Almost a year later to the day that I posted .
The , and it took a long time to get to an agreement. And then finally when there was an agreement, it was time to find a notary willing to notarize the Articles of Association.
Creating the Articles of Association
The first hurdle was that the Articles Of Association were wrought in English. Dutch law doesn't allow any official papers to be in any other language than Dutch. So a translation would have to be made. Fortunately, yours truly is pretty versed in both languages, and Google Translate can help a lot with the initial work on a proper translation.
Finding board members
The second hurdle was finding board members. I wanted to make sure that the initial Executive Board members would have a (long) experience with the Raku Programming Language, and where geographically / culturally and age as diverse as possible. Apart from yours truly obviously, I was very glad to be able to find Patrick Böker (Germany, patrickb), Bruce Gray (USA, Util), Richard Hainsworth (UK, finanalyst) and Tadeusz Sośnierz (Poland, tadzik) willing to stick out their necks to become officially registered board members of the Raku Foundation. They all have many years of supporting what is now the Raku Programming Language under their belt!
Yes, I would have loved to see an even more diverse board. This is definitely a goal the Raku Foundation will pursue!
Finding a notary
The third hurdle was finding a notary. A notary willing to notarize the founding of a "stichting" (Dutch word for "foundation") of which 4 of the 5 prospective board members were not able to attend any official notarizing meeting in person. Cheap online notaries only offered standard services: our Articles of Association were definitely not standard.
Then it turns out that Dutch notaries are very busy and are effectively able to pick the kind of easy / profitable work they want. Of the 8 notaries I contacted, only 2 actually replied within a day: and they both declined. Chasing after the initial email contact by phone, I found . This contrary to the UK and USA, which is mostly based on ( (Algemeen Nut Beogende Instelling, aka Public Benefit Organization).
The ANBI status is basically the Dutch IRS (Belastingdienst) registering that you applied for not-for-profit status. It has some prerequisites that I think we can all meet, once all board members have been officially registered.
And website) was willing to set up a framework for that. The board has taken him up on this offer, and yours truly was able to build on that quite easily, for instance by adding the as the place for our publicly available information.
Conclusion
We're live! Phew!
The coming weeks will see statements about interaction with current bodies (specifically (Raku Steering Council).
We want to know about you! Historically, what is now the Raku Community has been a very loosley knit world-wide group of people interested in what now is the Raku Programming Language. We want to get a better view of the size of that community, and the needs of Raku Community members.
So please, make yourself known to us by entering your name and email address (and nick, if you will) on the Welcome page. This data will be handled according to the GDPR (an official statement by the Foundation on that will be added soon).
Hope to hear from you soon!
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