Becoming a legal entity and accepting donations (was: Re: Buildbot Performance)

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, 17 May 2021 at 10:39, Ruben Di Battista wrote:
>
> Just as a side note, here in France I just created a non-profit association for a project I'm working on related to the organization of an event, and the process is almost free and reasonably fast. In a matter of few weeks we had the association published on the official governmental gazette and a bank account, also free of keeping charges.
>
> Same thing in Italy.

We have a non-profit in France and I would say that it's
extreeeeeeemely easy to run one there compared to almost any other
country.
The only downside is that one needs a person physically located there
who's willing to do some stuff occasionally, but it's orders of
magnitude less paperwork than in any other country that we
investigated about.

In Italy it gets a bit more complicated in my opinion (but still quite ok).

Another huge benefit of having an org in Europe is that organizing
meetings in Europe is much easier and cheaper with an European bank
account.
(That said, with Covid and everything, I'm not sure how likely we are
to organize further in-person meetings any time soon.)

If we are to organize a meeting here in Europe, having a legal entity
in the USA hardly helps. It's expensive to collect money for the fee,
and also expensive to pay the hotel & other costs. Also, signing any
contracts with the accommodation facility becomes a lot more tricky.

(Last time we organized the meeting via an Italian non-profit.)

> I perfectly agree with the will of having the legal entity in US,

It's also perfectly fine to run two non-profits in two countries at
the same time. But of course each one brings its own time commitment
and real costs (bank account etc.).

> but I think the process in Europe might be less expensive at least, probably faster.

I believe that we discussed a while ago that having a non-profit in
the US would cost us some 1000 USD just for the bookkeeping or so (not
sure whether that price was per year or per month, but either of those
is a non-trivial amount of money unless you really have a lot of
income).

In France we simply have board members that do all the roles on a
volunteer basis.
Of course, if we had a large traffic (lots of donations and expenses)
that might not have been viable, but then we could also easily afford
to pay for one.
The important part is that it's easy enough to do the job that one
doesn't need to be a trained professional to do it.

(What I'm slightly more worried about is the manpower to run a
non-profit, no matter how little work that is.)

Mojca