[OpenID board] Informations about the European Foundation

Dries Buytaert dries.buytaert at gmail.com
Wed Mar 14 16:31:50 UTC 2007


On 14 Mar 2007, at 02:36, Scott Kveton wrote:
> I'm interested in discussing ways that we can work together  
> better.  My
> biggest concern right now is that the current delegates for each  
> country
> appear to be OpenID providers as well as promoting the technology.   
> I see
> that as a direct conflict of interest and one that needs to be  
> considered.
> The localized sites for each country should be focused on advocacy and
> promotion not on providing OpenID service.

Ideally, there would be one organization to manage all IP (name,  
logo, brand) but looking at the history of things, this might be  
tricky ... or at least ... interesting.  ;)

Reading the document it looks like they are incorporated in Belgium  
(I'm from Belgium).  They filed a trademark application in 27  
countries of the the European Community.  This is a fairly expensive  
operation so I'm guessing they have some financial backing.  (From  
the looks, the trademark hasn't been approved yet in either Belgium,  
The Netherlands or Luxembourg -- didn't check for any other European  
countries.)

A solution to this might be to (i) add some more Europeans to the  
board so Europeans are better represented and/or to (ii) introduce a  
notion of affiliate foundations.  For example, in Europe we have  
Mozilla Europe, a French non-profit organization that is recognized  
as an international affiliate of the US-based Mozilla Foundation.

--
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/




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