[Wikipedia-l] foundation of a German registered association

[Ivo Köthnig]

> But if Jimbo gots any response from a german lawyer then they can reveal
> the answers. I do not know what is the exact purpose of the foundation.
> Gathering money for wikimedia? Gathering for themselves operating mirrors?
> Or something else? I'm sure the german editors already know the answer to
> these question.... I hope. :)

Gathering money is the first step. Since we do not know exacly, how much money 
this will be, we can not exactly plan, what to do with this money. There are 
two ways of gathering the money:

1. Members have to pay for the membership (actually the plan ist 12-24 Euro 
per year)
2. (Try to) get (tax-free) donations.

Some money is needed for the organisation itself. For example each year we 
have to held a meeting, and every member has to be informed. We actually dont 
know if it is allowed to use e-mail for that (what we would prefer), but if 
not we have to use snail-mail, and for that reason we would need at least 1€ 
per member each year. 

As you see on that example, german laws are very complicated. It already took 
much time to find out what to do, just to found the "e.V." (and there are 
still some points which are not clear). As more as we plan for the future, 
the time needed to find out "how to do what" increases exponantially. Thus 
most people prefer to make one step after another, look what happens in 
detail and react in the best way.

For example, we do not know how many members the "e.V." will have. I think it 
will be at least 20, but it could be 100 or 1000. We do not know that. And 
there is now (easy) way to find out this exacly. But as you can imagine it is 
a difference if we get 240 € each year from 20 members or 12.000 € from 1000 
members. Furthermore we do not know how much we get by donations. The only 
way to find out is just founding the "e.V." and see what happens.

One idea is to use the money for prefinancing merchandising. I think that way 
we could offer t-shirts and such things much cheaper. Thus we could increase 
the income of the "e.V." and promote wikipedia/wikimedia much more.

Another ideas is to finance courses, meetings and so on, to teach 
editors/hackers.

Also sending money to the Wikimedia foundation is an option (but we do not 
know yet if this is allowed). But even if this is no option, there are other 
options to support the wikimedia foundation. May we could print t-shirts here 
and send 500 (?) pieces to the foundation which sales them in America?

But as you can imagine it makes no sence to think about all that in detail, 
since we do not know, if we collect enough money to finance that.

--Ivo Köthnig