On 08.01.19 09:30, James Gannon wrote:
> This is a lot more complicated a topic than I think people are giving
> credit to.
> No-one has yet spoken about legal liabilities that come from
> establishing a legal entity, and I also don’t believe that anyone has
> spoken to ICANN legal yet (Currently we only exist as an entity within
> the ICANN bylaws, also there are interactions with the Empowered
> Community responsibilities that would need to be incorporated into the
> establishment of any entity).
> 
> Please don’t take this as a negative thing, but I think people are
> underestimating the work and complexity involved here.

This. A hundred times this.

What is being discussed here is _not_ merely "opening a bank account".
What you are discussing is to set up organizations.

At our foundation, a lot of what we do is help grassroots/early stage
projects bootstrap, to help them set up their own non-profits (and
sometimes for-profits), and to deal with the complexities arising from it.

My usual recommendation is to think hard about it, and to better partner
with an existing organization that has good procedures to cover your own
governance model. This is called "fiscal sponsorship", a concept well
established in the US (with a lot of providers) but not so much in
Europe. We also started our own fiscal sponsor for free software
projects in 2016, now handling 15+ projects with distributed teams and
loose membership, with an annual budget of more than 500k.

We have investigated "the Estonian model". Don't be fooled by the ease
of setting up: You also need to maintain it. There is little information
available about Estonians non-profit tax regime and laws regarding
international activities. I know from our own work that in many European
countries, acting internationally is _not_ straightforward, and you
cannot simply pay whatever invoices and travel without carefully
crafting bylaws, defining governance structures, and having a story
around every singe receipt. Someone needs to make sure this information
is there. It is NOT simply a meeting every once in a while, it requires
constant caretaking or it will cause a lot of headaches for the poor
soul that needs to clean up.

Fiscal sponsors have established processes, support somewhat
fuzzy/in-process governance models, and of course don't require a change
of legal bank account owner.

If you run an account under your name, or a shared account with someone
else, you have the full legal responsibility. But, maybe more
importantly, what you receive to this account is (shared) income. If you
don't declare it with your taxes, you are committing tax fraud. If you
buy services, you buy them for you, and they become your legal
responsibility. You can do so as a group, no problem, but you are not
magically "not a legal entity".

You will not be able to create "an international organization". An
organization always needs a location and thus a tax regime it will
operate under. There are some "modern forms" like the European SE, but
they are mostly European in name/appearance and not by jurisdiction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_Europaea

-- 
Moritz Bartl, Germany

Renewable Freedom Foundation
https://www.renewablefreedom.org/
Center for the Cultivation of Technology
https://www.techcultivation.org/