Association PostgreSQL Europe
13 rue du Square Carpeaux
75018 PARIS
People attending the meeting
- Alexander Kukushkin (cyberdem0n)
- Harald Armin Massa (ghum)
- Marcus Reuter (idrinkoban)
- Robert Ivens (possible)
- Stéphane Schildknecht (sas22)
- Thomas Spoelstra (thomas-optimadata)
- Tobias Bussmann (t.bussmann)
- Matthijs van der Vleuten (zr40)
- [Terra]Eric Veldhuyzen (ericv)
- Andreas Scherbaum (ads)
- Balázs Bárány (balazsb)
- Boriss Mejias (bmejias)
- Christian Freund (freund)
- Christoph Moench-Tegeder (chrmoenchtegeder)
- Guillaume Lelarge (gleu)
- Heikki Linnakangas (heikki)
- hjs-julian markwort (proxy for Hans-Jürgen Schönig) (postgresql_at)
- Ilya Kosmodemiansky (hydrobiont)
- Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker (ilmari)
- Julian Markwort (markwort)
- Jan Karremans (johnnyq72)
- Joost Wasser (joostw)
- Lætitia Avrot (arkhena)
- Magnus Hagander (mha)
- Martijn Wallet (mwallet)
- Stefan Kaltenbrunner (mastermind)
- mike-Michael Kefeder (kfed)
- Gunnar “Nick” Bluth (bluthg)
- Pavlo Golub (pasha_golub)
- Peter Eckel (peckel)
- Dave Page (dpage)
- Stefan Fercot (stefan.fercot)
- Stefanie Janine Stölting (stefanie)
- Federico Campoli (rotellaro)
- Bruno Friedmann (brunofr)
The first EGA which happened on June, 7th, 2021 didn’t meet the quorum. These minutes are for the second EGA meeting. As such, no quorum is needed. Thus, the meeting is valid.
Magnus Hagander is the president and Lætitia Avrot is the secretary of the GA meeting.
Meeting starts at at 19:02 (Paris time), the 2021-06-14, on the IRC network freenode.net, channel #pgeu-ega2021. Language is English, the report is available in English and French.
The agenda is:
- Vote for statutes changes
- Brief financial update for 2020
Statutes changes
Lætitia Avrot gave a brief summarization of the statutes changes. The changes are available here.
There are several changes:
- Clarification about resignation
- Lowering down the quorum to 15% instead of 30%
- Adding 3 optional positions to the board
- Giving more power to the treasurer to represent the association with the French administration
- Removing technology list from the statutes so remote meeting don’]t have to be on IRC.
Several questions and comments were given:
- the removal of the list of valid remote meeting technologies appears to only be in the english version
- We will fix the French version accordingly. Thanks for spotting that.
- Lowering the quorum seems to be because of low attendance. Is it the case?
- We’ve never managed to reach quorum, and our members have repeatedly asked us to lower or remove the quorum so they only need one GA meeting each time.
- Instead of lowering % we could try to get higher attendance?
- We did try but it never worked.
- Switching meeting platforms might make it easier?
- It’s certainly a hope that it will help
- 15% is a low number, this makes it possible that a small group can change the whole project severely. It is annoying that there have to be second GAs everytime, but maybe there should be a limit of 20% and it should never go below that for a first shot GA.
- we got quite a few requests from members to lower the barrier to a point where it is at least possible to reach a quorum in the first meeting. We have quite a number of “silent” members who never show up to any meeting, but which makes it hard to reach a quorum.
- is today and last week more than 15%?
- Do you intend to have a french treasurer, always ?
- this is not a requirement, but for practical reasons we hope to have either a president or a treasurer who’s French
- The text is very gender specific…it’s all He and Him.
- French version is very gender specific and the French verison is the one legally valable. Adding not gender specific in french will take the text no so easy to read (in particular for blind people), so we decided to go without it.
- since it’s so specific does this mean no women can be president or treasurer ?
- no, in France, gender specific does not mean that legally women are excluded
- How many members usually attend a pgconf.eu conference event?
- we’ve been a bit over 500 recently (pre-pandemic, of course). Most of those are not members, of course.
First vote with the question ‘If/when we change the statutes, would you prefer a 15% or a 20% quorum requirement’: 19 voted 15%, 12 voted 20%. 4 didn’t vote.
Thus, the quorum at 15% is the option to go with.
Second vote with the question ‘Approve the suggested statutes, with the change in the French statutes (removing the list of technologies), and the change to not be gender specific in the English version?’: 35 voted ‘yes’ out of 35 present in the channel.
Brief finantial update for 2020
Lætitia Avrot gave a brief finantial update:
In 2020, PgDay Paris, Nordic PgDay, PGConf.DE, and PGConf.EU had to be canceled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The hosting venues were agreeable to either canceling our reservation for free (because local laws did not allow larger events at this time), or to postpone events to a later date. For PGConf.EU the postponement came at a cost of 100.000€ (negotiated down from the contractual 200.000€), of which 50.000€ is held as a prepayment against the next conference.
As we had already paid the reservation fees for PgDay Paris, Nordic PgDay, and PGConf.DE 2020, at first glance it looks like we lost around 100.000€ in 2020. That however is not true. Some of this money is an investment for the events that will be held at a later date. Only in the case that we cannot hold events in 2022 might some of this money be lost.
The Association has enough money in the bank account such that even the 50.000€ advance payment is not a cause for concern over cash flow. We have had no need to utilise any money in our two saving accounts so far, however we might need to use some of it for the next PGConf.EU.
In 2020, we also incurred legal costs that we have not had in the past. We spent 10.000€ on legal counsel for ongoing issues.
Several questions were asked:
- Issues of what nature?
- We have an ongoing legal conflict with an organization which tries to reserve PostgreSQL trademarks in multiple jurisdictions, where either we as PGEU or PGCAC holds rights. In order to protect the trademarks we need to make sure that everyone follows the rules we established how these rights can be used. The organization is in violation of these rules. We have worked together with PGCAC on this, where PGEU has worked on the European angle and PGCAC have worked on the worldwide one. The cost of the actions in Europe have been jointly covered by PGEU and PGCAC. (PGCAC == PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada, which holds domain names and trademarks for the PostgreSQL Global Development Group)
- Is there more info about the organization causing the issue?
- We know the people behind that entity, but at this point we do not believe it’s appropriate to name individuals.
- Is there any chance to even get rid of those 50k€?
- we already tried, we’ll keep trying.
- How many paying members are there?
- Are all of these prepayments that are taken hostage void if no conferences can be held in 2022?
- we’ll try to negociate in that case (and we can always negociate with a venue because they expect more money for next years)
- Will there be any event in 2021 ?
- PGEU does not currently have an event booked for this year. But it is not too late to do something towards the end of the year, as long as it’s something small. We will simply wait and see how things turn out.
- will we have to expend 10K each year on legal advices?
- The expense is a very small amount of the funds we have at the moment, so we’re not currently reserving anything specifically for this. We continue to review the situation though: cost is largely dependent on whether or not the other organisation defends or abandons their marks and registration applications, and when. We (along with PGCAC) are carefully assessing the cost at every stage of the process and making decisions on whether or not to continue with the action based on the cost vs. the detriment caused should we lose control of our trademarks.
Meeting ends at 22:07, Paris time.
- Magnus Hagander, President
- Lætitia Avrot, Treasurer