Hello community,
I want to open a topic for discussion which is running around my head for quite some time now. All I am writing here is a collection of facts and thoughts I collected, if some information is wrong, feel free to correct me.

Some facts about the collective

Its about our french entity which holds our assets. Its called "The Funkwhale collective" and is an association following the french law.

Our assets include

money, eg donations
domain names
technical infrastructure

Additionally it builds a framework for our community to get organized, it provides statutes, a code of conduct and some institutions, namely the Steering Committee, the Moderation Committee and the Board.

Current problems

Currently we are facing some organizational and formal issues which we need to address.

We are committed to have a General Assembly in the third quarter, from July to September.
All positions need to be re-elected. Some people plan to step down, some are inactive, some need to be reelected since their 2-year-period ends.
Since its a association in France, we need enough french member to be elected into the board, but we are free to choose members for the Steering and Moderation Committees.

For me the situation seems to be a little bit problematic. If I'm not mistaken we need 8 people to be willing to take one of these jobs for two years. If you are willing to participate this way to Funkwhale, let me know! Lets get some overview here.

I am currently thinking a lot if this association is worth the effort. It introduces a huge amount of formalization, we need yearly elections and follow a fixed set of rules. We are in a phase of transition right now and we are having a hard time to follow all of them. On the other side these rules build up a basic structure to work in, forms the community and ensures some degree of democracy. I was not part of the community when the decision was made to found this association, so I cannot tell why this was done. But now the question is, if we want to keep it?

If we want to keep it, we should work on preparing the General Assembly, find people for all positions and maybe evaluate the statutes if they need some changes.
If we don't, we need some alternatives. We need a framework to ensure our values are preserved, we need some structure to manage our assets and we need to care for the transition itself. There are organizations like https://techcultivation.org and https://sfconservancy.org/ to help with that.

Thats my current state of mind for this topic. I would really appreciate your input and participation in this area! If you have some ideas or experiences, just let me know so we can discuss this 🙂