Organization Proposal

Overview

In early 2024, XSF Board member Nicola Fabiano proposed that we consider strengthening the XSF's presence in Europe. This could take several forms:

• Move the XSF entirely to Europe
• Create a subsidiary in Europe
• Make no organizational changes (this is always an option!)

These options are explained in more detail below.

Rationale

The basic idea is that:

1. most of the XSF's activities (e.g., FOSDEM, Summit, sprints) take place in Europe, and most developers in the XMPP community are located in Europe.
2. Furthermore, it might be easier to obtain grants from European organizations if the XSF had a stronger European presence.
3. Finally, we might be able to have more influence over European policy (e.g., DMA and the EU Chat Control proposals) if our organization were domiciled in Europe.

Options

Move

In order to move the XSF from the U.S. to a European country, we would probably need to form a separate organization in Europe and then shut down the XSF.

Subsidiary

Creating a subsidiary might be more complicated in the end, because we would need people on both continents to manage official matters such as banking, taxes, accounting, legal, and various government interactions. It's unclear if the benefits outweigh the costs.

Do Nothing

Perhaps we can be more actively involved with European initiatives (e.g., EU policy-making) without actually moving the XSF or creating a subsidiary or "local office". This should be explored, too.

Factors to Consider

Here are some things we should think about...

Personnel

• Who will do the work in Europe?
• Who cannot do the work (e.g., can only citizens of the domicile country be board members)?
• What about succession planning?

Assets

This might include:

• The membership roster
• The foundation's name
• Copyright in XEPs
• Domain name(s)
• Money in the bank
• Anything else that can be considered valuable

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service might not like it if these assets are transferred directly from a U.S. organization to a non-U.S. organization. It's possible that there are ways to avoid any problems, for example by granting or selling assets to the new organization.

Open Issues

Questions on rationale

The page currently defines three rationales. Before investing resources into a move, it would be good to have a high degree of certainty around any benefits of the move.

The first (most activities & people being in Europe) does not define relevance: what problem is solved by moving the organisation physically closer? Does that mean that a move will introduce similar problems for those that are in the US, while we're not fixing these issues for those that are neither in the US or EU?

The second ("it might be easier to obtain grants") and third ("we might be able to have more influence over European policy") are worded very cautiously (the word 'might' is used). Are we at all certain about this? Are there examples of grants or obstacles to assert influence that we're currently experiencing? As a counter-example: EU funding (through Next Generation Internet / NLnet) has already found its way to a significant amount (about 20, at the time of writing) of XMPP-related projects.