Am Freitag, 23. Januar 2004 11:48 schrieb Walter Vermeir: Because there is no such thing as a European law in effect. Laws by the European parliament have to be adopted by the member states. In the end, an association in Europe must always be an association in a particular country. If we found something in France, it will be already difficult for german contributors to donor funds there and get a tax exemption, because that is - I guess - only possible if you donor to a german organization and so on. If we found something in the UK, bank transfers will be especially expensive, because this is a non-Euro currency. Vice versa, if UK people want to transfer mony to a bank account e.g. in the Netherlands. Furthermore, you need to organize things like board meetings - it's already hard for us to get enough contributing people from Germany together in Berlin, you can imagine how hard it will be to get the contributing people from all over Europe together in Paris or Rome... So we need a bottom-up approach. We need local organizations in each country, they should join in some way in an European roof organization (so only member delegates and not members must physically meet for the european association), and that european association again should be a member (if that's the right term) of the Wikimedia foundation. But allow the things to grow - we must start somewhere at the bottom, that's what we are doing right now. Uli