Last weekend I joined parts of the FOSSGIS Community Meeting at Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany, focusing on topics related to organizing this year’s edition of the Open Transport Community Conference.

FOSSGIS Community Meeting

Group photo of (most of) the attendees of the FOSSGIS community meeting.

Twice a year FOSSGIS e.V. (the German local chapter of OpenStreetMap) hosts a multi-day meeting at Linuxhotel, for people to work on primarily non-technical topics, such as organizing conferences, presence at events, public communication and outreach, lobbying and political activities around FOSS/Open Data, finances and fundraising, and operations of the FOSSGIS e.V.

I had been at Linuxhotel for a KDE sprint before, but only after looking up the group photo from back then I realized that this was already 18 years ago…

Open Transport Community Conference

While the first edition of the Open Transport Community Conference last year was very successful and ran very smoothly overall, one important thing that had to change to make this long-term sustainable was moving this under the umbrella of some form of legal entity. We are looking at doubling the length, doubling the number of attendees and a 40x increase in budget this year, way beyond something you’d want to have individuals carry the legal and financial risks for.

I’m therefore very happy that with the FOSSGIS e.V. we have found a suitable organization for this. Besides the obvious overlap in domain and partially also in people, FOSSGIS e.V. has extensive experience in organizing conferences we can tap into, as well as infrastructure we can use.

This should allow us for example to handle sponsors this year, as well as offering (optional) paid tickets for people attending for their employers. And with that we could then (given enough income) provide some kind of travel support program for community attendees to soften the impact of the rather expensive location in Switzerland.

The weekend provided an opportunity to work out a number of legal, financial, organizational and operational implementation details for that. Some aspects have still to be resolved with the tax advisor though, given Switzerland isn’t in the EU, which should then unlock finally opening the registration for the conference.

Transitous

Transitous is in a somewhat similar situation, although with less time pressure for now. To improve long-term sustainability we’d also need a legal entity to hold assets (such as the domain), handle money and sign contracts.

We are extremely lucky so far that the “big” servers doing the heavy lifting are provided to us for free, including all hosting cost. While there’s no indication that might change anytime soon, we at least want to have options ready should this change, or in case we need additional capacity.

Our current yearly budget is around 60€, if we’d have to pay market prices for our entire infrastructure we’d need to increase that significantly, 50x before the global madness in recent months, more like 100x now. Obviously not something we can do overnight, so starting to explore and ramping up fundraising options sooner rather than later makes sense.

And that’s just the direct cost for server operations, it would also be great to be able to support community members with travel costs for example.

Just as with the conference, the plan is to attach Transitous to the FOSSGIS e.V.. FOSSGIS e.V. is “gemeinnützig” in Germany, which allows receiving tax-deductable donations, something we’d be unlikely to achieve with a separate organization on our own.

FOSS and Open Data

With my KDE hat on, there were also a number of other relevant and interesting topics:

  • Rules and criteria for “recommended service providers” lists by FOSS projects, and countering misuse (e.g. KDE e.V. Trusted IT Consulting Firms, FOSSGIS e.V. Dienstleisterliste, Transitous supplier list).
  • Participation and presence at the Digital Independence Day events.
  • Lobbying for recognizing FOSS/Open Data work as charitable (“gemeinnützig”) in Germany, to receive all the legal, tax and PR benefits associated with that, and without the current workarounds and uncertainties (see also the ongoing petition for that).
  • Lobbying for FOSS use in public administration, in particular in the context of the current interest in “digital sovereignty” there.

I think for all this we could benefit from building more bridges between the various communities and organizations affected by or interesting in those topics.

You can help!

It’s foundations like FOSSGIS e.V. or KDE e.V. that provide all the boring legal, financial and operational infrastructure for Free Software and Open Data communities and initiatives to do their work, and keep doing that independently. Your donations enable this.