GnuPG e.V. is looking for members

[Werner Koch]

Hi!

back in February we founded the GnuPG e.V. (aka the Verein) which is a
charitable German organization with the goal to foster data protection
and help with the development of GnuPG.  The idea is that the Verein
will be the legal entity for the GnuPG project, so that my company can
eventually step back from that.

The founding members were Andre Heinecke, me, Yutaka Niibe, Justus
Winter, Neal Walfied, Marcus Brinkmann, and Kai Michaelis.  Soon
Kristian Fiskerstrand and Daniel Kahn Gillmor joined us.  The elected
board are Andre, me, and Marcus.  Unfortunately Marcus resigned as board
member (he was treasurer) 4 weeks ago at the very time we planned to get
the Verein actually alive.  See the mail copied below.

Although the original plan was to first discuss rules for membership,
Andre and me agreed that we should invite active GnuPG people right now.

If you contributed to GnuPG, be it code, documentation, user education,
or whatever you think it makes you a contributor, please feel invited to
apply for membership by sending mail to board at gnupg.org.

We do not need a snail address, but it would be good if you at least
tell us the city you are living and a permanent mail address.  We expect
an OpenPGP encrypted mail and some words on the kind of ypur activity.

An English translation of our constitution is available at the Verein's
repo:
<https://git.gnupg.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=gnupg-verein.git;a=blob_plain;f=legal/constitution.en.pdf>.
Note that we will eventually propose the setup of a nominal membership
fee (say 12 EUR/year) to satisfy demands from the tax office.

Finally, we have a vacant position on the board which needs to be filled
soonish.  If anyone is interested to run for the position of the
treasurer, please let us know.  Being able to read German would be
helpful; however, we plan to source out most of every day's work so that
the job would require reading and writing some mails, attending telcos
every now and then, and ink-signing a bunch of donation receipts in
January.

I would be glad to eventually see many active people from our community
as members of the Verein.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner


--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
From: Andre Heinecke <aheinecke at gnupg.org>
Subject: Status update / planning for membership assembly
To: verein at gnupg org
Date: Thu, 03 Aug 2017 10:02:32 +0200

Hi,

So it's been quiet here for quite a while. Time to get some activity :-)

We (the Board) had a Meeting yesterday [1] to discuss how to move forward. 
Mostly we would like to discuss some topics (see below) on this mailing list 
and hold a first Membership assembly around FOSDEM next year (somewhere in 
February). Likely in Düsseldorf.

So, the Verein now has a Bank Account, a postal address, a bitcoin wallet and 
some funds.

Thanks to the Wau Holland Foundation the Verein obtained the
funds which were donated to the Wau Holland Foundation for
GnuPG since 2015. (~60k €).

Additionally the Verein got around 26 BTC [2] from the current fundraising 
campaign that was financed by and focused on g10code.

That's the good news. Now we need to get this Verein really set up to do 
something. :-)

While the assembly will be the ultimate place for decisions and discussions, 
we should probably try to prepare something and start to discuss topics 
beforehand.

Some points that I think we need to discuss:

- More concrete long / short term goals for the Verein apart from the general
  goals outlined in our constitution.

- Resulting from that: How should we spend the funds we received (or will
  receive) and how do we control that the funds are spent according to our
  goals.

- Membership rules
 -- Who should be accepted as a member?
 -- How do we want to concretly handle supporting members?
 -- Membership fees.
 -- How do we actually implement this, which infrastructure etc.

- What our activities as a Verein (apart from collecting and spending money)
  should be, and who would like to contribute what.

Feel free to propose / discuss anything else you think related, of course.

Best Regards,
Andre

1: https://dev.gnupg.org/T3301
2: https://blockchain.info/address/1EAw3RnaALKiES8Ap93SwwDx4fsoY12wzF
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---


-- 
Die Gedanken sind frei.  Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.
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