Some of the board members cannot attend this General Assembly, like Borja for example. And Oir is the second one. Borja cannot attend because he didn't get free from his new employer, so he took on a new job.

Oir unfortunately broke his leg on the very first day in the morning, just before we opened everything. So he worked really really hard on the conference and didn't really get to enjoy it, so it's a bit sad. And so he's, I think he's still in hospital, right?

Oh yeah, is this being live streamed? Yeah, that's very good. So, hi Oir! Right! Right. Well, first of all a big welcome to all the new EPS members. We just had this very very short board meeting where we voted in another six new EPS members, so we now have 172 members.

Of course we always like to get new members and people can just sign up on the website and then every now and then the board then meets and votes in the new members.

The general assembly for the EPS is very formal because the agenda for the general assembly is basically baked right into the bylaws, so we have to follow it. The first thing that we need to do is we need to select a chairman of the meeting, secretary, two checkers of the minutes,

and then the first thing that we need to do is a motion to establish the timeliness of the call to the meeting. The bylaws state that we have to call for the meeting at least 14 days before the meeting and the last things that can go on the agenda have to be announced to the members at least five days before the meeting.

So, let's start with the first one, meeting chairman, who wants to run the, for example, the voting process, moderate, Alex maybe?

Yeah, okay, you do it. Then we need a secretary, so basically the person taking the minutes. You're taking the minutes? Okay. Then we need two checkers of the minutes. We're going to check the minutes right after the meeting, so it's not something that takes long. Okay, Vicky and one more.

And Robin, perfect. So we have two checkers. I think we need to write these down, right? You have to manage the voting.

Yeah, raise hands, you can't, and then you need to write that down. No, no, Stefan is taking the notes, so you want to be a checker, so we still need a secretary.

So can we have someone who's good at writing English and can do the minutes? Yeah, write down, take notes, what the actions you are taking. I need to write, yeah, there you go.

Thank you, Floris. Yeah, it's better to come down here, probably. You need to manage the voting.

The agenda is more or less a given, so there's nothing much to do there, and it's all listed on these slides. So the first thing that you have to note is when we started the meeting, so that is 1440.

So we started 1440, chair of the meeting is Alex.

Then we have one checker is Raul, and the other one is Stefan. I think Vicky also wanted to check, right? So we have three checkers. Okay, so the first... Sorry?

Vicky, Vicky. So now it's your job, we need a motion for establishing the timeliness of the call of the meeting. Yes, in favor, abstain, and who's against?

I can, let me just open the, let me open the calls.

This here.

So we wrote a blog post for the invite. This is the invite, and it was sent on two weeks ago. There you go. It was sent on, what's that, July 6th? Yes.

And then the last things that were put on the agenda, that was an email from Kirsten. She wrote that email on Saturday, so it's five days before the meeting, so we can take those into account as well.

Yeah, we'll be reading the email later. Right, yeah, we're going to show the email. So now we need to vote on this. Alex.

Everyone.

So first part is done. Then we have the annual report by the board. I'm going to do this part, and then I'm going to pass on to Fabio.

So these are the EuroPython 2015 results. This data is from March 2016. So the total revenue of the conference was about 530,000 euros. We made a profit of 92,777 euros and 60 cents.

And the EPS share for this, because the EPS gets 50%, we always share with the onsite organization. We get 46,388.80 euros. And of that share, we have already received 1,000 euros to a PayPal account.

We're going to go into that issue later on. It's not really an issue. It's not that the AC Pi SS doesn't want to pay us. The issue is that we don't have access to our own bank account. So it doesn't really make sense sending money there, because we can't get it out again.

So compared to Europies in 2014, that's an order of magnitude higher, which is quite amazing. And for this year, the expectation is that we're probably going to be in at least that five-digit range again.

Yes, that's a good question. It's also a question that we've asked ourselves. I'm happy with the numbers, because I know that we have made the European Economic Organization.

I just want to add on this. On the board members, we have discussed a lot of times,

the EuroPython society not being only EuroPython conference driven, so supporting local... You're taking away all the thunder. Well, to improve things in general. Right, so the only thing I want to add here is that in Sweden, as far as Jacob told us a couple of years ago,

you have to watch out once you reach a bank account balance of about 100,000 euros. I'm not sure whether that number is correct, whether this... It's an approximate number. So if at any one point you have more than that amount in the bank, then you need to do extra stuff and you need to be careful.

We're not at that level yet, so we don't have to really worry right now. We may have to worry maybe next year, but we're going to have some other things that we want to tell you to maybe resolve this.

So if you were not here at the previous talk, we already gave the timeline of the conference, so I'm just going to go through this very quickly. So we had the election of the new board in July last year. In November we launched the new, the previous site, and then in January we started work on this year's conference.

And then we went through all the phases of that, like launch a website, launch a ticket sales, call for proposals, then talk voting. The financial aid program we had again, which was generously sponsored by the PSF in most parts,

so we added some money as well of course, but most of it actually came from the PSF. And I also still have to do a blog post about that. Daria wrote a nice summary and I still have to turn that into a blog post. So I'm probably going to do that tomorrow. Then we had a second CFP, which was new this year.

We wanted to, because the first CFP is about, when was it, like five months before the conference? More or less. Less. Originally we wanted to do that, everything a little earlier, but it turned out to be a bit later. We wanted to have the possibility to react to new hard things that happened just before the conference.

Because if there's a long delay between the conference and the CFP, then basically you lose on some of the new developments. Like for example a new PEP was released or accepted and you want someone to do a talk about that. Of course you cannot know six months or five months before the conference, so we have the second phase to address that.

And that was new, that was a new idea of the program workgroup. Then we had a new conference app this year. We switched from Guidebook away to Attendify and Attendify has so far been really good. We really like it and we're probably going to stay with it.

And then of course we had the conference and general assembly today. This is a chart showing the ticket sales. You can see in the background, you can see this yellowish brownish curve. That's 2015 and the purple one is 2016. So it looks more or less the same, we started a bit earlier.

And down there the smaller ones are the social event tickets. So this is a snapshot of July 14th, that's when I updated these slides. In the end the curve looked, well it basically looked like the 2015 one, so there wasn't much change there.

And this doesn't count the tickets bought on desk? Right, the on desk tickets are not included in this. Sorry?

I think today is the 21st. Oh yeah, right. Maybe just for the protocol it might be a problem.

There you go. Better? Right. So in the end we sold about 1100 tickets plus some onsite. I don't have the exact numbers for that. So what's new in 2016? Well the major new development was adding the Telegram groups to help work in those work groups.

That was a really good thing to do. It's also much more fun doing it that way. Then we invited more volunteers and we also rearranged the work group memberships, moved

all the inactive ones to the inactive members and then voted in a few, or the board voted in a few new voting members for those work groups to make it not look like the work groups are huge and have lots of members. Because if we put on the website, if we then have the long list of members in each work group,

people that want to volunteer for working in those work groups usually tend to think, well they already have enough people so we're not going to sign up. And that's an issue. And so we're trying to address that by doing this every now and then. And then we had to fix a few website issues, like for example the auto-assignment of tickets, we didn't have that last year,

we added that this year so that tickets automatically get assigned to the person buying the ticket. Yes, so some work to do, so some bugs to fix.

Right. And again we had a bit of an issue with the number of really active people. So it turned out that even though we do have quite a few members in those working groups, only a few of those members are really doing a lot of work. And we're trying to fix this.

As you can see, most of the board members, or actually all the board members were really active. And then we had these three people down here. I think they deserve a hand.

So just to name them is Alexander Handorf, he is working for the program group, he's sitting down here, he's shy. But he has to sign up anyway later on because he's running for board. Then we have Christiane Barra, who's also running for board, he's sitting here, down here in the green one. And we have Ricardo Savio, Alex's second incarnation, where is he?

There you are. Yeah, that's Ricardo. And he also helped a lot. So thank you very much to you guys. It doesn't mean that we didn't have other volunteers, it just means really a huge amount of work.

And they did a lot of work, much more than everyone, all the other volunteers. So, summary for 2016, working with the ACPIS, the local organization worked really, really well again. We had open discussions and everything was done in consensus, and this is what we like to see going forward as well.

And so that's why we did this call for interest now, to get to know people better. As in previous years we had a contract with the local organizer. We had one for 2015, we're going to just use the same one for 2016 because everything worked out well, there are no reasons to change it.

We're just going to change the dates. I think it's time for you to take over, right? As we mentioned before, we had quite a few continued improvements to the website.

The auto-assignment of tickets was a big deal, but also the IDE, also to help with the registration desk. We made a lot of new tools, internal tools of the website to help with the administration and managing the accounts.

And also the integration with the conference hub. We had three repos that we merged into one, which is far easier to maintain. We are running now on the EPS server using Docker containers, as far as I know that's working well.

Otherwise we'll know this on the website. So the future call for papers for Python, those will basically focus on the on-site team and all the other working groups will remain active.

We'll try to make it much easier to apply while we're working on it. And basically trim out all the extra things that are not really related to venue and catering and local support and all the small details.

Those can be continued to be carried on by the working groups. Basically we want all these things to make things easier for the local group.

At the same time it's really important that they work inside the work groups as well and integrate well with the current ecosystem that we're building.

The ETS or the on-site team will enter the contracts with the venue, catering and other stuff. It's likely that it's easier for local teams to have contracts with venues. In some countries if there are foreign companies they require a higher deposits or stuff like this and it may impact on budgets and money.

This year we are doing this new approach to call for proposal. We are running two phases, mostly because to make things easier we will have a not really formal proposal that we call for interest.

Basically a group shows up with enough clear ideas and a plan that is not just on the clouds but some real group that is there that has venue options.

We put better details in the call itself and then we follow up with the call for papers. For the future it's probably going to happen before. This year we were quite full with everything.

So far we had two interests but one was basically communicated that they would not go ahead. We have the Python Italia group which is proposing for Milan or surrounding areas and the pack in the UK is not going to go ahead.

Regarding domains, we tried hard to get back the European.org without success for now.

I'm not sure we can do much more but let's see. We tried all kinds of things. We can try this ICANN process to try to get it back but in the end ICANN changed the process recently. It will probably require a lawyer for this because the person owning it does not react to anything in Germany.

I think it's close to you. Maybe we should just go there and knock on his door. But it's not high priority because we're using the .emu domain for everything now and the .org domain redirects to the EU one.

So that still works but emails for example they bounce.

I know that there was this process in previous years but I recently looked on the ICANN website and couldn't find that process anymore. So they seem to have changed something. They would like to say that the lawyer is not needed but at the end of the day it's needed if the other partner employs the lawyer.

In theory it's not required. So regarding trademarks and logos, the marketing and design work group hired a designer to update the logo.

That process went through the ECPISS basically similar way like last year. Nice outcome as well.

So we still have quite a few issues especially regarding being a non-profit in Sweden. Especially because we don't have board members in Sweden as well. We need to address the docs reporting. Nothing has been really done in that matter.

The accounting, we have been trying for a year to find an accountant with a lot of frustrations and time wasted. Not a good experience. We didn't manage to contact and deal with local authorities.

Also we didn't have much luck with emails and phone calls and all this kind of stuff. Being in Sweden has been a really hard problem for now.

Actually it seems we do have a solution for this now. I met Anders at the conference. Anders is from OpenEnd as well, which is convenient because the Swedish registered address is at OpenEnd. And he offered to help us with this. So maybe you can say a few words.

I read about these problems you're having with the societies. I decided that I should step up and offer my help. We haven't actually discussed how I will help yet. We're going to do that afterwards.

I'll do my best to help get this sorted. Thank you. Well, part of the things that we need is finding a solution for V18 invoices.

So far what we've had until today is collecting information and discussing things. It's very likely that it will require moving the EPS because we really need

to enter either contracts with venues or invoice sponsors and be able to receive money. All these problems are very real. And to grow the EPS it would be better also to provide a backup. All those things are needed to backup future conferences.

That's a good point. Yes, correct.

So yes, the idea is that we want to build up a bit of a budget reserve that we can then use to do…

Can I have a few questions about this moving? Does this European foundation exist already or do you want to move to one single country in the EU?

Apparently there is this movement to create something like a European association. It's been there for five years at least. I can answer that. Okay, go ahead.

Exactly. Also the European guideline on the formation of European companies specifically and expressly excludes non-profits. I've been looking at this every now and then again to see whether there is some kind of update but there wasn't any.

So we basically just looked at various different countries where you can incorporate. But we are going to get to that afterwards. I just want to continue here now because that's one of the things that we want to discuss. We are still in this reporting phase.

In the end the long term goal that we want to achieve is we want to turn the EPS into something like a European software foundation. So we want to have a regional kind of PSF so to say. So we want to be able to issue grants for example to Python projects in Europe or to user groups or to help smaller conferences with grants.

And we want to build closer ties both to the PSF and also to the community in Europe itself. Because we have a lot of members in the EPS that have very close ties to their local groups. So in the end the wish is that we have to build something like a tree.

A tree is just upside down. So you have lots and lots of leaves that are centered locally and then it all goes up to the PSF eventually. So that's sort of like the long term goal of where this could go.

Okay, treasury report. This is actually something that Anton and Borja should do. Borja is not here. Anton, do you want to say something? Given the context that we discussed before, as a treasurer I've primarily been

trying to get access to the Swedish bank accounts and the Swedish bank manager. That has been partly not successful because I haven't been insistent for long enough. And the other part is what didn't help is that a previous treasurer has been ill and not been able to respond within weeks time.

And opportunities of me going to go to work once to get the signatures and all that things being arranged. I have been in contacts with one person who could do the accounting for maybe this first year.

Maybe not, maybe. They could do it for the first year. But since we want to extend the activities of the EPS to do more of the contracting and setting up things like the collection of the money with Visa cards and other credit cards.

So that doesn't have to be done with each change of venue and learned by the local organization. There will be more accounting work and for that we haven't found anybody yet, although we've tried a few accounts. What really didn't help is my lack of Swedish and not willing to go there

just to try and stand on the street corners like who wants to be our accountant. We'll go there once I know that we can get everything signed that is signable because it's not just trivial to be there and then it costs money.

So there's no, at this point, no overview of the exact state of the bank accounts. Jacob has been willing to transfer money whenever necessary from the bank account to our PayPal account and from that we do the monthly payments that we have for our server.

About 100 euros a month and then smaller amounts for the DNS domain registration and that's about it. Most of the costs for running the conference were basically put into the conference budget itself so they were paid by the AC Pi SS, not the EPS.

So we did not have much of an issue except that at one point this year, for example, the PayPal account went down to more or less zero. So we had to ask the AC Pi SS to send us some money from the profit from last year into the PayPal account so that we could pay the server again.

So what we do now is we have two accounts at the bank. One is in SEK, Swedish Corner, and the other is Euro. The current assets are probably going to be around 10,000 euros, slightly more than that, but

this is just an estimate based on the figure that we got for the last General Assembly. And the PayPal account is currently, I would have to look that up, I don't really know, it's below 1,000 euros in any case.

Right, so next is the auditor report. That would be Alexander Handoff. I did the auditing. Obviously I couldn't check on the bank accounts in Sweden, as Anton explained.

I did check, I had a transaction list from the PayPal account, got all the corresponding invoices for servers and stuff. I was able to review the loss and profits of 2005, compare that to the transactions, invoices, and I

was getting all the access, basically all the bookkeeping, everything was on file, and I can say everything looks fine. So I would, from knowing, next to our, suggest to what's exempt the board, is the right one?

Yeah, this one is the... Okay, yeah, both to discharge, yeah, but, well, you know, with a Swedish bank account, but I... Yeah, if not, and if not, Jacob has run with the money, I mean, it should be there. We reused it last year, so...

You have 12 minutes left, now we're gonna run over.

So, right, we're gonna speed up now. So what we want to do before voting for the board is we would like to increase the number of board members that we can have in the EPS as maximum. Right now, the bylaws say that we can have two to six directors plus one chair, so you get nine, or you get, currently you

get seven directors in total, and we would like to increase that to two to eight directors plus one chair, giving us nine directors in total. And the reason why we want to do this is because the EPS board members are the most

active ones doing the, running the EuroPython conference, and we simply need more people helping us with this. And so we'd like to extend the number of directors that we have in the EPS to a total of nine.

Any comments on this? Suggestions? Extras? We don't have that in the bylaws, no. No, we don't.

What we're doing is, and we're gonna do this again this year, we have created something which is not really in the bylaws.

It's basically the, we have board members from previous boards that stay on the board mailing list, and then they can help us because they have institutional knowledge, right, and we can ask them for comments. Basically they are non-voting of course, but they still can see what the actions of the board, and this has worked out well in the past and we'd like to keep it that way.

It's not really enshrined in the bylaws, so, and yeah, so, and those people usually don't have enough time to actually help actively in the organization. No, no. Everyone is very much active and willing to help, unless of course they have other issues why they cannot attend.

Apart from that we've never had an issue for example with getting a quorum to actually do voting in the board meetings.

So that's not been an issue. I know that increasing the number even more, so for example to 11, that can create problems because I've been on the PSF board for quite a while We have 11 directors on the PSF board, and getting a quorum was very often,

at least recently, until we changed the model that we can also have proxy votes. It was difficult. I think now we can confirm that. Would it be a good idea to have always an uneven number of directors?

Some foundations have an uneven number. They require either 3, 5, 7 or 9 or something like this. They don't have even numbers, so you would always have a decision. There cannot be a tie. We have an, it's uneven as well, I mean it's 9 directors. One director is called chair. The chair doesn't have any special meaning. Yeah, but it's a maximum number, 9. Yes. So it can be either 7 or 9, but not 8, that's what I mean. Because even

there can be 4 and 4 against, you might have a problem, you cannot reach a decision. I don't know if this is a problem.

Okay, you need 50% or how much you need to make it have a quorum. So you need 5, if it's 9 you need 5 people. Just from experience, maybe a comment on this. So far we've mostly done all the resolutions on the board unanimously.

There were maybe sometimes abstentions because people were in conflict of interests, but apart from that we never had the case where we could not reach a decision.

Also I share the idea, not to block by having even numbers, but it would also mean that if we for example have 8 candidates for the board, we would have to cut down to 7.

But if we have somebody saying hey I'm really happy to join the board to do a lot of work, we really depend on it. My quick thought on this is I would rather prefer to have an extra two hands helping during the year than having a potential problem.

Communication has been really really good so far with all the members. So it hasn't posed a problem in the past, I don't think it's going to pose a problem in the future.

So who's in favor of the proposition? Who's against? No, sir. Absent? Okay, full vote in favor.

Thank you. So the next part is candidates for the board for the next term, 2016-2017. So these are the candidates that we have. We sent around a blog post describing every single one.

Should we perhaps ask everyone to maybe come up on the stage and do a sentence or two, or should we go directly to a vote? We have time issues.

We can still vote on everyone. Actually I would rather not do this, because we had this last year and it didn't work out. I don't want discussions again, so let's just vote on every single one. We tried to do that as well last year. It didn't work.

I wish. Okay, we can of course have everyone stand up here and say a few words if you like that. What's the general kind of feeling?

That's a good idea. That's a very good idea, yes. But before we do this, we have one extra agenda item, which is we have to decide now.

The bylaws state now with this change that we just voted on, it states that we have one chair plus two to eight board members. And we now have to decide how many board members we want to have for the next period. We're going to get to this particular point later on, because there's a members motion suggesting to remove this part and always use the maximum number.

But we have to vote on this now, because the bylaws currently look like this. We recommend leaving the board size set to the maximum, so having nine board members in total, eight directors and a chair.

So you have to call for a vote now. Who's in favor? Against? Absent? Okay, full vote. Great. And now we can actually vote on the board members.

And I'd suggest that Borja stand up. Borja is not here. He did a really good job. He was excellent in negotiations with the venue and the caterer. He deserves a good hand for getting us the food. Well, not better food, but let's say different food.

Different food. Different food this year. I think a lot of people appreciated that. So votes for Borja in favor? Against? Absent? Okay, full vote in favor.

Next one is Christian. So my name is Christian. I'm a member of the organizer for the first edition of EuroPython Bilbao. And yes, I plan to submit the next proposal for the next conference in one hour, I think.

In favor? Against? Absent? Okay, full vote in favor.

Ojir, let me open the chat. Just a second. Because he seems to be online. Ojir? Yes, okay, so let's move on to...

Sorry? No, no. Oh, you can't read it. Just a second.

Votes in favor? Against? Absent? Okay, full vote.

My name is Daria. I was here last year. I was the organizer in the organizing team last year and I'm here for this conference and maybe for the next, I hope so.

So in favor of Daria? Thank you, Mr. Samiou.

Yes, I'm Alexander. I joined last year organizing the first Bilbao conference and I've been on the program work group and helping with all the stuff.

I need to say something, right?

So yeah, I'm Mark Lemberg. I've been working with the new EPS structure for quite a while now. I really love the work. It's a lot of work and I love to continue working on it and moving the EPS forward

and like what we already mentioned, moving it more into the Python community and basing it more in the Python community to make the whole thing a bit more than just a conference organization. And that would be my goal. In favor? Against? Absent? Okay, thank you.

Full vote in favor? On the further notes, from Holland. I've been a board member for three years now together with Mark Andre. Apart from my attempts in getting the treasury in hand, I'm on the code of conduct committee

and I'm the one pushing your video to archive.org and YouTube after the show. And I fold your t-shirt.

Against? Okay, full vote in favor. Now, my turn. Well, I'm a co-founder of the ACPSS, the local team that has been organizing your Python in Bilbao. I have been EPS board member this year. I'm running again for candidate.

I mostly have been in contact with the sponsors, working together with Alex, the other Alex of our program. In favor? Against? Absent? Okay, thank you. Full vote in favor.

So then we have a non-voting Amaryssius. We didn't vote for Oyer. Do you want me to speak for him?

Okay, so he helped with the web work group. He was an EPS board member this year. He's running again. He worked with the web. He's also a co-founder of the ACPSS. He's actually the president. He has been doing the refunds. What else? Communications.

We have ten minutes left for the rest of the year. In favor? Against? Absent? Okay, thank you. Full vote in favor. He's running again. Sorry?

He's not running for board now. I don't think we need to vote for the non-voting Amaryssius because the Bylaws simply don't state anything about them. But we want to have Vicky. Vicky, by the way, is back there. She wasn't there last year.

She was a board member in 2012, 2013. No, we don't have to vote for them.

And Fabio as well. Fabio stepped down. He was the chair of the EPS in the last year. So give him a hand. Do not talk for a while. Maybe at the closing I will just say thank you.

It has been a pleasure to work with everyone and stepping back just to give more space to more active people for family issues. So that's that.

Cool. What's wrong with this one? So next is election of a chair of the board because Fabio stepped down. I decided to throw in my hat.

So basically I already said everything that I wanted to say about the EPS and how to move forward. I've been involved in this particular conference edition quite a bit and I would like to do the same for next year.

And if you want me, you can have me. Vote in favor. Against? Absent? Ok, thank you for voting. Thank you very much for your trust.

Right, so now we need an auditor again and one replacement. So basically the auditor was Alex Henderth. Alex Henderth. See, it's fun using Telegram. He was auditor last year.

There are no special requirements for auditors so if Alex wants to do it again, for example, then he could. Looking at you. No? Ok. So we need someone else to do it. Basically what you get to do is you get to see all the bank accounts. Or not.

You get all the paperwork that we can provide you to do a proper job at auditing the stuff that's available. Stefan? Ok. And we need one replacement in case Stefan is not available.

It's very unlikely. You can? Raul? Ok, Raul just back up for Stefan. Stefan? Ah, we need to vote on this. Ok, vote on Stefan. In favor? Against? Absent? Ok, full vote. In favor? Ok.

For Raul as a replacement. In favor? Against? Absent? Thank you. Ok, so next is an optional election of a nomination committee. This is for nominating board members.

So far we've never had this. I don't think we really need this because anyone can just self-nominate. So the idea is to not have one. Anyone against this? Oh, sorry. Alex, your job.

In favor? In favor of not having one. Against? Ok, cool. Next one.

Budget presentation. So there isn't much to present here for the next year. The biggest expense that we do have is the server that we use. It's about 100 euros per month and then maybe a small figure for domains. We expect again a good income for 2016 because most of the invoices and everything else for this year is paid by the ACPS.

There isn't much for the EPS to actually have in the budget. Alex, any questions?

So there's nothing much that we can present in terms of budget. The next thing is membership fee. Membership doesn't cost anything. We'd like to keep it that way. So we need to vote on this again. In favor? Against? Absent? Ok, thank you.

Right, so next proposition from the board is to broaden the membership of the EPS to make it possible for anyone using Python in Europe. Or it's not restricted to Europe itself. We want to further the use of Python in Europe.

And we want to make it possible for anyone furthering the EPS mission to enable them to become an EPS member. So that's the idea. And the second idea is that we rebase the EPS from Gothenburg, Sweden to another EU country.

Right now the focus is just on organizing the conference. Yes, we had people who wanted to become an EPS member because they understood the EPS as being already something like a European PSF.

And so they wanted to join and we had to turn them down because our bylaws say if you're not organizing a conference then you cannot be a member. Or attending the conference, yes.

Yes, yes, of course. This is just the intro, right? And the second one is to initiate the rebasing of the EPS from Gothenburg to another EU country. So this is the intro. So the first proposal is broaden the membership. It's the same thing again, so I'm just going to skip this. So we need a bylaws change, so this is the proposal.

Also for the bylaws change, so the purpose is to further the use of the programming language Python in Europe and organize events centered around the programming language Python to support this. And we need a second one, second change, membership is open to individuals who wish to actively engage in implementing the EPS mission, which we just defined in number

two. So that is the proposed change. What is OE writing? Any comments on this discussion?

And a vote. In favor of change the bylaws. Okay. In favor? Against?

Absent? Okay. Full vote in favor. Okay, next one is the rebasing the EPS, so this is not yet what to vote on. This is just a summary, so the rebasing of the EPS would work in two steps. The first step is to create a new nonprofit as subsidiary of the EPS in another EU country.

And the second step would then be to move over all the assets from the EPS in Sweden to that new entity that we've created in the first step and then to close down the EPS in Sweden. So at this General Assembly we can of course only vote on the first one, which is to charge

the board with the creation of the full subsidiary in the country to be determined by the board of directors according to the criteria as indicated in the documents sent to the members list by Anton earlier on in July. So Anton created this document where he analyzed various different countries and then we also

had a few extra input from members on the members list. Of course we will look at that as well and then we're going to try to figure out which is the best place to go to.

So just as a very short summary of why we want to do this, the most important thing is that we currently cannot get a VAT ID and so we cannot be financially operational

as an organization. And because we tried last year to get one and it failed, the authorities are very unlikely to give us one because we'd have to convince them that the failure last year was not, there was something wrong with the application or something. And this would be very difficult to do.

And the second thing is that of course we don't have access to the bank accounts and this whole issue would not go away. And then there's a third issue, that is that there is no registry in Sweden for non-profit. So it's extremely difficult to convince anyone that you as for example the rector or as treasurer of the EPS are actually authorized as such.

So all we have is we can give them a signed document with all the signatures from all the directors and that's it. And so there's no official way of getting that information.

We need to hurry up. So can we vote for this?

In favor? Against? Absent? Okay, full vote in favor. So the next one is the email from Kristin, it's actually two emails, gonna be really quick here. Hopefully this is the first one. This is probably too small to read.

So basically what she recommends is in here she wants to find some kind of minimum for the number of board members, I assume you've all read this on the mailing list. And then she wants to, she proposes to remove this 0.8 which says determination of the size

of the board for the period until the next annual meeting of the general assembly, which is part 0.8 of the current bylaws. She proposes to remove that. The first part about this minimum aspect, she, I really have to hurry up, she retracted

again in the second email because this is already part of the bylaws and so she proposes to just vote on the second one to remove this 0.8 from the agenda. I think it's a good idea. We just had this vote and always using the maximum is certainly a good thing to

do. If you have lots of people who want to help then of course make them help, right? So just always have the maximum of the board limit.

Yes, you cannot, for example, if you just have like three candidates then three is okay, if you have two candidates, two is okay, if you have one candidate it's not okay. And if you have more than eight or nine candidates then of course you have to choose.

So we don't really lose anything, we just gain something. In favor? Against? Absent? Too absent? Cool, general discussion? Anything to discuss?

We can discuss outside, having a coffee maybe or something. Yeah, good suggestion? Yes, let's close the meeting. We're closing at 1547. So thank you very much.

Believe it or not, this was the quickest general meeting.