Nobody is LARPing an Eingetragener Verein, they're just being one, and the law requires them to have a board and presidium.
As they got hundreds of votes on the issue, that means tens of thousands of euros in membership contributions. It doesn't seem unreasonable to want to create a legal entity for that, and an e.V. is easier to set up in the beginning (although it can lead to a lot of drama later).
Germany requires e.Vs to have democratic governance as a response / reaction to what happened during WW2, where every organization was retooled to run under "Führerprinzip" aka, one person decides everything, zero democracy or accountability. Reconstruction decided this was really fucking bad, and made all organizations required to be the polar opposite
I have German background, so that was a genuine concern for me when I started using Codeberg 3 years ago. It's not a great surprise that they end up being more interested in rulemaking around FOSS hosting than in FOSS hosting itself.
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm is a good look at why taking themselves seriously enough to have a formal governance structure is a good thing for a healthy organisation of any sort.
Sort of yeah! I got used to it by now. At the local hackerspace we have a voorzitter, penningmeester, and secretaris -> president, treasurer, and secretary I think would be the English terms. All sounding fancy and together they're the board. But they don't dress up or anything, it's just terms that are commonplace for small organisations here, in Germany (like with Codeberg) as in the Netherlands (like our hackerspace). In practice people just do as they see fit, the titles are often just a formality and not taken seriously unless you can use it to teasingly redirect work onto another person :)
That's normal for any "vereniging", "Verein", union or association. My VVE (HOA) has that too. So did both of the student unions I've been a member of. There are organisations for playing games that have the same structure. As soon as you've got any kind of money or responsibility involved, you need some governance structure, or you're just giving your money to some guy.
And the complexity of the governance structure is related to the amount of money involved.
The weirdest thing is when the money of a non-profit NGO exceeds roughly 10e6, the decisions made by upper management tend to make an inversionally proportionate amount of sense. Reason being, it's not their money to spend.
Took me a while to figure this out but now it's everywhere.
Ah, interesting! I didn't realize they were German, and didn't realize it's a non-profit as well. I thought it was just an open source project and that was that. That would explain the bureaucracy.
Nobody is LARPing an Eingetragener Verein, they're just being one, and the law requires them to have a board and presidium.
As they got hundreds of votes on the issue, that means tens of thousands of euros in membership contributions. It doesn't seem unreasonable to want to create a legal entity for that, and an e.V. is easier to set up in the beginning (although it can lead to a lot of drama later).
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Germany requires e.Vs to have democratic governance as a response / reaction to what happened during WW2, where every organization was retooled to run under "Führerprinzip" aka, one person decides everything, zero democracy or accountability. Reconstruction decided this was really fucking bad, and made all organizations required to be the polar opposite
You are American? American non profit associations must have officers and a board of directors.
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I have German background, so that was a genuine concern for me when I started using Codeberg 3 years ago. It's not a great surprise that they end up being more interested in rulemaking around FOSS hosting than in FOSS hosting itself.
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm is a good look at why taking themselves seriously enough to have a formal governance structure is a good thing for a healthy organisation of any sort.
Sort of yeah! I got used to it by now. At the local hackerspace we have a voorzitter, penningmeester, and secretaris -> president, treasurer, and secretary I think would be the English terms. All sounding fancy and together they're the board. But they don't dress up or anything, it's just terms that are commonplace for small organisations here, in Germany (like with Codeberg) as in the Netherlands (like our hackerspace). In practice people just do as they see fit, the titles are often just a formality and not taken seriously unless you can use it to teasingly redirect work onto another person :)
That's normal for any "vereniging", "Verein", union or association. My VVE (HOA) has that too. So did both of the student unions I've been a member of. There are organisations for playing games that have the same structure. As soon as you've got any kind of money or responsibility involved, you need some governance structure, or you're just giving your money to some guy.
And the complexity of the governance structure is related to the amount of money involved.
The weirdest thing is when the money of a non-profit NGO exceeds roughly 10e6, the decisions made by upper management tend to make an inversionally proportionate amount of sense. Reason being, it's not their money to spend.
Took me a while to figure this out but now it's everywhere.
I think German non profit organizations are required by law to have a certain level of governance structure.
Ah, interesting! I didn't realize they were German, and didn't realize it's a non-profit as well. I thought it was just an open source project and that was that. That would explain the bureaucracy.
The open source project is Forgejo. You can host is yourself with any policies you want.
Guess the Germans woke up and had a board meeting about this comment lmao