[Europe] Resurrect legal entity

[Codrina Maria Ilie]

Hi, all,

In the last past months, I’ve been interacting both with ESA and the European Commission with 
various occasions and it has become obvious to me that there is tangible interest from both to 
formally connect to OSGeo, through a European entity. At the beginning of the year, I’ve approached 
the board of the OSGeo EU to inquiry of the legal status of the initial NGO. Because the chain of 
signatures to terminate was never completed, the Belgian NGO is dormant. However, given that this is 
an action initiated in August 2022 and still not done, I believe at this point that it is wiser to 
find volunteers that are willing to take the challenge to establish and to run a legal entity for 
OSGeo Europe Local Chapter. The intro, missions and objectives written in the OSGeo Europe wiki page 
make perfect sense to me https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Europe, we just need to have a more flexible 
and responsive structure.

To make everyone’s life easier, it is highly advisable that this NGO be established in an EU and ESA 
member country.

So, please share your thoughts on this in the following days/week. There is a time constrain because 
the European Commission is keen in having a formal connection to OSGeo Europe to support also 
financially both the FOSS4G 2023 in Kosovo, as well as FOSS4G Europe 2024.


Cheers from Bucharest,
Codrina

P.S. 1 All that being said, I’d like to share my - together with the geo-spatial.org people - 
availability to take on the legal formation of the OSGeo Europe Local Chapter in Romania.