Move Devstaff meetups to "Software Makers" non-profit organization

[gsaslis]

Ever since we founded Devstaff in July 2015, the meetups and all activities of this community have been - as far as I know - "not for profit" activities. Yet, we never took the step to create an actual non-profit entity ourselves to run the meetups and related activities - neither when I was an active member of the org team until late 2019, nor after. After leaving the Org Team, I was delighted to see Devstaff moving to Open Collective! As not-for-profit events, I do think Devstaff belongs to a non-profit organization.

A couple of months ago, with the active involvement of several current org-team members, we finally started setting up a new non-profit organization, called: "Software Makers". 🆕

I announced this, back then, on the Devstaff slack, and I will copy-paste some of the text from that announcement as the message will soon be lost due to Slack's message retention policy, to help further explain the reasoning behind creating that entity:

On the other hand, for some of the other events I am involved with, here on Crete, there is more of a need for a formal entity to exist. While we are running those events as not-for-profit activities, we do have to pay for accommodation, conference rooms, catering, some freebies, etc. etc. In a nutshell, a meetup has fewer expenses - a multi-day unconference has many more. And with more money going around, we want to be absolutely clear about how that money is handled. We also examined opencollective and its fiscal hosts (that Devstaff is using) but they are not a good match when event tickets need to be sold.
As such, we will be moving forward to create a new legal entity (Σύλλογος) that can take on the running of our non-profit events. Beyond that, it may also be used for other things (hold intellectual property, participate in legal cases on behalf of its members, run other events, represent its members in the media, etc. etc. )
I am reaching out to you all to see if:
as community members you want to also join this new club (Σύλλογος) and become part of a more “formal” community,
as devstaff org team members you would like to use this new club as a fiscal host (or similar).

With that context in mind, and now that the new organization has been created, I am submitting this proposal to move Devstaff to the newly-created "Software Makers" organization, essentially replacing its current Fiscal Host 1 (Open Collective Europe), with a fiscal host that is both controlled by many of the same people that are currently on the Devstaff Org Team and is also of the same locality.

Nothing else needs to change with regards to how meetups are currently run. The "Software Makers" founding document 2 allows having separate "Org Teams" within its ranks - each involved with running the corresponding meetups / events / (un)conferences. The Devstaff Org team could stay the same and Devstaff could continue operating the way it runs today.

The Devstaff Org Team could even keep using Open Collective as its finance/donations/expenses management platform - Open Collective offers it free of charge when the fiscal host doesn't charge a hosting fee. 3

Additional Benefits

1. Reduced fees: Currently, all donations that Devstaff receives are subject to a 8-10% hosting fee by its Fiscal Host. "Software Makers" doesn't have such "hosting fees".
2. Control of the fiscal host: As already mentioned above, any Devstaff Org Team member (or Devstaff member, in general) that wishes to, can participate in the upcoming elections of the Software Makers executive committee that we are planning to host some time in the next week or two. This way, the Devstaff community could have an active say in how its fiscal host is run. (And, yes, this is also an invitation to join "Software Makers" as a member and participate in the upcoming elections and helping us shape how these communities are governed! Start by joining our discord server! ;) )
3. Intellectual Property: I don't think it is very clear today who owns certain pieces of intellectual property - the devstaff domain name, the meetup page, the slack group, etc. etc. If so desired, the people owning these today could transfer ownership to the non-profit organization in the future. The "Software Makers" has a clear governance structure that explains how access to this intellectual property could be decided upon, whereas this is currently a little unclear.
4. Access to Non-profit SaaS offerings: with a real, accessible, non-profit organization behind it, Devstaff could have access to some special offerings for non-profits that Software-as-a-Service companies are known to provide.

Looking forward to your thoughts and feedback! It would be great to at least hear some early thoughts ahead of our upcoming elections! I expect that having Devstaff meetups as part of the Software Makers activities would involve significant overhead for the Software Makers executive committee, so it would be good if the people running for these positions know about this additional overhead, ahead of time! They are volunteers, like you. ;) ;)

Thanks in advance and happy to also chat about this further in a Devstaff Org Team meetup! ;)