[iRail] Let's move together

Sat Nov 10 13:59:54 UTC 2012

Hi all,

We have 2 issues, with 2 organisation that I am part of.

1. iRail

iRail supports digital creativity concerning mobility. We are pretty
good at that, but our name does not reflect this any longer. We should
change our name in something that reflects our "open" approach to
current problems (such as mobility, transparency, identity management,
business modelling, front-end design and so on).

2. Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN)

OKFN international is an organisation founded in 2004 which support open
knowledge. OKFN Belgium, a local chapter, is an umbrella organisation
for Belgian "open" and "free culture" initiatives. Amongst our working
groups we have the organisers of the Apps For X events, we have Creative
Commons Belgium and we have currently several possible upcoming working
groups, such as: open education(al resources), data journalism and
wikimedia. As another working group, for me, iRail is the open transport
working group.

Currently there are a lot of people (not at all "all") of iRail involved
in OKFN, and a lot of projects of iRail make more sense under OKFN (for
instance: The DataTank, Summer of code, BeLaws, and so on) rather than
under an organisation which support digital creativity concerning mobility.

A very simple solution for iRail and OKFN would be for us to merge. This
is currently impossible from a legal perspective as both organisations
are active in public tenders at this moment.

One solution would be that from now on, all communication is going
through OKFN. iRail become the "open transport" working group at OKFN.
iRail's current people helping at Apps For Ghent become people
volunteering at OKFN, not iRail, and our blog hello.iRail.be moves to
transport.okfn.be. This also means Miet will not be working for iRail
anymore, but for the open transport working group at OKFN. In one or two
years we will be able to merge both organisation legally.

What is your take on this? Feel free to reply both privately as publicly.

Kind regards,

Pieter

P.S.: At this moment we are paying for a bookkeeper twice, we have 2
different bylaws, we have 2 different boards. For 2 organisations which
have such an extensive synergy, this makes no sense at all.
-- 
iRail vzw/asbl
+32 (0) 486/747122