What is Siege Engineers e. V.?
Siege Engineers e. V. is a registered association following German law (“eingetragener Verein, e. V.”).
What is this registered association supposed to be good for?
There are currently a lot of cool technical projects surrounding Age of Empires II. Many require some sort of basic infrastructure and suffer from one big issue:
They are run by a single person.
And that works, until it does not anymore. People lose interest, people move on, people find out that they cannot or do not want to pay the cost anymore for a service that they provide for free and which gains in popularity, raising maintenance costs.
Siege Engineers e. V. can offer a solution to these problems in the following ways:
- As a legal entity, it can own assets, like domain names or servers. This means the fate of a beloved service does not hinge on the energy of a single person anymore, but that of a group of people. Sounds like an improvement.
- It can gather donations to finance maintenance costs. Sure, each person could do this individually, but that stuff quickly gets complicated with taxes, side jobs, etc.
We also put stuff about events and competitions into the statutes, because we think supporting such things is cool as well.
That sounds sensible. Can I become a member as well?
Sure! Visit our Members page for more details.
I don’t want to become a member. Will you just take my money?
Sure. Visit our Donate page to support our cause financially!
Do you want this association to run everything™ now?
Of course not. It is just an option for people to make the things they love to do easier.
Why did you choose the legal form of a German registered association?
It is the most common form of non-profit organisations in Germany, where about 600,000 registered associations are, well, registered. Compared to the alternatives (founding some kind of company, not creating a legal entity), it seems like the best option to guarantee the non-profit aspect as well as some kind of community control over its assets.
Why do you not try to be recognised as charitable (“gemeinnützig”) by the German tax authority?
That was our initial plan. However, we have been informed by the responsible tax office that what we are planning to do sadly does not qualify as charitable. The consequences of that are rather minor though: It mainly means that German citizens cannot deduct their donations to the registered association from their taxes. Membership fees and donations to the registered association are still tax-free for the association.