Maybe we should give this a little more time - letting people from other parts of Europe get involved too. Also I have observed that women are avoiding these dairies and discussions - they do sound a little like a macho parties :-D. It seems that just a small number of people are participating in this project (at least its always the same names showing up) - I would like it to have a larger foundation. Give the Dutch, Germans and from other countries, including the ones from Eastern Europe, time to get involved too. Right now it looks that the core group who wants change are mainly in the UK.

Currently the whole discussion feels very pushy to me - something I do not feel enhances creative thinking.

I think that in order to move this forward one would have to move from generals to specifics. To date, people have put forward good suggestions on possible organizational structures in a few countries: (UK LLP, French SCOP,SCIP for example) along with some info on how they work in general. It is pretty clear that they would have to be investigated further, and a more specific form would have to emerge. Questions regarding revenue, taxes, audits, jurisdictions, liability, etc would have to be addressed. Questions that are unanswerable with information found so far would have to be identified.

rg suggested somewhere that an ET "Green Paper Concerning the Future Structure(s) of European Tribune." ought to be written. Not a bad idea. But perhaps first several green/white/red/yellow papers ought to be created on: "ET as an LLP registered in the UK", "ET as blah in blah", etc. With specifics! Not just "we could do a, or b, or c, or really anything, it is a really open model..." A move is required to "we should/could do a or b which are reasonable structures under this model..." A few distinct options would allow people to say "I like this better than that..." But I fear that a few people would have to work through the specifics first, without expecting community wide input, simply because a lot of people here don't have the time, or the interest, to dive deep into all the possible potentialities of a future ET structure.

After there is some agreement that option K is probably a good idea some legal help will be required to determine if this is indeed so, and to answer any unanswerable questions identified so far. And so that the lawyer can ask, "have you made a decisions on issues X and Y" that no one here even though about. This would of course need to be preceded  by an identification of the means to raise investigatory capital, i.e. how to pay the lawyer.

Then there is the: "How to raise the start up capital needed for registration, etc." How to migrate existing structure to new structure."  "Who signs what when?" "Who retains/gains ownership of the URL?" "Is any other part of the `site' currently `owned' by someone?" "Are these parts to be leased to the organization or sold to the organization?" Oh, and then the "server where and how?" issue. And much, much more, probably. It doesn't sound easy, but also not impossible. For me the site works fine as it is. On an ideological level I would prefer some kind of a community owned and operated platform, but I don't care deeply enough about this to spend significant time on the how's and what's.

My suggestion, thus, is to let this be the last general "Restructuring the European Tribune" diary for a while. Now it is time for someone who feels like doing the real work to start on the "ET as a <organizational form> in <country>" diaries. With an understanding that participation in the working out of the details might be quite low.

The subject for me is what Fran wrote in response to Colmans' comment.

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.