Dev Diary #18: A Place to Call our Own
Hello Everyone!
Live from Brussels we have some exciting news to share, today we signed our contract for our (virtual) office in The Hague! In the coming weeks we will make a couple of administrative changes to the Atlantic Forum and our relationship with our sponsor/guardian Pantheon. Atlantic Forum will register as a foundation at the Dutch Chamber of Commerce, while Pantheon retains the role of our administrative handler, allowing the Atlantic Forum team to focus on getting things done with Transatlantic Youth Engagement.
What is a virtual office?
Atlantic Forum excists largely in the cloud. We currently have five people "working" on Atlantic Forum (technically all are volunteers who receive a stipend), however only one of them lives in the Netherlands, namely me (John). And I don't even live in The Hague. A virtual office allows us to have a "hard" postal address, and register our own bank account and registration at the Chamber of Commerece on this address. In addition we are able to make use of the meeting room facilities at the address should we have a need for it. While I'll enjoy working on Atlantic Forum at the Starbucks, it isn't really a place where you would want to meet an official to talk about corporation and sponsorships. For the outside world it will be an actual office, just not one where people are working full time.
A place to call our own
The "A place to call our own" was originally described in our (old) Roadmap. Outside of the physical meeting space we also envisioned Atlantic Forum to be a meeting place digitally. In part we achieved this through our social media channels, and in part with the updated Patron only side of the website. How does it work?
Below you'll see a screenshot of the patron only website (ignore the Dutch Gibberish; Mededelingen = announcement; Datum = date).
This part of the website can only be accessed by Patrons by visiting: https://atlantic-forum.com/my-patronage - in most cases we will link to these announcements in our communication, should you not be logged in you'll receive a message that this is patron only, with the option to register as a patron, or log in if you are already a patron. This differentiation allows us to better serve the members of our network with patron-only exclusives.