2019 GENERAL ASSEMBLY MINUTES

Association PostgreSQL Europe
13 rue du Square Carpeaux
75018 PARIS

People attending the meeting

  • Adrien Nayrat (anayrat)
  • Andreas Karlsson (kandreas)
  • Andreas Kretschmer (akretschmer)
  • Andreas Scherbaum (ads)
  • Balázs Bárány (balazsb)
  • Christoph Moench-Tegeder (chrmoenchtegeder)
  • Dave Page (dpage)
  • Dragan Sahpaski (dragan.sahpaski)
  • Gasper (hruske)
  • Guillaume Lelarge (gleu)
  • Johannes Graën (gio)
  • Julien Rouhaud (rjuju)
  • Louis Brauer (louis77)
  • Lætitia Avrot (arkhena)
  • Magnus Hagander (mha)
  • Marcin Cieślak (saper)
  • Martijn Wallet (mwallet)
  • Patrik Hall (phall)
  • Pavlo Golub (pasha_golub)
  • Robert Gravsjö (roppert)
  • Robert Ivens (possible)
  • Stefan Fercot (stefan.fercot)
  • Stefan Kaltenbrunner (mastermind)
  • Stefanie Janine Stölting (stefanie)
  • Stéphane Schildknecht (sas22)
  • Tobias Bussmann (t.bussmann)
  • Vik Fearing (xocolatl)

The first GA, which happened on May, 27th, 2018, didn't meet the quorum. These minutes are for the second GA meeting. As such, no quorum is needed. Thus, the meeting is valid.

Magnus Hagander is the president and Guillaume Lelarge is the secretary of the GA meeting.

Meeting starts at 21:00 (2019-06-10), on the IRC network freenode.net, channel #pgeu-ga2019. Language is English, the report is available in English and French.

The agenda is:

  • activities report for 2018,
  • financial report for 2018,
  • 2019 activities (and some early in 2020).

Activities report

Magnus Hagander gave a brief summarization of the Activities report.

Several questions were asked:

  • Is Swiss PGDay independent from Postgresql Europe?
    • Yes. They have elected to do that without working with us for now. We of course communicate with them, but they have decided to run it under their own organisation.
  • What is the best way to propose one more pgeu event?
    • Contact pgeu-board@.
  • Are there any new cities/countries doing a pgday in 2019?
    • Currently not within the context of PGEU (there are some new ones around Europe, such as Belgium and Austria, but they have elected not to work directly with PGEU).

Votes for approval: 26 voted Yes out of 27 present in the channel. 1 didn't vote.

Thus, the activities report is approved.

Financial report

Guillaume Lelarge gave a brief summarization of the Financial report.

Several questions were asked:

  • Why is it "wanted" to have no sponsors for FOSDEM?
    • It would be possible to get sponsors for FOSDEM, but it would ask for more work from our small team and we don't want that work for such a small event.
  • The merchandise position, is it give-away stuff for events or for online sale?
    • Mostly booth sales. Online sale is so little we might as well kill it. The loss is basically stock and give-away.
  • 4K in banking cost and fees is a lot...no ?
    • It's all kind of payment processors, so bank, Paypal, Adyen, Trustly, etc.
  • So PG EU had 204,769.84 in the Bank at 31.12.2018 (if I'm reading correct) ? If so maybe we make some investment or donation?
    • On the 204k we had, we only have half of it because of the payments of the 2019 pgconf.eu venue. And we now have payments to do for the 2020 pgconf.eu venue.
  • Shouldn't pgday.paris result be considered negative?
    • Yes, that was a mistake on the report. This mistake and another one have been fixed.
  • Do we have numbers for income/expenses for 2019 events (like PGday 2019) that have been accrued in 2018?
    • We definitely do have the numbers. We generally don't summarize them until the event is completed.
  • Many questions from saper about the financial report and its lack of details
    • Send an example of what you would like as a detailed report, and we'll see if it's something we already have. We really can't share the raw data without doing "gdpr scrubbing" first, and that will be a lot of extra work.
  • Can you say more about tax issues?
    • It's quite hard to deal with foreign taxes. We pay French taxes, and we get back French VAT. That doesn't happen with foreign taxes, and that's our biggest issue. So we need to hire tax representatives in foreign countries or, much better, contract with a company that does have tax representatives. We are looking into multiple options. If somebody has a direct suggestion for someone to work with, please do send it to pgeu-board@ -- we'd definitely appreciate that input!

Votes for approval: 24 voted Yes out of 26 present in the channel. 1 voted No. 1 didn't vote.

Thus, the financial report is approved.

2019 activities, and the first 2020 activities

Magnus Hagander gave a brief summarization of next year's activities (see the Activities report).

Some questions were asked:

  • Any news on the special hotel rate? Any further details on the hotel situation in Milan?
    • We have a rate with the hotel in Milan, which we are currently holding back to primarily offer it to speakers. We want to make sure we don't sell out the entire rate before we approve any of our speakers. We are also working to see if we can get additional room blocks with nearby hotels to cover overflow.
  • What is the "other event" - exactly?
    • There is a big conference for hotel people, which means they snagged hotel rooms that were promised-but-not-contracted to other conferences (us). We are hoping that when those groups release some of their rooms, we get some more on our rate, but we don't know when that will happen.
  • We're willing to do pgday.ukraine, but want to know dates/month that suit the most to avoid parallelism in pgdays.
    • We really want to avoid conflicting events. please contact pgeu-board@ outside of the meeting, and we'll help you out with that one.
  • How much snail mail do we get?
    • Not much, but some of it is important (read: tax agency).
  • Were there any changes to the board of directors since the last GA?
    • Yes, Julien replaced Gulcin.
  • So we should vote that?
    • No, the voting already happened in February.
  • How are we funding local meetups, if we are? and if we're not, can we?
    • We are currently not really funding them. What we have done was set up a set of guidelines required for us to do so, so that we have a framework to work within. Those are at https://www.postgresql.eu/user_group_recognition/ (basically a version of the conference guidelines).
  • The statutes say "Board of Directors, composed of 5 members, elected by the General Assembly" - so elections online are another GA?
    • The statutes talk about General Assembly and General Assembly Meeting. That's kind of confusing and so should be fixed. We don't have a specific meeting for the vote, it only happens online.
  • Do the quorum rule apply or not for the vote? I don't really mind the current system, but that should be written down in the statutes...
    • It doesn't apply. The quorum is only for GA and EGA meetings.
  • Would the organizers of PGConf.EU consider giving some free tickets for PostgresWomen?
    • Some tickets will be provided to PostgresWomen. How many has not yet been decided.
  • I'd like to put a remark in the minutes about the clarification needed about the legal status of the election vis-a-vis current statutes.
    • It's a clear takeaway from this that we need to clarify the language. We just need to be careful with it with regard to the french translation etc, but clearly the current one is causing confusion.

No votes.

Meeting ends at 22:40.

  • Magnus Hagander, President
  • Guillaume Lelarge, Treasurer