IMESA founding announcement
2025-06-16 14:43:44
Hi @everyone,
We're happy to announce the official founding of IMESA, the International Minesweeper E-Sports Association!
As of 2025-03-12, the Austrian Government officially recognizes us, and we can operate. Now that that's the case, we're in the process of making a bank account - once that's done, donation collection and crowdfunding can start, which also means that we'll be able to be a bit more concrete about the level of support WCH participants can expect.
I'll post our statutes and the excerpt from the register of associations ("Vereinsregisterauszug") - if you wanna check the validity, you can go to https://citizen.bmi.gv.at/at.gv.bmi.fnsweb-p/zvn/public/Registerauszug and either search for "1208005196" in "ZVR-Zahl", or just "Minesweeper" in "Vereinsname".
As you might notice when you read the statutes, they are mostly in German. That's because they need to be according to Austrian law. We haven't translated them yet because that would be a lot of work. If anyone would like to help out there, that would be much appreciated - bear in mind though that for legal reasons, the German version will always be the legally binding one. And in the meantime, automatic translation should do a decent job.
Something else you might notice is that IMESA is defined quite a bit more broadly than we'd need just to organize the WCH. This is intentional - we want IMESA to evolve into a permanent institution that facilitates hosting more events like this one (not just by us, we'd love to find a way for the chinese community to host at some point, for example), and also give Minesweeper more legitimacy as an E-Sport in general. Changing the purpose of an association after the fact is hard - its funds are collected (and taxed) under the assumption that they will be used for that specific purpose. So, this is closer to describing our long-term goals than it is to describing what we want to do right now.
Also, you may notice that only organizing members get voting power, and community members don't, and be wondering why. Here, we'd like to point out that
- The statutes create a legal framework. They are what is required to have an association, and are basically a legal contract between the association and its members, as well as a way to regulate how the association is allowed to do business.
- However, they don't mean that we can't have more democratic internal rules and processes, which is the plan eventually.
- We want membership to be accessible, and possible for people around the world.
- So, if community members had voting power according to the statutes, a small group of people from outside could sign up as members, call for a general assembly, elect their own board, have legal control of the association and its funds, and then proceed to spend it in ways that are not allowed, at best destroying the organization, and at worst also causing a legal quagmire for the two of us. We're not willing to risk that.
- So, new organizing members would have to be people we trust to carry that responsibility.
- We realize that IMESA can only exist with the support of the community. If we make decisions that y'all don't like, and people decide to abandon us, we have a legal entity with no income, regular expenses for things like a bank account, and a fancy name. We only have the power that you give us - which is a good thing.
We don't see ourselves as leaders - we see ourselves as formalizers and implementors. We don't want to shape the community - we want to be a voice for it, as well as a vessel for coordinated/collective action.
We recognize that we're asking for quite a bit of trust here, so we want to be very transparent about what we do. For example, we pledge to be proactive about making absolutely clear about how we use IMESA money, and regularly publishing our transaction history, only leaving out personal details that could identify who a transfer went to (leaking people's bank data wouldn't just be a terrible thing to do, but also be illegal for us to do given our data privacy provisions). We see a lack of transparency as a significant contributor to the IMC failing, and don't want to repeat that mistake. The other mistake we don't want to repeat, as stated above, is trying to be an authoritative governing body, as opposed to a body that formally recognizes what already exists.
All of that said - right now, IMESA is primarily a tool for organizing the WCH. Getting that done is our primary priority - fleshing out IMESA as an organization beyond what is necessary/helpful for that goal will probably have to wait.
Nonetheless, stay tuned for instructions on how to become a member, the link to our homepage, and our initial decisions, among other things!
And feel free to give us feedback/start discussions over in #imesa 🙂
Happy Sweeping,
The IMESA board (ralokt and RmwCby)