sufficient support (desire to proceed in a different direction) at some point in the future
- Find a trusted individual or organisation to own things on our behalf.
- Using a service hosted elsewhere - this means we would be dependant on the service provider. With some service providers there is the option to become involved in the governance and development of the platform.
I’ve just noticed that they also offer solutions for UK registed ‘comapnies limited by guarantee’. I’ll get details.
Impressed!
Oneclickorgs is genius. I can see how any healthy process would soon outgrow the limit set by the software, but it does address the problem of how you build an org-like interface for something that, deep down is really a network of individuals! Thanks, Darren!
Finding out how to steer ourselves … and who we are …
Darren, you’re not the only one who’s troubled about the platform … however, I think we’re seeing some progress. If I remember correctly, it was intended right from the start to make the platform software open source, because it’s a taxpayer funded project. That release day is approaching … . With the software being open source, the question of “who controls the hosting” becomes less of an issue.
Then, we have discussions how to make the platform and its further development a community-steered process. Like: behind the link you gave, we also have a discussion here that we want to add a feature request / community decision making tool to the platform.
The question you raise (of how the platform should be governed) is very much a work in progress – welcome to add to the discussion. Im interested esp. in: Do you have real-life examples how making up a legal entity could help to warrant a stable, community-steered platform development? (I see that you folks are really into this topic and I’m following the discussion a bit, but I don’t have experience with this stuff …)
A personal idea that came to me some days ago and that I’d like to throw into the discussion here: We could make the platform a rather generic free software project, apt for other “meta-communities” like ours, as well. Because that’s what I see Edgeryders as: we connect all kinds of existing, local communities and projects, with synergy benefits and inspiration for everybody.
So Edgeryders (with its 2.0 agenda) is, in my understanding: the github.com for “socially relevant stuff”. Or something similar to the Spanish 15M movement’s N-1 network (based on open source ELGG + Lorea). But with the benefit to connect the hosted / presented projects rather than letting them just sit there …
Neodynos said
"The question
The question ultimately comes down to who the server space belongs to (who pays for it/has the contract) and who owns the domain name which people use to access the site.Neodynos said
“The question you raise (of how the platform should be governed) is very much a work in progress – welcome to add to the discussion. Im interested esp. in: Do you have real-life examples how making up a legal entity could help to warrant a stable, community-steered platform development?”
Presently the domain name ( http://edgeryders.ppa.coe.int ) belongs to The Council of Europe (CoE) but I guess at some stage we will move to something else as either they won’t want to host us there forever, or we won’t want to stay there.
I’m not sure what the deal is with the hosting - I guess CoE pays and has control? Whatever the deal is, Alberto has suggested that its only paid untill early next year.
Both the domain name and server space have to belong to a legal someone - you can’t do otherwise (well… I did actually manage to have a domain name registerd to a organisation that was not a legal entity for a few months once - then someone realised what was going on). This could be a person or a legal entity, that is an organisation that is seen as a person in law.
So we would have two options. Have someone (or an existing legal entity) we trust have ultimate control (as seen, and backed up, by law) over these things or create a legal entity to do this ourselves.
There are things to consider with both options
- Letting someone (or some organisation) have control - quick and easy option, but what happens if they die / go mad / go evil?
- Creating a legal entity - time and money to set up and run.
I think we can create a legal entity that is reasonably low in both time and € costs to set up and run and has a governance structure which allows the users of the platform to decide what happens.
Thanks Patrick
Funny, this is the first I have heard of you since the last Lote, Eimhin here.
Lots of good info there, I especially liked your portrayal of the non hierarchic modus that a lot of us are more comfortable with. And your ethical and moral trusteeship, thats a here-here from me.
I hope to see you in Brussels if you have time. If coming, let me know, phaps we could airbnb one spot… (oh and do you remember Steven, the young shoemaker, I need to get a hold of him if possible)
All the very best Patrick, nice to see your positive influence on here!