Why?

Currently doing it as an unincorporated group of volunteers. Contracted signed through someone's company with them taking the risk.

No separate legal identity so liability uncertain

Managing finances a problem as we don’t have a bank account, everything needs to go via Wotton house and expenses are hard to manage

What do we want the entity to do?

• Running the unconference
• Another event(s)
• Not-for-profit model

Geographical remit is UK (clue is in the name)

What type of community involvement do we want?

• Community involved in a legally binding way or not?
• Transparency (e.g. public slack, trello etc)
• Organisining committee open to all

What structure do we envisage?

• A board of directors/trustees
• An organising committee

What structures are available?

• Limited Company
• Community Interest Company (a special form of Limited Company) aka CIC
• All members being Directors
• Directors are members but larger group of members - much higher overhead
• Charity
• etc.

Conclusions

For the purpose of running SoCraTes UK 2020 we should register a CIC limited by guarantee with a small set of Directors being members. The CIC should be registered in England and Wales as opposed to Scotland or Northern Ireland.

We anticipate a journey towards a charity but there is more work and things we need to find out first. In the future we can change the entity type, and expand the members to a wider group.

Other

Should we register a trademark? Could a charity own it and licence it to all SoCraTes (and provide other benefits e.g. charity gets free google apps, slack)

Opencollective is neat but expensive way of handling membership